MP3 Players
EMI Abbey Road Live: Instant gig recording
Record company in good digital idea shocker! EMI, one of the big four major labels, has announced a new service that will sell recordings of gigs -- at the gig itself, as the band are walking off stage shouting, "Thank you, Milwaukee!"
'Abbey Road Live', which confusingly has nothing to do with the Beatles or their famous studio (other than sharing an office), aims to offer a higher-quality service than any bootleg, with multi-channel audio, mixed and mastered in no time at all. Continue reading...
The 6 worst video game samples in rap music 
Hip-hoppers are a shameless bunch who will literally rap over anything. The Fugees' Ready or Not borrowed Enya humming, Kanye's Diamonds from Sierra Leone sampled Shirley Bassey, and Cypress Hill's Insane in the Brain is actually built around a braying horse noise from a Mel & Tim track.
Some artists, however, take things too far, sampling audio from their favourite video games in the hope they'll supplement their meagre fanbase with a glut of music-obsessed gamers. Occasionally this practice leads to things you could actually class as music, but more often than not, the resultant songs make you want to do a Van Gogh and chop your ears off. Here are six of the very worst. Continue reading...
EMI baffles us: Offers Beatles MP3s... on memory sticks
Core blimey (arf!). For just £50 more than the beautiful box set of CDs, you can get a USB stick in the shape of a piece of fruit. True, it contains all The Beatles' remastered albums on it, in FLAC and MP3 audio format, but you could make those yourself.
This, apparently, is what Apple Corps and EMI thinks moving into the world of digital distribution is all about. We're not even bothered about the £200 price tag -- at the end of the day, it's a collector's item, and if there's a group of people who like collecting, it's Beatles fans. No problem.
But for the love of all things beautiful, if 30,000 limited-edition apple-shaped USB memory sticks is the best you can do, instead of at least setting up your own download store, then goddaughter help you. Continue reading...
Mint Tank MP3 player: Tracks for your tracks
Gadgets don't come much more manly than the tank. Even MP3 players can be made extra-manly by tacking on tracks. Cower, then, before the Mint Tank Music Player: it's Action Man's iPod.
The Mint Tank is a concept from mintpass, which we spotted at design blog Yanko Design. It features urethane-coated caterpillar tracks that wrap around the speakers. An ultrasonic sensor detects obstacles and a pyroelectric sensor detects your body heat and follows you around. The sensor can detect different heat signatures and so can be programmed to follow different people. Continue reading...
Spotify's Daniel Ek to headline SXSW: Spotify coming to America?
Spotify head honcho Daniel Ek has been announced as keynote speaker at next year's South by Southwest conference/festival, in what could be the US launch of the streaming service.
Ek will be interviewed in the SXSW keynote on 16 March 2010. Crave was at a similar interview recently, in which Ek hinted at his social network plans for Spotify, but kept his cards close to his chest on international expansion. Continue reading...
England mi-football: Music on the ball
From Hoddle and Waddle's Diamond Lights to Liverpool's Anfield Rap, football and music go together like Best and Charlton, Keegan and Dalglish, Ant and Dec. The England mi-football 2.1 iPod speaker lets you get all patriotic and listen to your favourite tunes.
As well as iPod and iPhones, the mi-football supports other MP3 players via a 3.5mm connection or Bluetooth. It's controlled by remote or Capriccioso Sense Control (CSC) microchip, which allows you to scroll through iPod menus by stroking the patches on the ball.
You can put it next to your England laptop. We've already highlighted our favourite tellies for the football season, or when you're away from home, follow the results with the Sky Sports Football Score Centre. Continue reading...
Win a CNET UK Editors' Choice swag bag worth £1,200!
Christmas may not be here yet, but we've been distilling the spirit of Santa Claus for months now, nurturing our pot bellies by gorging on pies and cultivating slightly off-putting beards. In order to indulge our premature festive inclinations, we're offering the chance for one reader to win a veritable smorgasbord of consumer tech. And we're not talking just any old gadgets -- what's on offer here is the cream of the crop, with all prize offerings having been awarded CNET UK's coveted Editors' Choice award.
The Humax Foxsat-HDR freesat PVR and 1080p Toshiba Regza 32RV635DB LCD TV are sure to please on the wintry evenings ahead, while the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ6 superzoom camera, 8GB Apple iPod touch, and Asus Eee PC 1008HA Seashell netbook should provide ample distraction from the numbing sensation in your toes and fingers if you decide to venture outside. Continue reading...
Interview: Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen on Google and the future of music
In the UK, streaming music is all about Spotify, but across the pond, Lala is top of the online pops. It has a massive song catalogue spanning all the major labels and thousands of indies, all available for instant, free online streaming. You can listen to any tune once for free, or buy unlimited access to a song for 10 cents (about 6p). But here's the clever bit: upload your music collection to Lala (it takes just a few minutes to match tunes with its database) and you can stream any of your tracks at any time to any device, without paying a penny.
Lala has been in the news recently thanks to new partnerships with two Web goliaths. First, Lala muscled its way on to Facebook, so your American friends can now buy each other virtual tunes for their real birthdays. Then, just last week, Lala secured itself a spot on the home page of Google.com as part of its new OneBox music-search feature. We hummed a few choruses at Lala's co-founder, serial entrepreneur Bill Nguyen, to see whether he'd sing along. Continue reading...
Google amps up music search
Google has dipped its enormous toe in the frothing waters of the music industry, with the official announcement of a new, integrated way of displaying search results for artists, songs and lyrics. As we reported last week, Google will partner with MySpace, iLike and Lala for links to downloads and streaming music, and Gracenote for lyrics. Music videos will also be handled by MySpace. Continue reading...
Spotify vs Sky Songs: Sound quality blind test
Sky has launched a subscription-music service called Sky Songs, but its streaming-audio bit-rate is much lower than Spotify's free service. The question is, can anyone actually tell the difference? We put it to the test.
We dragged 16 people from around the CBS Interactive offices kicking and screaming into a quiet room. We gave them a pair of £500 reference-grade headphones and a high-end audio processor, and played them the same section of Michael Jackson's track Billie Jean twice -- once from Spotify, once from Sky Songs. Continue reading...
