Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I'm not convinced Google TV will be any different from the many other failed attempts to bridge the Internet and television--WebTV and its various Microsoft offshoots, AOLTV, and the first iteration of Apple TV all come to mind. (Although the new Apple TV might be at the right price point to make a go of it.)

Google's emphasis on apps might sway some skeptics, but for the masses, it really comes down to entertainment content. Before I'll pay for some mysterious box that attaches to my TV--much less buy a brand new Internet TV--it needs to … Read more

Yesterday the Windows Live team at Microsoft announced the release of Messenger for the Zune HD.

I'm not much of a Messenger user, but one of the big things Microsoft added to the new version of the desktop app is Facebook integration, and that same functionality is built into the Zune version of Messenger. After connecting your Facebook and Windows Live accounts, you can see all Facebook updates and conduct Facebook chats from within the Messenger app. (There's already a standalone Facebook app for the Zune HD; this new app is best suited for users who straddle the … Read more

One of my favorite online streaming services, Grooveshark, has begun notifying registered users that it's going to raise the price of its VIP subscription service beginning December 1. But if you sign up for VIP service before then, you'll never pay more than $3 a month or $30 a year.

Grooveshark's online music streaming service is and will remain free. The main benefit of the VIP service is support for streaming to mobile phones, including Android, BlackBerry, some Nokia phones, and Palm; you also get access to a desktop app and other benefits. The company briefly offered … Read more

mSpot, a cloud-based service that stores your music and lets you stream it to your Android phone, announced new pricing and features today.

The company will continue to offer music fans 2GB of free storage. But instead selling various paid tiers that topped out at 100GB for $13.99 a month, the company now has just one paid plan: up to 40GB of storage for $3.99 a month.

This makes mSpot more competitive on a price-to-storage basis with its main rival, MP3tunes However, MP3tunes offers far greater capacity, with multiple plans topping out at 200GB for $12.95 per … Read more

Subscription music pioneer Rhapsody was spun out from joint owners RealNetworks and Viacom in April, and it immediately declared its independence by dropping the price of its mobile service from $15 to $10 per month. Since then, the service has introduced offline playback to its iPhone application--critical, if you want to be able to get the most out of your subscription while on AT&T's notoriously flaky 3G network--and successfully launched an Android version, which will be getting offline playback shortly.

Tomorrow, the company is set to announce that it's moving its streaming service from several data … Read more

Let me say this upfront: I haven't tried them myself. But the digital media servers from San Francisco-based Olive seem aimed at a weird niche between audiophile and technophobe.

A lot of home audio devices let you stream digital music from your computer to your stereo over a home network. Olive's digital servers also connect to your stereo, but let you rip CDs to digital formats right on the device--no computer required. (Or, if you're you're lazy and rich, the company will do the dirty work for you.) Then you can play the resulting digital files … Read more

Streaming music from your PC to your phone is a nice alternative to music locker services like MP3Tunes and mSpot, which require you to upload your music to a server on the Internet before you can access it on your phone. Simplify Media had a great iPhone app that performed this function, but Google bought the company earlier this year--presumably to integrate it into some sort of future music service for Android--and discontinued the iPhone app. I've been looking for a viable replacement ever since.

Today, I found it: ZumoCast. It's brought to you by the folks who … Read more

Three years after launching the first DRM-free music download store, Amazon.com is once again stepping up its music game.

On Wednesday morning, subscribers to the indie-music download service Amie Street received an e-mail announcing that the company had been bought by Amazon. Existing customers get a $5 gift certificate to Amazon's MP3 store and must download all the music they've paid for by September 22.

Amie Street started by offering music from independent labels and digital distributors like The Orchard, and it was a pioneer of demand-based pricing--all downloads on the site started off being available for … Read more

Music Hack Day is a recurring event in which developers take 24 hours to write music applications based on various open APIs. This weekend, Music Hack Day took place London, and a few of the results have been made available online for the general public. Most offer a minute or two of interesting musical distraction, like 7x7, a Web page that lets you create chords from notes in a matrix, and Soundwheel (warning: audio will begin playing as soon as the page loads), which warbles bass tones as you drag points around a color wheel.

But one hack seemed truly … Read more