Category Archives: Music

Cleepr: the web portal to rapidly find music videos in You Tube!

Today, in our Linux Page (in Spanish) we have added a short post about Cleepr, an interesting web portal which allows you to easily find, in YouTube, all the music videos you are looking for. Cleepr is very simple to use and, graphically, very clean. During our tests we occasionally found some delay (one or two seconds) when we decide to download other files while we were watching the videos. Using Cleepr we were able to find immediately all the music videos we were looking for, without wasting time to select them between other amatorial videos contained in YouTube. Funny and enjoyable!

Project Neon: the fastest way to install Amarok 2.0 on your Kubuntu!

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This week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), Frank has added an interesting post about Project Neon which is the best solution for people who desire to have the new nightly builds service for Amarok. Following the simple instructions contained in Project Neon you will able to enjoy the last developing packages for Amarok 2.0 without waiting the release of the stable version. Project Neon also provides simple instructions to install Amarok 2.0 on your Ubuntu in just five minutes. Last but not least, it is necessary to remember that Amarok 2.0 is not in its final version yet and it could potentially create some serious problems on your PC. To install it just add:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

in your sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) and the install it using the following command lines:

$ sudo apt-get uptdate

$ sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

Enjoy it!

FLAC: our favourite multiplatform (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) Free Lossless Audio Codec!

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It is true! MP3 format is the most common format we normally use in our everyday applications but MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm and it is not comparable with the quality of uncompressed audio formats as Monkey’s Audio, ALAC, WMA. This week, in our Freeware page, we posted a brief review about some particular features of FLAC: a multiplatform (Linux, Windows, MAC OS X) Free Lossless Audio Codec. Nowadays, FLAC is well and constantly supported by many music player producer. We compared FLAC and MP3 formats using the “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major – Allegro” by Bach and the results were very interesting. For common listeners (as us) the audio quality was, more or less, the same but when we asked to a couple of friends (authentic music “hooligans”) to describe the difference between the two music files (FLAC and MP3) they spent more than 15 minutes of their (and our) time talking about “tones”, “pizzicato” and something else that I really do not remember at the moment! After the listening, when we compared the file extensions, we discovered that the FLAC file was five times bigger than the MP3 (25.6MB vs 5.1MB)… To conclude, we really think that FLAC represents a fantastic (and the best) lossless format for home stereo systems. On the other side, if you are not a music purist, MP3 could be the best choice for listening music on portable audio devices.

MusikCube: the opensource competitor to iTunes

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In our Freeware Page we have posted a review about MusikCube, the most powerful competitor to iTunes. It is superfluous to remind that this opensource software has exactly the same features than iTunes (e.g. tags and dynamic playlist), personally I prefer to underline that MusikCube is extremely lightweight (12,792K on my XP), fast (due to the sqlite database engine), compact and easy to use (it has also a good integrated CD ripper) . Unfortunately it is not possible to personalize (or create) the skin but there are more than 20 plugins you can choose between. Moreover I tried to connect my IPod but I did not succeed; with Zen and Rio I had not any problem. To conclude, I suggest MusikCube to all people who are loking for a modern mp3player with a terrific integrated library manager!

Deezer.com: free legal music to listen and “use”!

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This week, in our Linux page we post a brief review about deezer.com a French website which offers free music to listen or use in your website. Using deezer.com is very simple: you have to create a new account (just few personal data -email, country…- are required) and you can start to listen to your music. The audio quality is good and we haven’t found any problem also after many hours of broadcasting. Moreover Deezer has a special feature which allows you to directly insert your favourite playlist (with an included player) in your blog (all this is free). Last but not least you can buy and download the songs you like using the integrated iTunes feature. Good site, good free features!