Music retailers HMV are looking to rattle Apple with the announcement of their new hmvdigital download store which will offer 10 million songs with every UK Top 40 single costing just 40p each.
If, like us, you have a hard drive stuffed full of badly organised MP3 files, many with baffling files names and no embedded metadata, trying to find the tune you want in a hurry can be quite a challenge.
We’ve been using the excellent free Mp3tag v2.46a – billed as a universal Tag Editor – which is a straightforward tool for editing and adding metadata to tons of music files in a jiffy.
There’s all sorts of snazzy docks available for iPod/iPhones, but music-mad users looking to squeeze the last drops of sonic goodness out of their MP3 collections should perhaps take a peek at Arcam’s irDock.
Replacing their earlier rDock, Arcam’s shiny new high-end audiophile dock sports a die-cast aluminium anti-vibration enclosure with a damped rubber base offering RF shielding, and comes with a bundled remote for full loafing-on-the-sofa control.
Some of the head honchos behind the the development of the original trusty MP3 new music file have unveiled details of an upgraded music format, called MusicDNA.
Created by Norwegian developer Dagfinn Bach – who worked on the first MP3 player back in 1993 – the new MusicDNA format can pack in extra information, including lyrics, videos, artwork and blog posts, and the data can be continually be updated.
Korean media player whizzes iriver have released details of their Smart HD touchscreen PMP, which looks rather a dandy affair to our eyes.
The Smart HD – previously seen lurking under the codename “K1″ - is a slick looking PMP packing a ton of features including a FM tuner/recorder, voice recorder and a 3.5″ touchscreen (480 x 320 resolution, 16M colours) interface.
SanDisk scored a huge hit with their Clip range of budget MP3 players, and their updated Clip+ wisely doesn’t fiddle with the winning formula and continues to offer a compelling alternative to the more-expensive iPod Shuffle.
Available in three capacities, the new Sansa Clip+ adds a microSD slot to the available built-in memory (2GB – 8GB), letting users cheaply increase the capacity by up to a 16GB.
If you’re looking for an attractive alternative to the ubiquitous iPod, Cowon’s iAudio 9 16GB media player looks a natty little number, sporting a sprightly spec sheet for its €180 price tag (£163).
Sporting a 2-inch LCD display, the iAudio 9 packs an integrated FM tuner, a built in microphone, TV output and a healthy portfolio of supported formats including MP3, WAV, OGG, WAV, FLAC, APE, AVI, JPEG, WMX and XviD.
Search engine behemoths Google have elbowed their way into the online music market with the launch of Onebox, their new service for finding music videos, previews and images and buying songs online.
Allied with with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike, the service – which is only available to our States cousins – lets people rummage out hot tunes by typing in song titles, the names of artists or by using snippets of lyrics.
If you’ve got a mile-high pile of old vinyl forlornly gathering dust and remaining unheard, Roxio’s new Easy LP to MP3 software should help you shovel those lovely old warm sounds onto your your cold, clinical PC.
Roxio’s Easy LP to MP3 package comes with a small pre-amp and stereo cable connections to let you pipe in that old vinyl goodness onto your hard disk,
Seeing as most MP3 players and smartphones come with headphones so terribly frightful that they make Noel Coward* sound like a drunken ruffian playing the spoons at closing time, we’ve always ended up shelling out for a decent pair (*see below).
Our quest to find a sonically superior product has often been a wallet emptying pursuit, but for the last six months we’ve been enjoying the Sennheiser CX 300 in-ear headphones on our travels.
It seems like an age since it was announced, but Microsoft’s shiny new Zune HD player has finally been released in the US.
Coming in 16GB and 32GB flavours, the Zune HD packs a 3.3 inch OLED touchscreen (480 pixels x 272 pixels), Wi-Fi and FM radio tuner, 3.5mm headphone jack and is priced at $219.99 (£133) and $289.99 (£176) respectively – making it cheaper than the Apple iPod Touch.
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