Banshee for Mac Beta 1.8.0

However, there are good things to say about Banshee. It will import your iTunes library, even correct and add metadata such as BPM and cover art automatically in the background. It supports plugins such as Last.fm, eMusic and Amazon which are killer features from my point of view. Using the Last.fm plugin you can view related artists and tracks as well as listen to your personalised radio stations.

The interface is clearly something they need to overhaul. It wouldn’t hurt to use default OSX UI elements instead of the default Gnome resources. Its simplicity however is commendable. If you’re so inclined, download it and help the developers kill some bugs. If you want to have a good alternative to iTunes, one that’s free and open-source, this is what has to be done.

Available for both the first and second generation of iPod Touches and iPhones, the Juice Pack charges your device when inserted, while still offering protection from accidental drops and slips – with its sturdy rubberized exterior. The Juice Pack connects to your device via the 20-pin Apple dock connector, and to the computer or wall charger through a standard USB port.

When connected to a computer, the Juice Pack’s ‘pass-through’ design enables you to sync with iTunes and charge at the same time – without having to remove your iPhone/iPod from it. The enclosed battery has 1800mAh of energy and extends your battery life by a factor of 2. The lithium polymer technology of the battery is known to be more resilient to physical damage but it’s also known to have a reduced lifecycle (about 500 charge-discharge cycles) when compared to lithium-ion technology.

Photos, while they show off the design, don’t tell the full story of the Juice Pack. The iPod touch fit snuggly inside, and it started charging immediately. It adds very little to the total weight – insignificant when compared to other hard shell cases. The rubberized surface also improves handling. If you prefer another case for your device, don’t worry, you can disconnect the Juice Pack and still have a fully charged device. The integrated power distribution “instructs the iPod Touch to always drain out the juice pack first”. Fully charging the iPod touch took around 2 hours from 10%, as fast as it would charge connected to a computer.

The Juice Pack is not the average battery extender. It is by far the smartest accessory I’ve seen so far and also impresses with its simple Apple-like design and attention to details. It’s the first Apple certified battery extender for the iPhone 3G.

The Juice Pack provides you with tremendous convenience in situations when you don’t have access to a power socket or a an USB port – and is a must have for traveling or long commutes. While some have picked on the price tag for this device, I won’t, because I don’t think that’s fair. Everything about the Juice Pack suggests quality,  and it’s very clear who this company addresses with its products. People who buy Apple products look at quality and overall experience before looking at the price tag.

I highly recommend the Mophie Juice Pack. Visit the Mophie website here.

We thank Mark Olson from Max Borges Agency for providing this sample.

Since the recession is in full swing I thought it may be useful to check out some ‘budget’ earphones.

First of all, let’s talk a bit about the technical specifications. The CX 400 II Precision:

• Have a small form factor and weigh just 5g.
• Use a symmetrical 1,2 soft rubber cable with inline analog (slider) volume control; It isn’t exactly precise but it does the job. It comes in handy in cramped situations, on the bus, when you just don’t have enough space to take out the iPod.
• Have a gold plated 3,5mm jack which work with the iPhone with no additional adaptors. The jack’s plastic enclosing is elastic although it doesn’t seem to offer much protection for the wire at all.
• The Neodymium magnet dynamic speakers are shielded by steel mesh caps.
• In the package we got: 6 sets of elastomer fittings, a clip attachment, cable winder, leather-like  carrying case.

I liked the small form factor of these headphones, as well as the ‘titanium’ metallic finish; I also appreciated the extended ear adaptor set – it makes a huge difference, from noise isolation to bass. If we take out of consideration the jack – which has no apparent protection for the cable – these are very well designed headphones.

I would have liked to see an asymmetrical cable which provides, in my opinion, a better experience.

The sound quality is good – crisp highs, solid bass, but not so well on the midrange. Apple and Etymotic perform better – but nothing noticeable listening to day-to-day rock in noisy environments. Here are the official numbers:

• Range: 17-22,000Hz
• Impedance: 16 ohms
• Speaker Type: Dynamic
• Acoustic Pressure: 114dB

Check out more technical information over at the product page. As always, a question for the readers: What would you like to see reviewed next?

We thank Linda Irvin –Product Management and Mareike Oer -PR for providing this sample.

In this article we’re going to take a closer look at the service, deconstructing its features and weaknesses. Plus, for those not lucky enough to live in one of the officially accepted countries, we describe a simple way to circumvent the protection and gain immediate access.

The Selection: Is it enough?

The current music selection will not impress a hard-core audiophile, or fans of Britney Spears – but it certainly will satisfy the needs of most casual listeners and even the more pretentious ears of an indie-lover; Spotify features bands such as Decemberists, The National, Atlas Sound, CSS, The Shins, Feist and many others.

Nobody is arguing that the current song count is significantly lower than the catalogs of any major seller – the fact that it is completely free is what’s so compelling about this service.

Initially, I was deeply worried about bitrate quality, which thankfully is 192kbpps, and interruptions, but none happened. The team notes on the blog:

However, we want to make sure that everyone who uses Spotify gets the same fast, uninterrupted experience so providing a stable service is our priority. If growth happens too fast and it starts affecting quality we may have to re-instate the invitation system, hopefully this won’t happen. –UK launch of the service

It’s notable that for 9,99 pounds/month you can get the premium service – ad-free listening – and some cool extras such as pre-release songs and concert tickets:

Mikael Wiehe, sogwriter and driving force of Hoola Bandoola Band, has another solo album, Sånger från en inställd skiljsmässa, which is now available for pre-listen.

[…]and get to be one of the first to hear the new Morrissey album. –From Spotify blog

They’ve signed deals with all the major labels(EMI, Universal, AMG), and adding more music at a fast pace:

We’re currently adding about 10,000 tracks a day from our current deals. – from the Spotify blog

The application: Simplicity in its purest form

You’ll be impressed with the sheer simplicity of the Spotify desktop application – and its similarities to iTunes, Songbird or Banshee. It clocks in at a mere 2,4 MB download.

Although is incredibly small – it has all the basics covered: playlists as easy as drag and drop, an very easy to use Radio feature, saved searches, easy navigation and search.

The Radio feature is a killer one: with two clicks you can find the right music for a romantic evening, peaceful reading, or just going back in time to rediscover old classics.

Another utility I found for Spotify is quickly previewing songs – recommended from friends or iTunes’ Genius – full length quality preview of the whole album before deciding if I want it or not.

Conclusion

If you’re going to ask, I’m going to tell you that I hate not having control over my data, be it music, photos or documents, but you can’t help noticing that everything is slowly moving away to the cloud – which ultimately might be better, or worse.

If there’s something I’m not quite sure about it’s this bit of information posted on their website:

We ’ve got a far greater range of targeting than you’ll find in offline or even most digital media – starting with demographic, location and mood. Of course, detailed tracking and reporting comes as a given.

I don’t like being tracked – unless it’s Last.fm – and I certainly don’t like that they don’t mention it prominently during signup.

Spotify is a must-have in my book and definitely worth watching in the future. That being said, you should visit spotify.com/en/get-started/ and sign up. If you’re not living in one of the accepted countries, use a proxy that supports SSL and maps your location to the UK or Sweden. It’s easy to set up a proxy in Firefox using the Options menu:

Don’t forget to share in the comments your take on Spotify and other cool services(and music) you’ve discovered in this space.

Stay Relevant

Times are changing as we rapidly move to an increasingly connected world. Companies everywhere are doing their best to stay relevant. But not all succeed.

I can imagine a whiteboard – and the three core people standing around it in the meeting room. The question popped:

How can we stay relevant? It’s no longer about physical access to media – everything is connected to the internet.

It was a good question to ask because CD swapping wasn’t going to work forever. CD sales are going down quarter after quarter, as the RIAA keeps telling us. They blame piracy, we say it’s evolution. People are buying music online and that’s nothing new.

We need a music store. With a large catalog, about 6 million songs. And a social network.

But that was already done: iTunes, Amazon, eMusic, Rhapsody, and the list goes on. The same goes for social networks, with Last.fm leading the pack. The only way to bring in people to your service is to provide a better experience, for less money.

Another trend widely discussed by tech pundits are netbooks, are selling like there’s no tomorrow: Most of the time people are on the internet, checking mail, reading, chatting even doing work on the road.

Can you notice what’s missing from that list? That’s when Lala was born:

Your music library online, available from any computer.

Moving to the Cloud

The Lala Music Mover comes as a free download once you sign up. It’s a small application that sits quietly in your taskbar and uploads your songs to Lala:

• Fast song matching reads the metadata from your songs, and matches it to Lala’s catalog. If Lala has the song it is automatically added to your online library, no questions asked. It doesn’t even matter if you downloaded the songs via P2P. It matched 1,947 songs in 53 minutes, with processor usage never jumping the 30% limit.
• Brute-Force uploads the songs it can’t find in Lala’s catalog to the server. This takes some time depending on the server load and your bandwidth.

Lala Music Mover works both on Mac and Windows – never crashed or sucked up all the CPU cycles. Settings like default download folder, downloading/uploading are clearly laid out.

Once you uploaded your library you can access it online and play it through the flash player. A nice touch, you also have access to your playlists.

You’ll notice however that ratings – which are stored in the proprietary .itl file in iTunes – are not imported.

Music Store and Social Network

• Clean interface, easy to navigate and find artists, songs.
• Recommendations based on what you and your friends are listening.
• Listen to whole albums/songs for free once. 10 cents for unlimited web-plays, 99 cents for DRM-free MP3 download. The web-play counts toward the mp3 purchase.
• Songs are encoded at 256 kbps VBR or 320 kbps CBR.

Conclusion

The only caveat I find to this service as a whole, is that it’s not available outside of the United States. Yes, the geo-ip tracking can be tricked, but I’m not sure how legal that is. We contacted John Kuch, but unfortunately he was out of the office and could only be available via phone. Hopefully we’ll get him on an interview after the holidays.

Considering the large 6 million song catalog, integration with media players, the high quality encoding and cloud availability, I would strongly recommend this service. Visit Lala.com.

Familiar?

Apple’s recipe for success was simple, a top down approach: the device, the software, the place to get music, and the (demonic?) scheme to tie all these together- FairPlay DRM. Microsoft, rather  unsuccessfully copied that recipe a little later, and called it Zune. Even if more than 85% of PCs use Windows, Zune’s music player  market share is only 4% compared to iPod’s crushing 70%.

As expected,  there are three components in the Zune’s platform: the Zune player, the Zune Windows-only software and the Zune online services: Zune Marketplace and Zune Social. Oh, and let’s not forget the the Zune DRM. In this article I will take a look at Zune Software and Zune Marketplace. We’ll review the Zune hardware in a separate article later on, if possible.

Quick overview

Zune Software runs on XP and Vista and it is build on a variation of the Media Center UI Framework, and not WPF, as Microsoft probably wanted to eliminate the burden of installing the .NET 3.0 framework. A good choice.

The Zune software is a media player application that can be used to manage a Zune and stream content to a nearby XBOX 360. It supports MP3, AAC(.aac, .mp4, .m4a, .m4b, .mov), WMA for audio and MPEG4 ( .mp4, .m4v, .mov), H.264, WMV and ASF for video. It can also manage JPG pictures, but  this feature  is implemented just for syncing with the Zune player, so it is very limited in functionality. Like iTunes, it can rip and burn audio CDs.

Zune devices can only be managed using the Zune Software and no other media players are compatible with Zune software.  As Zune Marketplace is tightly integrated with the Zune Software, it  has also gone largely unnoticed.

Library management

Zune Software allows folder monitoring so whenever you drop files in the monitored folders they are automatically added to your collection. You can define folders for music, videos, pictures and podcasts from local or external drives. Sweet!  iTunes can replicate the same behavior only on the Mac using Folder Actions. The default location of the Zune library (songs downloaded from the Marketplace, podcasts and ripped CDs) can easily be changed, even from the first start-up screen.

Smart playlists are known in Zune as Autoplaylists. Unlike iTunes, where you can burn any playlist as an audio CD or MP3 Data CD, Zune Software has a dedicated burn playlists and you can burn it only as an audio CD.

At the bottom you can select the default playlist and any tracks dragged onto the playlist icon are added to that playlist. Another nice feature that iTunes did not implement properly is the Now Playing playlist.

It can automatically download album cover art and metadata for the content in the library or you can do it manually. It  does a good job at finding cover art, significantly better than iTunes.

Other than marking a song as favorite (the only functionality I see in this is  for the social extension since there is no favorites autoplaylist) or editing the metadata, there’s not much you can do.  In iTunes you had some more sophisticated options like specifying whether a song should be skipped when shuffling or the start and end time if there’s just a part that you like.

You can rate songs but it doesn’t have a five star rating systems like iTunes,  just a love/ don’t love heart symbol.

Searching brings results both from your collection and also from the Zune Marketplace, nicely divided in to two panes. This would be a view that I’d like to see in iTunes.

Look and feel

The look and feel of a software used for managing, discovering and listening to music is very important for the user experience and could be considered a deciding factor in buying a music player. In my opinion, the Zune Software is a worthy contender for the “Best Jukebox experience” title.

Interface

Zune has a unique, beautiful, clean(!), user-friendly and intuitive interface, which makes it far more attractive than any other media player I’ve used before. Even with the Cover Flow and the new Grid View, when compared to Zune, iTunes still looks too much like a spreadsheet.

The nested-tab navigation is remarkably easy to use and seems so natural you wonder how you managed to live with out it.  In the upper left corner you will find the main tabs: Collection, Marketplace and Social as well as a tab for Zune devices when connected or CD when inserted.  Each main tab contains nested-tabs to display different  content. For instance, under the Collection tabs there are tabs for media stored on your computer: Music, Videos , Pictures, Podcasts and Channels.

The third level of nested-tabs allows you to choose the type of view you prefer. For Music you get Artists, Genres, Albums, Songs and Playlists. Each of this view has an uncluttered layout and they all look attractive, but I find the Artists view the most useful.

Themes

Zune Software does not support themes but  you can change the background. You get seven different backgrounds, the first being completely white, and the rest having some washed up colors on the same white background, but interesting non the less.

Now Playing

Zune doesn’t come with a true full-screen view or a mini-player but  it has a fabulous Now Playing screen, that tiles album art across the application window.

If your graphic card supports it and if you enabled the Premium graphics rendering with animation option, the Now Playing screen fills up with high quality photos of the current artist and animated bio info. I prefer this to any iTunes Visualizer.

Podcasts

Podcast support in Zune is decent.  No complains or new features here.

Music discovery features

Zune comes with three interesting music discovery services: Mixview, Channels and Picks.

Mixview

Mixview puts at the center the current artist (selected or playing), and flowing around it,  squares representing works of  the same artist, related artists, artists who have either  influenced or been influenced by the respective artist  and top listeners. When you click a square, the item moves in the center and new related items are displayed.  When you mouse over the center you can get more info, play or buy the item. Very cool!

Channels

If you are busy and don’t have time to track all the music you like, you can subscribe to  channels, that are basically  regularly-updated playlists that Zune Pass members can subscribe to. These are updated by partners–industry heavyweights and Zune employees. I’m going to talk about the Zune Pass a little later.

Picks

Like iTunes Genius, Picks makes music recommendations tailored to your taste, based on your listening habits. your friends and those listeners who prefer the same artists as you. After 116  plays I still didn’t get any recommendations. It is supposed to get better the more music you listen to.

Zune Marketplace and Zune Social

There are some differences between the Zune Marketplace and the iTunes store. The Zune Marketplace offers a lot less music (4 million songs) and no feature length movies or audio books. On the other hand, you have a simple interface and a subscription-based service called Zune Pass, which didn’t turn into a big hit.

For purchasing songs, Microsoft uses a system called Microsoft Points.These are available in denominations of $5 for 400 points. A song is 79 points, which equals to $0.9875, similar to the price on iTunes, but from a psychological point of view 79 is less than 99. To me, the only logical explanation for this confusing system is Microsoft’s greed. Just think at the fact that if you buy 400 points with 5$ you can buy only 5 songs with 395 points, so the remaining 5 points which equals to 0.0625$ remain to Microsoft.

Music content is offered in DRM-restricted WMA format @ 192kbit/s or non-DRM MP3 format (256kbit/s) for a per-song or per-album fee, or via a $14.99 Zune Pass monthly subscription.  The non-DRM offering is larger than Apple’s, but these MP3s are hard to find.

The Zune Pass allows you to download an unlimited number of  tracks, you can play on up to three computers and three Zunes. You are actually renting the music, since Zune Pass downloads cannot be burned to audio CDs and become unplayable when the subscription ends, unless purchased. Luckily you get to keep 10 DRM songs per month and all the MP3s. Also, with the Zune pass you can preview the whole song, not just 30 seconds. Still, 14.99$ seems a little expensive.

When you create a Zune account you get a 14-day free Zune Pass. The Zune pass isn’t a bad deal if you take into consideration that you can strip the DRM relatively easy(FairUse4WM).

Even if you don’t subscribe to the Zune pass you still have access to the music discovery services that will be applied on you existing collection and any music you rip of CDs.

Zune Social is the free online component that displays your  most-played artists, recently played and favorite songs, and a list of your friends. You can also earn badges, if  you listen to an album or artist a certain number of times. This info can be showcased on a user’s Zune card, which is a flash widget that can be embedded on other social sites like MySpace or Facebook.

Conclusion

Zune is a viable alternative to iTunes on the PC side, and you should really give it a try. For me, the Zune Software offered the best music experience on the Windows platform so far.  Too bad it doesn’t support other audio players. If you want to buy an iPod and use it with a Windows PC, I suggest you also try a Zune player first. I know I would, after seeing how elegant the Zune’s interface is.

Of course there are some limitations and annoyances with Ruckus, but considering it’s completely free and legal – two words that don’t play nice together – it’s worth it.

Selection

The Ruckus website boasts a large figure, over 3 millions songs and quite a lot of music videos – all encoded at a good bitrate. I haven’t counted all the songs in the store, but I’ve found a great rock selection, and albums that I wanted to have for a long time; and since there is no cost to downloading, it’s a great way to find new artists and discover their music.

You will find that the catalog is more inclined to the mainstream listeners, but there are some gems suitable for indie lovers.

Songs

Most albums are encoded at a decent bitrate, even by audiophile standards – 192kbps. With older songs, you might not be as lucky – just 128kbps. I’ve downloaded about 12 albums, and only one was encoded at the lower bitrate, so that’s not a big problem.

Now here comes the bad news; All songs are encoded in Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (.wma) and protected by DRM. With the free plan, you will only be able to listen to the songs on your computer.

For 4.99$, you get the ability to sync the songs to a ‘PlaysForSure’ compatible device, such as the iriver players. By default, you won’t be able to play these songs on an iPod or a Zune, but I’ve found a workaround to fix that.

Not much of an issue these days, the software needs an internet connection to update the licenses for the songs, once a month.

I’ve also noticed that the filenames are not normalized and some metadata is missing on certain albums: details like genre, year, or composer. I didn’t see the album art when I imported the songs into Windows Media Player either. However that is easily fixed by following these steps:

Right-Click on Album Cover > Find Album Info > Save Media Information Changes

[Later Edit] Forgot to mention that you can’t preview the songs before downloading them on the website. I’ve also found that some more obscure bands have pulled down their albums and although they appear in the store, you can’t download them.

Ruckus Player

Once you login for the first time and try to download a song, you are presented with a dialog box requiring you to install the Ruckus Player – which has three big features:

• Downloads your songs to your specified folder
• Acquires and updates licenses for the songs
• Plays your songs and music videos
• Provides you with a recommendation service, similar to Genius.

Although it didn’t crash during our tests and downloaded all the songs successfully, I’m not terribly impressed with the Ruckus player. The developers didn’t take enough time to polish the interface – having to squint at the monitor to see the now playing song isn’t that appealing. You’re better off just importing the songs into Windows Media Player.

Ruckus is ad-supported, so unless you’re running AdBlock you’ll see some ads.

Conclusion

As a whole, the Ruckus experience can’t be compared with iTunes or Amazon: ugly, slow, restricted. But the situation changes dramatically when you work around those restrictions to get rid of the DRM: free music for your iPod, at a decent bitrate. If you’re a student with a little tech know-how and time, this is a deal you can’t miss.

The legality of these procedures can be debated – but it seems Microsoft is doing anything about it yet.  Without getting myself in trouble I can say that ‘FairUse4WM Mil0tis’ (about half way down the page) can be used to succesfully strip the DRM. Visit the link I provided, follow the instructions and you’ll be good to go in about 2 hours – from then on it’s just a simple process of downloading and clicking a button or two. To import the fresh DRM-free songs in iTunes, just drag and drop them into the window.

In theory, you won’t be in any trouble if you proceed with these instructions, nobody can know what you are doing with the songs after you download them. It’s a lot of overhead but this is a lot safer than using BitTorrent.

March 4 2009 EDIT: Ruckus shut down.

We’re now living an electronic revolution. But what started it in the first place ? Well, people started inventing lots of devices that could process audio signals, modulate them, and so on. These hardware devices were ment to discover new sounds, new feelings. And they did, but whit a lot of work, a lot of patience, a lot of wiring and plenty of headaches. They all had lots of knobs, buttons, wires, some had displays, and they all needed a lot of knowledge – all these to make new sounds. But was it worth the effort ? Of course it was! Music is the universal language, and these smart people extended that language to a level of endless possibilities.

A short history about virtually crafted music

When the computers started to appear, they were not seen as a way of making sounds or even music. But armed with time and will, some people saw the potential of computers in the music industry, an industry that already reached adulthood.

Computer programmers started to create pieces of software intended to generate sound, and once that step was done, they already had everything they needed to make music and even save it for replaying it. The first music production applications were very complicated by means of handling, and also primitive, compared to the current music software. And even if computers had a great potential in making music, people were’nt ready to give up on their real hardware devices and musical instruments. So a new problem popped up for computer programmers, and that is connecting computers to real hardware. This was the biggest step ever in the music industry, because it allowed people to take music developing to a new level by combining real hardware with virtual applications.

So now, every music and recording studio has both computers and real hardware working together in order to get the most out of music making. The only problem was that people needed to spend some more money on special devices (hardware interfaces) to connect the hardware to their computers. So if you want to make your own recording studio, think carefully, because you’ll need a lot of money to buy all the gear, like mixers, some instruments, special “walls” for mastering and filtering the sound, speakers and amplifiers, microphones, signal processors, recordering accessories, studio monitors, outboard effects (compressors, reverbs, equalizers, and so on), lots and lots of cables, and do not forget the computers and all the hardware interfaces needed to plug the equipement).

Competitive issues between two well known DAW’s

First of all, what is a DAW ? It stands for Digital Audio Workstation, and it’s basically a system that records, edits and plays back digital audio. The “workstation” in DAW reffers to the combination of music software and real audio hardware that we talked about earlier. Some of the modern DAWs include software like Ableton Live, Adobe Audition, Cakewalk Sonar, Steinberg’s Cubase, Logic Pro, Sony ACID, Pro Tools, Propellerhead’s Reason and FL Studio (formerly known as Fruity Loops). I’ll be talking only about the last two DAWs, because these are the biggest competitors out there in terms of music production.
Both Reason and FL Studio provide the basic tools and techniques for recording, editing and playing back music. But as any competing software, they both have pro’s and con’s. Users world wide still debate the problem of competition between these two, and this debate started many years ago and I honestly don’t know if it’ll ever end. So i compiled a list of pro’s and con’s of these two DAWs after many hours of reading lots of forums and articles on the Internet. But before I present you this list, let’s look at some screenshots of Reason and FLStudio.

Propellerhead Reason 4

FL Studio XXL 8

I will now list the pro’s and con’s of these two DAWs, but in a different way, meaning that for each DAW I will list the features that it has and that the other DAW doesn’t have. Warning: if you never used DAWs or any music software, the following lists will be meaningless to you!

Reason 4 ($449 + $99 for upgrading)

• sounds produced with it are more realistic and less digital, but it also allows you to make digital sounds;
• possibility to create sounds far better than any VST out there (VST = Virtual Studio Technology, an interface that allows using third-party plugins and effects inside a DAW);
• endless possibilities for making new original sounds;
• allows to reproduce any sound you wish;
• provides advanced mastering control;
• tons of soundbanks available on the market, so you never get bored;
• soundbanks shipped with the product don’t contain childish sounds (like FL Studio’s stock sounds);
• professional and “realistic” look;
• the user interface teaches the user about hardware interfaces, how they connect, signal processing, etc.;
• using many devices on one song won’t crash your Reason, like FL Studio crashes when using many or some VST plugins and effects on a song;
• it’s easier to use in combination with a midi keyboard;
• it hasn’t a “reason sound”, so you cannot easilly say “oh, that’s a reason sound” like you do for most FL Studio songs;
• provides advanced sampling with ReCycle and Dr.Rex;
• advanced hardware routing and connecting using the rear rack view (check the wires in the screenshot – this feature pops reason out from the other DAWs);
• doesn’t tend to lag in latency;
• better memory management;
• tempo and time signature automatization (it’s sick, in a good way!);
• has a full drum machine (see ReDrum);
• no skin support, so reason focuses only on its’ fuctionality and it doesn’t try to impress by using skins;
• combined with Ableton Live or Cubase, you can get your own virtual monster music studio inside a box;
• no limits for mixers, effects or anything else (FL Studio has limited mixer channels and effect slots per channel);
• full support for MacOSX (even for Ableton Live and Cubase), compared to FL Studio which has to run in a virtual machine.

FL Studio XXL 8 ($299)

• VST and VSTi support (this feature makes it extensible, and because of no support for VSTs in Reason, users tend to run away from it);
• easy to use user interface with no daunting “monster hardware devices”;
• excellent for beginners, so you can learn it as you produce music;
• creates loops much more easier than many other DAWs;
• tons of VST plugins and effects so that you can create lots of new sounds;
• provides support for audio recording;
• mp3 support (another feature that Reason doesn’t seem to think about, but you can use SoundForge or any audio converter to convert your songs from wav to mp3);
• better support for vocal processing;
• lifetime free updates for customers (this is really awesome!).

So, after a few years of using both of these DAWs and after all the forums I’ve read, I sincerelly recommend you to start with FL Studio, create some songs, and then switch to Reason. This is what I have done, this is what many have done, and that’s because learning to use Reason from the beginning could get very frustrating, but once you master the basic concepts and techniques in FL Studio, it’ll be a piece of cake to use Reason. Anyways, if you care about the price, you will definitelly start with FL Studio, and maybe never switch to Reason at all.
You cannot say that Reason is better than FL Studio, or vice versa. Both have their pro’s and con’s, that’s for sure. But in my opinion, Reason is far better than FL Studio. Hey, don’t I have the right to an opinion ?!
You could also do another thing, if it’s still a hard choice to make regarding which one to use. Propellerhead has developed together with Steinberg a technology called ReWire that allows you to combine two DAWs into a single DAW! Amazing, isn’t it ? So you could buy both Reason and FL Studio and then use the ReWire technology to connect them both into one big virtual music studio. And yes, by combining them with ReWire, you get all the features from Reason and FL Studio, so you could, for example, create music in FL Studio using Reason devices, and then export it to mp3! I, myself, couldn’t choose between these two DAWs, so I use them both when producing music.

Article written by Ursan-Mihalcea Razvan.

What’s wrong with iTunes?

It depends on who you ask. Some may say it’s bloated, it’s slow, a resource hog, lacks support for players other than iPods, you can’t customize it, it doesn’t allow you to organize music the way you want – you constantly need to import music files into iTunes library (aka no “Watch Folders” feature), no “now playing” playlist, DRM-ed songs bought through the iTunes store can only be played on iPods, cover art download feature doesn’t work most of the time and let’s not forget it’s closed source.
On the other hand iTunes is sexy, easy, pretty much painless, integrates perfectly with the Mac, iPod and iPhone, streams music with AirTunes, cover-flow library view is gorgeous, library syncing works fantastic, it has smart folders, built-in CD ripping/writing and it basically has everything you need for playing, organizing, syncing, encoding and downloading music, podcasts and movies.
We will take a look at open-source Songbird 0.7.0 and Banshee 1.4 from a Mac user perspective and compare them to  iTunes to see if there are any compelling reasons to switch.

Technology used

Songbird is built on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform and it allows skinning and add-ons similar to Firefox, but it uses a lot of RAM. It is called by many the Firefox of media players. Another selling point is browsing web pages from within Songbird (Gecko engine) and automatic music discovery(“url slurper”) – music files embedded on a web page are displayed on a separate pane where they can be played or downloaded.

Banshee is built on the Mono platform and Gtk – the reason why it has a certain Gnome look and feel, which is not actually a bad thing. This version of Banshee is the first technology preview release for Mac OS X which explains the glitches and frequent crashes. Before installing Banshee you need to install Mono.
Both Songbird and Banshee use GStreamer multimedia framework for decoding and encoding media files.

Media files support

Songbirds can play MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, WMA and Apple FairPlay – encoded audio, while Banshee plays Ogg Vorbis, MP3,FLAC and H.264 videos.
Library Management
Songbird allows importing your iTunes music library. In my tests, songs and playlists were imported correctly, but no ratings or play counts. Banshee can’t import the iTunes library but you can import the media from the iTunes folder. I imported more than 7000 tracks from my external Firewire drive. Both applications were quite fast, but Banshee seemed a little faster. When importing is complete, Songbird automatically searches for duplicates and Banshee tries to find cover art from the internet.
When it comes to organizing your music, you get the usual stuff you might expect: playlists, smart playlists, ratings, live search and sorting from multiple criteria. Neither has playlist folders.

A feature that we long for in iTunes, Folder-watch (auto discovery and import of new music files from specified folders), is also missing, but is promised in a future release of Songbird. At least Banshee has a Rescan Library Tool, a tool that will rescan your media collection and update your library if any changes have occurred. A very welcomed feature is the Play Queue in Banshee, which allows you to queue up songs on the fly. Why isn’t this in all media players?

Metadata and cover art
Both have good meta data editors, but Banshee’s is better. A thing I’ve noticed: Songbird did not read the whole meta data:

When you import music files, Banshee will automatically try to download cover art from Rhapsody, Amazon and Last.fm. It does a pretty good job. Way better than iTunes.
Songbird does not have such a feature built-in and cannot import cover art from the iTunes library, but you can use Album Manager and Last.FM Cover Fetcher addons. From what I can tell, you have to manually right click each of your albums to download the cover art. Ouch!

Interface
Songbird has a fairly polished interface, very iTunes-like, and many Mac users will appreciate the similarities. Unlike iTunes, or Banshee for that matter, the interface offers a very high degree of customization. You also get a tabbed browser and customizable music search box, where you can add your favorite mp3 music search engines or use the defaults: SkreemR or The Hype Machine.
Besides the playlist pane and the central pane you get three customizable panes for add-ons: two at the bottom and one on the right side.

Also with the help of add-ons you can choose the library view from: List, Filter Pane, Album List, Album View, and MediaFlow (mimics iTunes CoverFlow and it’s not to shabby) . Album List is terrible.

While some may say Banshee’s streamlined interface could use some spicing up, when compared to Songbird, I find it easy, clear and uncluttered. It has only one view for the library, with three panes: the  artists. the albums and the songs. I consider this to be the most useful way to view my music library.

Considering this is the first beta preview on the Mac, I will ignore the little interface quirks like chunks of text disappearing or the absence of a functional progress bar for songs.
Both application offer a mini-mode, but Banshee’s interface is bulky while Songbird’s mini interface is highly stylized.

Skins
Songbird’s skins are called feathers. You can choose from well over 100 feathers and with the help of the add-on manager you can easily install them. I don’t really know what is the deal with Banshee themes. Apparently it supports skinning but I did not find a way to get and install such themes.

iPod support
Songbird has built-in support for managing iPods (but no iPhones or iPod touch). You can let it sync or manually transfer the files.

The Mac version of Banshee does not yet support devices, but the Linux versions supports iPods and mobile phones (even HTC G1 Android, but no iPhone) so hopefully this will not be an issue with future versions.

Music stores
With Songbird there is a Jamendo and eMusic add-on, but the integration with these stores resumes at displaying a list of tracks and a play button in the bottom pane. To buy a song you need to visit the website. As for Banshee, there is an unofficial iTunes Music store plugin, but more about plugins in the next section.

Extension Support
The strong point of Songbird is the ability to easily add extensions. There are over a hundred extensions for library views, social services like Last.fm and Twitter, lyric finders, music recommendations, concert ticket finders, artist bios, Apple remote-control support and many more. Some of these add-ons will fit nicely in the extra panes.

The recommended add-ons you can install on the first start of Songbird are:iPod Device Support, QuickTime Playback, SHOUTcast Radio,Concerts,iTunes Library Importer,Songbird Developer Tools.

Banshee also supports extensions, but their number is very limited. Most of these plugins have been included by default in Banshee and they are called Core-Plugins. The unofficial plugins are not that easy to install- you have to know your way with the command line. Among the core-plugins you can find: Bookmarks, Cover Art fetching, Digital Media Player support, Mass storage media player support, Internet Radio, Last.fm radio and Scrobbling, Mini Mode, Play Queue and Podcasts.
I find the Last.Fm integration very well built in Banshee.

Radios and podcasts
In Songbird there is no podcast category. To get a podcast to appear in Songbird you need to right click the Playlists category, choose New Subscription and enter the feed URL. The podcast will appear as a playlist and  you can begin streaming the episode you want, unlike iTunes where you have to wait for the download to finish.
Songbird comes with SHOUTcast Radio add-on. If your favorite radio station isn’t there, then you have to follow the same procedure as for adding podcasts.You guess it, the radio station will appear as a playlist. Awkward and annoying. No to mention the fact that if you add a radio, the download animation will constantly indicate a download is in progress.

Banshee has a dedicated Podcast and Radio category. You will see the cover art for all your podcasts in the album pane. An interesting feature is the ability to organize podcasts in playlists and smart playlists. Radio doesn’t work 100%. I could add all my stations but some refused to play.

Conclusion
With good looks, customization, addons and  integrated web browser with music discovery and download features, Songbird is an ambitious project.
With sheer elegance in its simplicity, Banshee for Mac looks very promising. But at the current stage it’s not really usable- it crashes every few tracks.
If you think about it, you have great plugins for iTunes too: Last.fm, iLike or the upcoming TuneUp companion. Most people don’t even care about the audio encoding or where the physical music files are stored on the drive, they just want to listen to their music. These people and those who like iTunes the way it is, probably consider Songbird or Banshee just a crippled-down iTunes.
For those who dislike iTunes I have bad news: neither Songbird or Banshee is an iTunes killer on the Mac. Simply put, at this moment there are no real compelling reasons to switch.
On the other hand, as an iTunes alternative on Linux, the fight is tough, as there are two more contenders: Amarok and Rhythmbox.

Thanks everyone, this post made it to Reddit!

People want to do much more with their iPhone then Steve Job allows.  So they jailbreak it. The same goes for the Apple TV. While it is a great and relatively cheap media center, it has restrictions, just like the iPhone.  Wouldn’t it be nice to play xvid videos, stream shows from Hulu, listen to LastFm, Twitter the name of the movie you are currently watching or see what music your friends are listening to on your big screen TV connected to an Apple TV? Well, you can do that with Boxee!

Boxee is an open source media center, with social networking features, currently in an invite-only alpha stage. It is a fork of XBMC, a media center initially designed for the Xbox, but then ported to run on all major platforms. Boxee runs on Linux, Mac, and soon Windows. You can put it on your AppleTV with a grandma-simple “hack“, with no adverse effects.

What does it do?

As other media center software, Boxee allows you to browse and play media files (movies, music, photos) from local hard-disks or DVD drive and can stream music and videos from the internet or other computers in the network (SMB/SAMBA shares). It supports 1080p HD and it reads virtually any type of media, except DRM-ed files.

Boxee scans your default media folders and downloads the related metadata and artwork for your music and video files. Unfortunately, it doesn’t import your iTunes or iPhoto libraries – a big loss for Mac users.

When playing a song you can choose to see the lyrics (especially useful for a karaoke night) or display information about the band or artist.

Boxee seamlessly integrates with online video, music and photo websites and can actually download public torrent movies. You can also configure media feeds for your favourite podcasts on the Boxee website or choose one from the built-in Podcasts directory.

• Video : CBS, CNN, Comedy Central, Hulu, Movie Trailers, MySpaceTV, Next New Networks, ON networks, Revision3, YouTube.
• Music: Jamendo, Last.fm, NPR, SHOUTcast, BBC.
• Photos: Flickr, Picasa.

Social Features

Boxee wants to turn the TV in to “a social media center”. To achieve that, it gives the users the ability to rate and recommend content to their friends. The dashboard displays friends’ recommendations and the media they’ve recently watched or listened to, facilitating the discovery of new quality content.

On Boxee’s website you can set up your Twitter, FriendFeed or Tumbler account to be updated with the current playing media or media you recommended.

Interface

Boxee is not the first nor the last to bring to the table all the features mentioned earlier. The utility of a media center software is given by how fast and how easy you can get to the media files you want.

Boxee has a very clean and slick interface, and after little time to get used to, the menu is a breeze to navigate, especially if you have an Apple remote. It has no manual so you must figure out how to use the keyboard or the remote, but it’s pretty intuitive.

One key feature of the interface is the sliding panels approach for showing the menu. It uses the screen real estate very efficiently and in terms of usability it may be one of the best solutions for media center software I’ve seen.

What’s the catch?

None! Boxee is and will remain free. The business model is not yet established, but it should be based on content referrals or advertising. Being in Alpha it is buggy and crashes from time to time.

Is this the end of cable/satellite TV? Well, not really. But more and more people watch videos online, in detriment of traditional TV. And now, with media boxes that can stream content from sites like Hulu, for many of us there aren’t many reasons left in favour of cable TV.

This is where TuneUp Companion comes to the rescue : a small plugin for iTunes that manages to fix your ID3 tags and add album art.

Usability

To fix an album, you just have to select ‘Clean your mislabeled music’ and drag-n-drop the song or the album into the blue box. It usually takes about 5-15 seconds per song for the algorithm to recognize the song and present you with what it thinks is the right information. You then have a choice to save the correct information to your songs.

Depending on the ID3 tag version and how much of the information is wrong it usually takes less than 30 seconds for an entire album to be saved.

Adding album art is equally easy – you’re even presented with a choice between different versions of the cover.

There are some extra features:

• Integration with YouTube, for watching music videos and content related to the artist.
• Concert notifications from StubHub
• Album recommendations using Amazon
• eBay integration for tickets, CD’s, etc.
• Analyze feature tells you how many songs have correct tags.

Cons

This application only works with iTunes – no luck for Linux users or Windows Media Player fans.

It uses a product activation scheme – same as WGA or Photoshop for example – that creates an unique fingerprint for your computer. Once activated you’re limited to 1 license transfer to another computer.

As of writing this article users are reporting some issues with iTunes 8, which are solved by reinstalling the app. Mac version is ‘coming this fall’, and signups for the beta are open.

Conclusion

TuneUp Companion is very accurate – better than FixTunes and MusicBrainz in my tests – because it uses one of the largest, most comprehensive music databases, Gracenote.

The free version of TuneUp is limited to cleaning  500 songs and 50 album covers.  For unlimited cleans and album covers a single computer license is 11.95$/year or 19.95$ lifetime.

Download it from here.