Music Software

Music theory is a stumbling block for many amateur and would-be professional musicians. Major and minor scales are basic, and pentatonics and harmonic minors come up a lot in certain types of rock music, but when it comes to the modes, everything starts to sound like Greek--literally. (Modes are basically a major scale from one key played in a different key, and many have Greek names like Dorian and Phrygian.) If you're forming your first punk band, you probably don't care. But if you want to play with more sophisticated musicians, you have to know your scales and … Read more

Commercial music radio may be an artistic wasteland, but independent-minded stations like Seattle's KEXP, Silicon Valley's KFJC, and New Jersey's WFMU are still great ways to learn about new music. Plus, if you want to hear talk radio, news, or live sports in your car, radio's still your best choice.

The iPhone and iPod Touch lack a built-in radio tuner, but there are plenty of ways to listen to radio stations on these devices, including podcasts and a multitude of apps that offer near-live streams delivered over the Internet. Tuesday morning, the App Store added another … Read more

Grooveshark on Tuesday released a mobile app for Palm OS, bringing the experience of mobile on-demand music to Palm phones like the Pre, Pre Plus, and the Pixi for the first time. The Palm app joins Grooveshark Mobile versions for Android and BlackBerry (it doesn't work on the Storm), both of which were quietly released in early January.

If you're not familiar with Grooveshark, the concept is similar to Rhapsody or Spotify (which is not available in the U.S. yet): type in the name of just about any song, album, or artist, and you'll get a … Read more

I was at Apple's iPad launch on Wednesday, and maybe it was just Steve Jobs' reality distortion field, but I don't quite understand why the haters are piling on. A lot of PC-centric commentators are dismissing the iPad as an overpriced gadget, wondering why it's lacking features that are standard on even the cheapest notebook computers, like Flash support, multitasking, USB inputs to connect peripherals, and video outputs (HDMI would be nice). These are legitimate complaints--for a notebook replacement. But the iPad isn't a notebook replacement, and I don't think users will carry it with … Read more

A proposed file format called MusicDNA will allow content owners to ship up to 32GB of information, such as album cover art, song lyrics, and even up-to-the minute blog posts and concert listings, alongside a music file. If enough content owners and distributors sign on, it could become an alternative to the MP3, giving users a more album-like digital playback experience, and allowing artists and content owners to charge more money per download.

The proposed format was announced by Bach Technology on Sunday at MIDEM 2010, a music-industry conference under way in Cannes, France. Unlike current alternatives to the MP3, … Read more

Version 3.0 of Nutsie, a mobile application soon coming to Android phones, is more than an anagram for iTunes.

As I watched Melodeo engineering Vice President Bob Wise demonstrate the new Nutsie on a Motorola Droid at the company's Seattle office on Monday, I had to wonder why Google doesn't have its own Nutsie-like app.

The basic idea behind the current version of Nutsie is simple: you have a bunch of songs stored in iTunes on your computer that you'd like on your phone, but you don't want to buy an Apple iPhone (perhaps because of AT&T). … Read more

Creating personalized playlists for your iPhone is great if you're a control freak with plenty of time, but I've increasingly come to rely on the Genius function introduced with iTunes 8. But Genius requires you to build playlists around a single "seed" song, and is often weak on variety--it almost always picks two or three other songs from the same album as your seed song, and its other choices tend to run to the same era and genre.

Moodagent, a free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch released in December, offers a more innovative take … Read more

No matter how much music you have on your iPhone or iPod Touch, sometimes you get bored with it or just want somebody else to drive.

That's the appeal of apps like Pandora and Slacker, which build personalized radio stations based on a particular artist, then let you customize those stations to various degrees.

A new app called Effin Genius, from Seattle company Melodeo, takes a different approach: instead of forcing you to enter the name of an artist or musical genre--or anything at all--Effin Genius analyzes the playlists in the iTunes library on your iPhone or iPod Touch, … Read more

Muziic, the YouTube-based music application created by teenage programmer David Nelson, has been an impressive piece of work with one drawback: the desktop application only runs on Windows. Not anymore! On Christmas day, the company officially launched a Web-based version of its service, and it compares very favorably with other free online music services.

Like the Muziic desktop app and U.K.-based TubeRadio.fm, the new Muziic Web player draws its content from YouTube, and allows you to queue songs and save playlists. But it's got a couple of interesting wrinkles.

First, you can get content from Vevo … Read more