HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Spawn. An iPhone or iPod Touch application you will enjoy guaranteed.

[NOTE: Before downloading this application, please make sure to read the readers’ comments. It sounds like my mostly positive impression is an exception to the rule?]

FixTunes is an app whose main goal to fill those missing tags in your MP3s and add album art. If you want to, it can also organize your music in [...]

Cog is an open-source audio player for the Mac (OS X 10.4 and above) with support for all major lossless formats—in active development. Worth a look; its interface is that of your typical neat Mac app (is there an app for that platform that doesn’t look good?). [via]

Whoever made this, “mad propz” as they say. FairUse4WM is a tool that strips WindowsMedia DRM 10 and 11 (not DRM 9)—it surfaced first on Engadget. This is the kind of protection that the tracks you listen through subscription services (Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Napster, etc.) come with. The app looks easy to use and [...]

First, a short introduction and a necessary reference to Hymn—Hymn is an app that strips the DRM (Apple calls it FairPlay) of the tracks you bought from the iTMS—only drawback? You need iTunes 5 for it work.

iTunes 6 users can now have a look at Igor Skochinsky’s QTFairUse6 [via]—a tool that’s supposed to do the [...]

Ever wanted to edit a track’s tags but weren’t bothered enough to launch your tag editor of choice? AudioShell to the rescue. This shell extension allows you to quickly view and edit your tracks’s tags from within Windows Explorer. Works with pretty much every current audio format out there:

MP3 (all ID3v2 tag versions)
WMA, ASF and [...]

Interesting point: why isn’t there built-in podcasting support in the latest versions of iTunes’ competitors? Podcasting is huge and drives average usage duration up (see: “Thanks to the built-in podcasting support “iTunes users tune in for an average of 111 minutes versus 46.4 minutes per RealPlayer user—2.4 times as long.””)

So why do Windows Media Player, [...]

John Borland, with an excellent story (via) on how Sony’s Connect (the supposed answer to Apple’s iTunes) came to be such a crappy, bug-ridden app. So bad that the US branch of Sony refused to release it in their market.

By early summer, the Connect programmers were saying they had no way of meeting plans to [...]

A few days ago the beta version of WMP 11 surfaced, it sports a cleaner look than its predecessor (we had posted a preview with screenshots back in March) and features a built-in music store (like the iTunes Music Store within iTunes) called Urge. Urge is the fruit of collaboration between MTV Networks and Microsoft; [...]

3tunes automatically records the songs Pandora plays for you and saves them in the format of artist – title.mp3. We’re obviously talking about transcoded tracks here, but it’s a nice way to grow your collection and maybe listen to that track a couple of times more before you decide you really like it and go [...]