MP3

Bankruptcy will not protect MP3tunes.com or founder Michael Robertson from answering for the copyright violations they allegedly committed, according to EMI, the record company that's home to The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and Coldplay.

CNET broke the news today that MP3tunes.com, a music locker service that let users store songs on the company's servers and then access them from Web-connected devices, filed for bankruptcy protection.

The service was noteworthy for being one of the first unlicensed music locker services and helping to pave the way for similar services offered by Google and Amazon. But MP3tunes.com … Read more

MP3tunes.com, the music locker service that rose from the ashes of pioneer sharing site MP3.com, has filed for bankruptcy, records show.

MP3tunes.com was sued out of existence by EMI, one of the four top record companies, according to founder Michael Robertson, a technology entrepreneur who started Linspire, MP3.com, and DAR.fm. In 2007, EMI accused MP3tunes.com of violating its copyright and so ensued more than four years of litigation, heaping loads of legal costs onto the startup music service.

"Four and a half years of legal costs and we're not even out of … Read more

As far as I'm concerned, we have a global musical crisis on our hands.

The cassette tape was the dominant music format through most of my childhood. The first read-along books I had as a kid were on cassette tape. The first time I ever bought music with my own money, it was on a cassette tape (which, by the way, I'm proud to say was Run DMC's "Raising Hell"). The first time my band ever released a demo, it was a demo tape.

For independent musicians of the '80s and '90s, cassette tapes offered … Read more

Spotify's Android users have it easy. In the Android version of the app, Spotify can just peek at whatever music files you have loaded on your phone and allow you to play them alongside any songs from its streaming library.

But because Apple is very particular about third-party apps accessing iTunes content, the Spotify app on the iPhone has to jump through a few extra hoops to accomplish the same feat.

The payoff? Well, if you love using the Spotify app and resent having to jump out of it to hear songs from your personal collection, you can now … Read more

MP3s are very convenient and supported by many devices from portables to car audio systems. But no matter how high the bit rate of an MP3 file, it's still a lossy format, meaning some of the sound quality is lost during the conversion from a CD.

FLAC is a lossless audio codec that doesn't lose any sound quality during conversion, but is much bigger in size than MP3 files. It's also not as widely supported in devices as compared with MP3s, but there are many more of them than just a few years ago. If sound quality … Read more

iTunes is a convenient way to rip CDs into compressed audio files in Windows, but it certainly isn't the only way. LAME is an open-source encoder and is considered one of the best, if not the best, MP3 encoders available. It can be used with a free CD-ripping program called Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to create high-quality MP3s. Here's how:

Step 1: Download the Windows executable of LAME to a folder on your PC and unzip it.

Step 2: Download and install Exact Audio Copy. You'll need to have an audio CD in your optical drive … Read more

Get ready, MP3s: Rocker Neil Young and his electric-powered Lincoln Continental are coming for you.

According to "Rolling Stone," Young has applied for a series of trademarks on what appears to be potential names for a new high-definition audio format that the musician is creating.

The project appears to be the result of Young's long-standing dissatisfaction with the quality of MP3s.

"They might sound like great song titles, but '21st Century Record Player,' 'Earth Storage,' and 'Thanks for Listening' aren't new Neil Young tunes," "the magazine wrote. "They're trademarks that the … Read more

Bottom line: Version 10.6 of iTunes brings a handful of enhancements to Apple's ubiquitous media software, and adds support for 1080p video.

Review: As one of the most popular programs for managing music and video content on a personal computer, Apple's iTunes software has become an indispensable part of our digital life.

Interface The look and layout of iTunes 10 is essentially identical to that of iTunes 9, with just a couple of noticeable differences. The first is that Apple has updated its logo for iTunes. Rather than the old-school music note-over-CD icon, you'll see a … Read more

Apple has released an update to iTunes that addresses a number of bugs with the program's handling of photos, videos, and music artwork, along with a couple of file ordering issues and VoiceOver corrections.

The update should also fix a problem in which iTunes may become unresponsive for people using iPod Nano or Shuffle devices. So if you have one of these and have experienced hangs with iTunes, then this update should help.

A final fix in this update is for a problem in which browsing through TV episodes on an AppleTV device might result in them being reorganized.… Read more