Music

Advice and help on music related computer issues, how to get music via the Internet, music applications, sound and recording articles.

Sonos – great quality gadget speakers for the home

Those of you that know me well, know that I am a gadget freak through and though – if it’s got a screen or flashing led’s then I will be interested in it!

This month we look at the growing trend in wireless speaker technology. More and more of us are using our mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) to listen to music. The problem is that the speakers that are integrated into these devices usually are not of great quality. Adding a wireless speaker to your device will give you both better quality and a longer battery life (because the tablet isn’t having to use its battery to play the music). Read this entire article »

Free Music

Well….NO!  This morning I spoke to  a customer who told me about a fantastic new web site that provides its users with the ability to search a seemingly endless list of all kinds of music that can then be played, radio style, over the Internet. 

The thing that differentiates this site from the many other web sites that share illegally copied music is that this one is fully above board, all legal and all free – nice!  I must thank Neville for telling me about this particular gem and giving me the opportunity to share it with you. 

The press release says “Deezer.com is now the first global website for music on demand with no restrictions: listening to all kinds of music is now free, unlimited, legal and accessible to all Internet users via a Web browser.” 

Sounds great, but does it work?   Well the answer is an emphatic YES! 

Within a minute of browsing to the site – www.deezer.com/en (if you want the English version) I had registered and had started to play my first list of music. 

Once registered you can search for music from its database, I could find everything that I looked for from “Fly Me To The Moon”, Sinatra to “Labios Compartidos”, Maná – the former was an Italian American singer popular in the latter half of the 20th century; just in case you didn’t know.  

When you have found the music that suits your particular penchant you can either just play it straight away or add it to a playlist for playing later on. 

 You can create your own playlists to organise the music that you find and these playlists are automatically available to you the next time you logon to your Deezer account.  If you want to use Deezer to store your music then you can even upload your MP3 collection to it. 

Deezer also provides all of the sort of services that you would expect from this type of web site – the ability to view album art covers, the ability to purchase music etc. 

An interesting and unique additional   option is the ability to add a Deezer Widget to your blog, remember we talked about Blogs in the June issue; their ‘widget’ allows you to create a playlist  within Deezer that can be linked to, from your blog. 

Your readers can then have music automatically played to them while they are browsing your blog. 

Finally Deezer allows you to rate each piece of music that you listen to, the statistics behind this  type of rating  go towards creating a list of globally enjoyed songs that can be seen from the front page of this fantastic site.