I stumbled across the following website which is offering 1,000 songs free to download and play on your computer, MP3 player (iPod), or even burn to a cd.

http://www.reverbnation.com/windows

The free downloads are supported by Microsoft Windows of all people. I guess the way to beat piracy is to give things away. I doubt they will adopt this attitude with their Operating System or Office software anytime soon.

The songs are in genres including Alternative, Electronica/Dance, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop and Rock. Strangely there is no Classical category but there are a number of instrumentals among the Jazz and Latin categories.

Most of the artists you will have never heard of but there are a couple of Australian bands in there like The Church and a cool Jazz/Fusion band from Sydney call Urban Gypsies. You can play the songs on the website by just clicking the Play button next to the song. If you hear something you like you can download in either M4A or MP3 format. If you don’t know which format to choose go with MP3.

So have an explore and listen to something new today

Found this today and thought I would share with you. Coldplay are one of the most successful bands in the world. Check out their Wikipedia entry for more information if you aren’t familiar with them Wikipedia: Coldplay.

I was very impressed with their support of the Sound Relief fundraising concerts for the Victorian bushfire victims. They do a lot of charity stuff apparently. And their music is not bad either!

As a thank you to their fans (and also a pretty good PR move) they have made an album of live songs available for free download on their website.

To Download the album go to their website Coldplay.com and click the link on the right (or just click the butterfly image). They ask for your email address and country but they do offer an opt-out if you don’t want emails from them in future. The album comes in a Zip file and is about 55mb. Of course like any mp3 songs it’s fairly simple to burn them to a CD for use in the car or your home stereo too

Give it a try – you can’t go wrong at this price

Here is a follow up to a few things discussed at the January Mullies meeting

Broadband Pricing and Plans available in Ulladulla area

As always the Whirlpool Broadband Choice site is the place to compare your options. As discussed ADSL 2 plans are available now from Telstra and companies reselling Telstra services. The really competitive prices available in Metro areas aren’t here yet though.

Blu-Ray Disc Players/Burners

Someone asked about Blu-Ray discs. Blu-Ray discs (BD) are the new format of discs that can hold a lot more data than DVDs. Here’s the comparison:

	Single Layer	Dual Layer
CD	700mb	n/a
DVD	4.7gb	8.5gb
Blu-Ray	25gb	50gb

More details at Wikipedia 

So as you can see the capacity of Blu-Ray discs is 10 times that of DVD. The extra capacity is needed for true High Definition pictures and sound on your home theatre and is also useful for backing up a computer where the extra storage means more per disc.

Just like when DVD tech first came out the prices of the machines and media (discs) started out ridiculously high. Burners were over $1,000. Last night I suggested they were still $300 plus but got an ad email today offering BD/DVD burners (for desktop not laptop PC) for about $220 delivered. Laptop burners would be much more expensive. And note the actual discs are pretty dear too – Individual 25gb discs are over $10 each. 5 DVD discs are similar capacity for less than half this price but not as handy as having all in one. Like everything else in tech BD will rapidly become cheaper and more common, or is that more common and therefore cheaper :)

Downloading YouTube videos & Saving the Audio

Stan asked how to save the audio from YouTube videos. A quick search took me to the Digital Inspiration website – a great blog written by Amit. I am subscribed to his RSS feed and you might like to check it out. His post on how to accomplish Stan’s task is here: How To Rip Audio from YouTube Videos

He suggests using the Vixy.net website to save the audio directly from YouTube. You simply input the URL, wait for conversion (it takes a while), then click to download. just like the site we found the other night ListenToYouTube I found this a process a bit flaky.

Much easier to just download the video (as a FLV) and convert it to MP3. To download I use a FireFox extension called Video DownloadHelper. But there are any number of free download programs and extensions available.

As mentioned at Mullies over a year ago you can use KissYoutube to download right in your browser – basically you just type KISS into the YouTube Address url and it takes you to their site to download the video.

 

Once you have the video on your PC I recommend Format Factory to convert it. You can convert the FLV (Flash Video) file to another video format or to MP3 to capture the audio only. The Format Factory is free and is great for ripping DVD’s to video files, converting pictures to other formats, or converting videos for use on portable players, ipods or phones.

 

Portable Music/Video players

As discussed with Romey it can be very frustrating with dealing with portable devices. Some manufacturers insist on making you use their software to load songs/videos onto a device. Then the software they give you wants to take over, duplicates your whole song library and clogs up your PC. Some players of course do not do this which makes life much easier. You can just drag and drop files like it was a USB flash drive.

Apple and Samsung (Romey had a Samsung T9 player) are difficult culprits but with iPods being so common a number of programs can interact with them. The choices for Romey’s Samsung are a bit more limited. But I believe that MediaMonkey should do the trick. It is a far more user friendly and very powerful music player and manager. If you don’t need to deal with video (it doesn’t do video very well) then I highly recommend it over Windows Media Player or other proprietary players. It handles Podcasts and Internet radio too. Because of the extra functions like syncing contacts etc on my Apple iPhone I still use iTunes and am quite happy with it but that won’t help Romey. I recommend downloading MediaMonkey and giving it a try. it shouldn’t duplicate your song library and hopefully will make creating playlists and syncing them with the player much simpler.

As always if anyone needs a bit more help with anything we discussed on the night or mentioned here then fire back a question and we will do our best to sort you out.

Confession time – I just bought a new iPhone. One of the Aussie 3G models which is much sleeker than the hacked 2G US model I tried once before.

So far I am very happy with it. Not only is it a good phone with some unique features it is of course geek to the extreme!

One of the Apple tricks is to try to get you to pay for ringtones – you can download them from the iTunes store. But us crafty geeks know better. A quick search revealed Audiko.net

At Audiko you can download ringtones for old phones or for the new iPhone – completely free! You don’t even need the songs/sound on your PC. Just do a search and they will have it for you. Just find the ringtone you want and hit download for iPhone. When the download option comes up click “open with iTunes” and you are done. Awesome and so easy. Thanks Audiko.

Here’s my new ringtone:

by audiko.net — ringtones.

I thought this was interesting even though the songs are the American Billboard Charts.

Mine was "My Sweet Lord/ Isn't It a Pity" by George Harrison - happy with that :)

What was the #1 most popular song on the day you were born? Has this question been keeping you up at night?

Then today’s your lucky day. On this site, you can specify your birth month and date. The site will show you which song was at the top of the US Billboard charts on the day your life began. (You look through the years manually; that’s how the site avoids making you tell it how old you are.)

Your Birth Tune - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog