Remember when you could download all of the MP3s you wanted from peer-to-peer site Napster and not get sued by the RIAA? Remember trying to find an audio player that would play all of those pesky MP3s? Remember Winamp?!? Initially monikered WinAMP, the audio player was first released on April 21, 1997. Winamp gained popularity among audiophiles for being feature-rich, small, free, and compatible. Winamp also won fans over with its skinable interface, allowing you to inflict your personal steez on your media player. Winamp was developed by Nullsoft, a company who was known for their llama logo and humorous opening sound clip: “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass!” Winamp is still very much alive, and very much available; although it is now owned by AOL. Hit up their website and take a trip down memory lane.
BGR Throwback Thursday is a weekly series covering our (and your) favorite gadgets — and in this case software — of yesterday and yesteryea
We’ve sort of done some light podcasting, a couple radio-themed segments, and all, but we’re interested to know if you want a weekly no bull news recap / opinion-influenced podcast with the BGR staff. If you do, we’ll do it. See how much power you have right there with that computer mouse?
The good folks at Sonos just stopped by our office to give us a preview of their brand new Controller application for the Apple iPad, and boy is it sexy. If you’re a Sonos fan (you know we are) and you have an iPad, this will be a no-brainer when it’s released within the next two months in the App Store for free. For starters, just by taking advantage of the extra screen real estate, the software guys at Sonos have masterfully developed a three column view that just looks incredibly slick and functions even better. We’re talking a completely new spin on the Sonos remote control experience, and we can easily see these things taking over living rooms, kitchen tables, and practically anywhere else music is listened to. More →
It’s no secret that the star of this year’s WWDC keynote will be the next-gen iPhone, but what else could it potentially bring to the table? According to a note issued to investors by Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, the answer is iTunes.com, a cloud-based music service, and a refresh of the Mac Pro and MacBook Air. Apple has long been rumored to want in on the cloud-based music business, and its purchase of Lala in December of 2009 only served to add fuel to the fire. Add to this the fact that Apple has ordered Lala be shut down on May 31st and it seems there is quite a bit of evidence to support these claims. Turning our attention to the Mac Pro, the scuttlebutt is that it will pack a pair of 12 core Westmere-based processors from Intel’s Xeon 5600 series. As for the MacBook Air, rumors of a refresh have been fairly consistent over the past few months. The most recent came a few weeks ago and claimed that the travel-friendly notebook would be equipped with a Intel Core i3 processor and 4GB of RAM (although back in January the word was it would be getting a Core i5 processor). Would this be enough to satiate your need for shiny, new Apple gear? More →
Some pretty big news out of China recently as Nokia has announced the launch of its Comes With Music service in the world’s second largest consumer market. To be known locally as Yue Sui Xiang and included for free with the purchase of select Nokia handsets (in China’s case, the X6 16GB, X6 32GB, 5230, 5330, 5800w, 6700s, E52 and E72i), the service allows for the downloading of an unlimited amount of à la carte tracks over a period of 12 to 24 months. Even better, all of the music — which includes catalogs from Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Music, Huayi Brothers Media Group, Taihe Rye and more — is DRM-free and allows subscription holders to keep everything they’ve downloaded after their subscription runs out. Hats off to Nokia for giving a pretty censored country a little bit of freedom. Now… When is the this DRM free business coming to the democratic world? We’re pretty tired of stripping away the DRM ourselves. More →
It’s pretty incomprehensible that until about two weeks ago, I had never used a piece of Sonos equipment. Heard about it, and read about it? Sure, but never used it. What MP3s did for personal audio enjoyment 5 years ago, Sonos does for your home, office, or wherever you want today, ingeniously creating a seamless and practically unlimited expandable system. Sonos is literally one of the coolest things I’ve seen in years; not because they reinvented the wheel (even though they kind of did in some places), but because it works. More →
There’s nothing like ruining your ears by blasting your favorite tunes while studying up on photochemistry and reaction dynamics, but Oxford students will have to find somewhere else to go deaf. The prestigious university offers free Internet access for its students, but Spotify, the wildly popular music streaming service, has been grinding the network to a halt. That pretty much makes life more difficult for the students accessing the network to, you know, learn stuff. But some of the students who use Spotify daily calls it “discrimination,” with one student saying, “I use it loads. It’s the most comprehensive collection of classical music in one place.” To the students’ dismay, the university retorts, “The university provides free internet access for students because it’s an educational resource. If they want to use it recreationally as well that’s no problem unless it uses so much bandwidth that it slows the network down.”
We don’t feel too bad for the Oxford students. Call it schadenfreude since we don’t get that music streaming service in the U.S. yet. More →
We wanted to do something special for the end of CES 2010, so we’ve recorded a nice little wrap up of most of the mobile content we saw as well as some other good stuff like home entertainment, TV’s, etc. Check out our wrap up podcast below!
Special shout out to Sprint for sponsoring our CES content.
Circulating reports suggest that Apple has purchased online streaming music company Lala. Lala offers a service that allows users to stream music from Lala’s massive online music catalog without any advertisements. It also provides users free streaming of a track once, with unlimited streams costing a mere 10 cents per track. Users can easily build up an online catalog of music that they can access anytime, anywhere they have access to a web browser. Think of Lala as an iTunes in the cloud, which most likely is the reason Apple bought the startup, but whether we’re looking at an actual new service coming or Apple’s interest in music licenses remains to be seen. More →
Looks like what we reported turned out to be true — social networking sharing (sending information to Facebook and Twitter as well as app organization). Apple’s iTunes 9 is now officially official and there’s some great features in here. Application organization for iPhone/iPod touch apps, home sharing which will share your entire iTunes content on up to five machines, support for iTunes LP (referred to as project Cocktail in the past) and much more. It’s available now.
Our same source is back at it again and we have some further clarification on the iTunes 9 rumor we posted a couple days ago. We really have to take this information at face value, but again felt it was worthy enough to be published. Here’s some of what was just told to us about iTunes and something else entirely:
That’s all what we have for now. Again, this isn’t confirmed and some of it seems a little far-fetched, but let’s see what happens here. It’s going to get interesting
Thanks, Lindsey!
We’ve just received a tip from a pretty reliable source that detailed for us some of iTunes 9′s upcoming features and they’re pretty exciting.
One of the new additions to iTunes is said to include Blu-ray support which lines up nicely with a recent Apple Insider report about Apple integrating Blu-ray into their new iMac line-up. Something else that will most likely make a bunch of people happy is that we’ve been told iTunes 9 will finally include the ability to visually organize and arrange your iPhone and iPod touch applications. Something that wasn’t so clearly described was some kind of Twitter/Facebook/Last.fm integration. Maybe broadcasting what song you’re playing to your friends?
Let’s see how this pans out. Even though we weren’t given a timeframe on a possible release, that yearly Apple iPod event around the September timeframe would most likely be a reasonable place to expect this sort of announcement we believe.
Thanks, Lindsey!
