Just over a month after the first release candidate made its ways to the masses, Songbird 1.0 is available for download. Songbird is an open source music player built on Mozilla code.

The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.

Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.

Songbeat is a desktop application for accessing web-based music search and discovery services including Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, and Last.fm without a web browser.

When you fire up the application you're greeted with a search box. Just type an artist or song title and Songbeat will attempt to find songs from the music search engines mentioned plus a few more. Or you can click on the Station tab and enter an artist or song title to launch a Last.fm audio stream.

Songbeat lets you listen to as many songs as you want for free. But you can also use the program to download music or record audio from Last.fm. Once you hit 25 downloads, you'll have to pony up some cash to keep downloading the free music. A full license costs 19,99 Euros or $29.99 US.

There are a few kinks to be worked out. While I found the search and playback features worked fairly well, once I tried recording an audio track Songbeat went hog wild and started downloading a bunch of songs I hadn't asked for. In a matter of minutes all of my 25 free downloads were used up.

[via TechCrunch]

FluidTunes is an app that lets you control iTunes from a webcam, using your hands, head or feet. The main screen looks like CoverFlow, with the image from your camera image lightly visible behind it. You can swipe across the album covers to navigate, or swipe the large forward and back buttons for finer control. Play is at the bottom of the screen, and stop is at the top. It reminds me a lot of the display from Minority Report.

FluidTunes can be a little bit difficult to control. It's quite responsive, but it's easy to hit a few buttons at once, or accidentally scroll past the song you wanted. Also, don't rock out too wildly in front of your camera, or you're liable to change songs with your head. For right now, Fluidtunes is an impressive showpiece, but it's not entirely practical for everyday music browsing.

Oops, there goes my entire day! I just discovered an addictive new musical puzzle game called Auditorium, and I'm trying to play though all of the demo levels. Gameplay in auditorium is centered on a flow of "audiovisual particles" that you can direct by moving and resizing different objects that are available to you. The object is to direct the flow across musical audio containers, using arrows, attract and repel symbols, and any other special tools that pop up.

The audio containers each represent a different piece of the music, and they get louder the more you fill them up with flow. To clear a level, you need to max out all of your containers, which brings the song together. There are multiple ways to solve each level -- right now, there are 3 acts, with 5+ levels each, and 20 total acts are being planned. Once you get into some of the more complex levels, you have to deal with multicolored flow, and even containers that need more than one color to fill up. It's challenging, but the freeform gameplay gives it good replay value.

There are plenty of ways to find music that meets your tastes on the internet. Last.fm, Pandora, and similar music discovery services will recommend new music for you based on the songs you like. YouTube is filled with music videos from popular and not so popular artists. And music search engines like SeeqPod make it easy to find songs and videos.

Now if you take all of those music discovery methods and roll them into a ball and add about half a dozen other ways to search for, browse, and find music, you'll have Soundflavor.

We first looked at Soundflavor two years ago, but the service has come a long way since then. Here are just a few of the things you can do with the web-based music discovery service:

• Find and play YouTube videos from artists by searching.
• Browse for music by genre, decade, mood, or subject matter of the lyrics.
• Enter an artist or song name to generate a playlist of YouTube videos of similar songs.
• Embed the Soundflavor Video Jukebox widget on your social networking profile or blog.

Because the music comes from YouTube you will occassionally get a clip of some kid sitting in his or her bedroom with an acoustic guitar, but for the most part the music recommendation engine is pretty good. And hey, some of those kids with guitars are halfway decent.

Back in August I wrote about Screamer, a nice portable streaming radio app. KSoft's Icy Radio offers a similar experience with a couple of nice additions.

Icy Radio is completely portable - just download the zip archive and extract it to a folder. Apart from a large library of audio streams, Icy Radio includes several nice skins and streaming video support.

As with Screamer, you should expect some of the included streams not to work. After all, many of these feeds come from ad-supported sites and their owners probably aren't so keen on the idea of us listening to their music without having to view their banners.

The massive channel list is fully searchable and indexed by genre - more than 60 of them. Adding new stations is easy, and can be done one-at-a-time or in bulk from an XML file. Icy Radio's tabbed main window also sports a favorites list for your top channels and maintains a history of your recordings for easy playback.

Built-in recording supports MP3 and OGG (you'll need to download and unzip the plugin into your Icy Radio folder first). Unfortunately, video streams can't be recorded as of version 0.5.

Icy Radio is freeware for Windows only.

Online video site YouTube has been offering a "watch in higher quality" option since earlier this year. But higher quality doesn't mean high definition. It simply means that the videos are encoded in a higher bit rate and if you have a fast enough internet connection to keep up, the videos look a little better.

But now it looks like YouTube is starting to add some honest to goodness high definition, 720p videos to the site. Members of the Video Help forums have spotted some videos available in HD, including the popular "Where the Hell is Matt" video.

Not all videos are going to be available in HD rigiht away, because most videos uploaded to YouTube aren't high definition in the first place, and because YouTube appears to be quietly testing the feature on a small number of videos. It appears YouTube is also experimenting with stereo sound for its online videos. Up until recently most videos were mono only.

YouTube is hardly the first online video site to dabble in HD. DailyMotion, Vimeo, and several other video portals have been offering HD movies for a while, but YouTube is stll by far the most heavily trafficked web video site.

[via Wired]

MiniTube is a plugin for WinAmp that attempts to find music videos from YouTube for every song in your playlist. Here's how it's supposed to work: A song starts to play, and MiniTube will automatically find the best music video available for the song and start playing it. That's the theory anyway. But the actual practice is a bit shakier.

That's because MiniTube just grabs the first video it can find that roughly matches the song's metadata. That means there's a pretty decent chance you'll get the wrong video from the right artist, a video of an amateur musicians performing the correct song, or something else entirely. Sometimes MiniTube will find the right video, but if the metadata on your MP3s is anything less than perfect, more often than not, it won't.

MiniTube does address one potential problem fairly well. Because the audio of the YouTube video will undoubtedly be out of synch with the audio file, you can choose to either play your audio file and mute the audio on the video, or mute Winamp and play the audio and video from the YouTube video.

[via gHacks]

Last month I wrote about mufin.com's music discovery engine. Unlike traditional music discovery services like last.fm or the Genius Mode in iTunes 8, mufin analyzes the actual musical structure of a song. This is great for music lovers because it can really open up more opportunities to discover new bands.

Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.

Today, mufin is officially entering public beta. If you missed out on the private beta, you can now sign up for the service and give it a whirl. Even better, mufin's public beta now supports both Facebook and iTunes.

Mufin for Facebook is pretty similar to the existing mufin widget for MySpace. You have access to the mufin discovery engine and song catalog from within Facebook and you can add your discoveries to your profile or share them with friends.

Over the last year we've seen a lot of companies race to come out with iPhone-specific versions of their applications. But FlyCast is moving in the other direction. The company makes a mobile application for iPhone and BlackBerry users which provides easy access to hundreds of internet audio streams including music, news, entertainment, and tech podcasts. Now FlyCast also has a desktop client based on Adobe AIR, which means it can run on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

The FlyCast Desktop Player appears to be a direct port of the iPhone software. It would have been nice if the company had spent a few minutes coming up with a new design so that you didn't feel like you were playing with an iPod while flipping channels. But the application works as you'd expect, making it easy to find internet audio streams in a number of different categories.

[via Zatz Not Funny]

The folks behind the Working series of radio stories that have been running on public radio program Marketplace, have put together a nifty Flash-based Working Browser. The radio stories explore some of the more unusual occupations of people around the world. But the Working Browser allows anybody to create a profile and rate their job satisfaction, describe their compensation, and answer a few other questions.

Right now there are only a handful or profiles, but the web site only launched yesterday. As more people enter their information, the site will provide an interesting way to see what people do for a living and how they feel about it. In addition to browsing profiles, you can sort the browser by categories like gender, education, compensation, length of commute, and other variables to see how many people fall within each category.

If 'Portable' blogging apps aren't your cup of tea, and you're looking for something that's a little more mobile, the Tumblrette application for iPhone and iPod touch might be right up your street. Tumblrette [App Store link] is a mobile client for the very excellent Tumblr tumblog service - if you're not familiar with Tumblr be sure to check out our previous coverage here.

Tumblrette not only allows you create entries in any of the post types allowed by Tumblr, but also allows you to save draft posts to come back to later as well as write posts using Markdown formatting. The latest release sees the addition of a nifty record-and-upload feature that allows you to use the iPhone or 2nd-Generation iPod touch's built-in microphone to record a message and upload it to your Tumblog.

The application is both well thought out and beautifully designed. Best of all, it's something of a steal if you need to be blogging on the go: costing just $1.99 in an App Store near you now.

Open source, Mozilla-based media player Songbird is inching closer to version 1.0. This week the team behind the cross-platform application made the first release candidate of Songbird 1.0 available.

So what's new in the latest build? First up, Songbird 1.0 RC1 uses GStreamer to handle media playback whether you're running the Windows, Mac, or Linux version of the program. The Songbird team says that should mean better performance and reliability. The latest build also includes a number of performance enhancements, including the ability to import media into Songbird more than twice as fast as before.

Here are a few of the other changes/improvements in Songbird 1.0 RC1:

• Users can also drag and drop images to add album art to a song.
• Addition of new keyboard shortcuts
• Smart Playlists can be used as rules within other Smart Playlists
• Improved search speed
• Faster startup times
• Scrolling large libraries is more efficient

While this is a release candidate, which means it's a bit more stable than your typical beta software, there are still a number of known bugs and issues. You can read the complete list in the release notes.

There's no denying that Apple's iTunes Store is both well designed and chock-full of music, TV shows and movies for you to buy. It's also got a rather awesome Genius feature for playlist creation [whilst cunningly up-selling you more tunes via the Genius Sidebar]. However when it comes to buying music, a large proportion of it remains crippled (and at 128kbps bit-rate) thanks to the iTunes Store's FairPlay DRM. Sure, there's iTunes Plus: but the selection remains lacking thanks to the devious tactics of the record labels. Amazon, on the other hand has had a high-bitrate DRM-free store for sometime.

Thankfully, there's now a new option that allows you to make the most of Apple's excellent store: and then skip over to Amazon to actually buy the music: Advantageous. Simply run the Advantageous installer, and a script [added to your iTunes Script menu shown above] will take the currently-selected track from the iTunes store, open your default browser and load the relevant Amazon search page.

It's a neat, and above-all free, timesaver that may just provide an incentive for iTunes Store addicts to go DRM-free. Advantageous requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and iTunes 8.

[Via BoingBoing]

Open source, cross-platform audio editing application Audacity 1.3.6 beta is out, and it adds a handful of new features that make it even more useful. One of the most attractive new features is support for using FFmpeg to import and export audio files in a wide range of formats, including WMA, M4A, and AC3. You can even import audio tracks from video files using FFmpeg.

Here's how to set it up. First you need to install Audacity 1.3.6 beta, and then find the preferences menu under the edit tab. Next, click the Import / Export option. If you already have FFmpeg on your system, click the find library button and locate the avformat-52.dll file. If you don't have FFmpeg yet, click the download button and a web browser window will open up with instructions for downloading and using the plugin.

The latest version of Audacity also has a few other tweaks, like improved performance when laoding uncompressed audio files and the ability to link audio and lable tracks so that labels move properly when you move an audio track.

[via Making Music]