MeCanto – your music collection on the web

MeCanto let you Listen to your music collection on the web and your mobile phone.

Features:

• Upload and sync music using the PC client.
• Unlimited free online storage for your music.
• Music is neatly organized according to genre, artists, etc.
• Create and edit your own playlists.
• No need to manually sync again.
• Use it on your mobile too.
• Edit playlists online, search for videos on Youtube and scrobble it to your last.fm account.

Recommended by MakeUseOf.

Free Music Notation Symbol Fonts

WebsiteTips has a page listing Web Sites with Commercial, Free Music Notation Symbol Fonts as well as Music Dingbat Fonts, Music Picture Fonts, and Band Fonts.

How do I add music symbols to my Word document?

Ask Owen blogs on How do I add music symbols to my Word document?.

Musical sharps, flats, and naturals not in the font you’re using? This post covers the Unicode method to insert those symbols anyway. Nice trick for writing about music!

Simplify Media – Connect Your Music

Simplify Media is freeware which lets you play your music in iTunes, Front Row, Winamp, Windows Media Player 11, or Linux’s Rhythmbox.

It’s file streaming software for Windows/Mac/Linux systems as well as iPhone/iPod Touch.

MyCast your digital media with Orb

MyCast your digital media with Orb 2.0 remote pc access software.

“Orb provides the ability to “MyCast”. MyCasting gives the user instant access to photos, music, videos, live television, and other digital content on their home PC at anytime and from any internet-connected device, such as a mobile phone, PDA or laptop. MyCasting is media anywhere.”

Freeware. Windows Vista, Windows XP (Home or Professional) with Service Pack 2, or Windows XP Media Center Edition (2004 or 2005), Wii, PS3 and Xbox.

Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better

Lifehacker has a post on how Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better.

Songbird is the younger sister application to Firefox and Thunderbird and other Mozilla freeware, and it handles the media playing.

These add-ons pump up the functionality of Songbird.

Kantaris: Unique Media Player Based on VLC

The How-to Geek has a post on Kantaris, “a Unique Media Player Based on VLC”.

Kantaris combines “the plays-anything aspect of VLC with the pleasant interface of Windows Media Player”.

Media Player Classic

Media Player Classic is available fromCNet Download (a safe source) and it’s freeware.

If your Windows Media Player refuses to handle DVDs and other video or audio formats, this is a good alternative that’s easy to install and use.

“Media Player Classic is the perfect substitute for Windows Media Player. Aestetically is identical to version 6.4 and has the same lightness in terms of RAM occupation, but it has much more usefull functions. Features: with ‘right’ and ‘left’ keys it’s possible to go forward/backward of one single frame; with ‘Ctrl + right’/'left’ it’s possible to skip one predefinite quantity of frames; with ‘Ctrl + up’ it’s possible to change faster the speed of reproduction; it’s possible to visualize with media player Quicktime and RealMedia movies (but that programs must be installed); in full screen modality it’s possible to show a scroll bar putting the mouse in the lower portion of the screen; in full screen it’s possible to do the redimension images and adopt a cinema format or a TV format; it work as a DVD player too; keys are completely customizable; it can show subtitles.

CNET Editor’s Note: Some anti-virus software flag this product as a potential threat. We have re-tested it and based on our process believe it’s clean.”

Screamer Radio

[updated 2009.7.2]
Screamer Radio “is a freeware Internet Radio player for Microsoft Windows.”

• It’s easy to use
• It’s not bloated
• It’s ad free
• It has no spyware
• It has a huge database of radio stations
• It has a cool peak meter
• You can easily record what you’re listening to
• You can hide it in the system tray
• You can play back on multiple soundcards
• .. and it’s free!

Pick a radio station (now this is really impressive — I didn’t know most of these even existed!).  Tune in, turn on, and listen.

Note: some of these stations listed have broken links.  Keep trying and some of them will work.

Didn’t find the station you wanted on the furnished list?  Here’s a possible way to include it:

Open the File drop-down menu, select Manually Edit Favorites and look at the list of possible stations you’ve already selected.

The easiest method is to copy one of the entries to a new line, and then edit it to match.

Example: I found in my Favorites:

<Station title=”Mellesleg.FM – Soundtracks (192 kbps)” url=”http://www.mellesleg.fm/”>
<Source>http://195.228.254.168:8070/</Source>
</Station>

Note: the “Soundtracks” actually read something non-English (“Foado”), so I edited that first to something that meant more to linguistically-challenged me.

Now the lists didn’t include every station from Mellesleg, so I wanted to add others that looked interesting.

I copied the existing entry to the next section.  With Screamer open, I clicked on the link to that group of stations, and found another I liked, which wasn’t on the lists provided with Screamer.  When I clicked on the new station, I got the IP address for it shown (in Firefox) which was 195.228.254.168:8120, which differed from the first one only in the section after the colon:

<Station title=”Mellesleg.FM – Musicals (192 kbps)” url=”http://www.mellesleg.fm/”>
<Source>http://195.228.254.168:8120/</Source>
</Station>

So I edited the change, made it into “Musicals” and I had a new entry in my Favorites.  Saved the file, and used Screamer to change to the new Favorite channel.

The same principle applies to other channel addresses — especially if you already have another one from that station.  If not, see if you can get the IP address and work out your own custom link.

Windows Essentials Codec Pack for media

Windows Essentials Codec Pack is”one of the most comprehensive collection of Media Codecs, Filters, Splitters and other tools that will enable you to play 99% of all the movies, music and flash files you download off the internet. WECP also includes a set of powerful filters that can enhance the video quality as well as audio quality and it comes complete with an automatic update service that will keep your computer up-to-date with the latest software upgrades as soon as they become available.

WECP is clean and compact, it has no spyware / adware / or viruses, it’s easy to use and even easier to install / uninstall and it’s published under the GNU GPL open source license so it’s 100% free. But more importantly, it was especially designed to fix the many errors and software conflicts caused by other codec packs which routinely install obsolete or overlapping codecs, and it’s guaranteed to keep your to keep your computer up-to-date with the latest software upgrades.”

Vattoz: Music Search Engine

MakeUseOf has a post on Vattoz: Music Search Engine with a Playlist Support.

Vattoz “searches for songs based on artist name or the song name and displays the results in a clean interface where you have two options – play the song or add to playlist.

The playlist is a box which could be dragged and dropped anywhere on the web page and maintains the list of your favorite songs and plays them. The site uses cookies to remember your playlist. You can also share your playlist with friends.”

Amarok music player

Amarok is an open source freeware music player “for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface.”

It seems to be a head-on competitor for iTunes, without the commercial aspects, and integrates with web services, along with offering a number of powerful features.

Might be what you’re looking for in a music player.

Lifehacker’s Five Best Media Center Applications

Lifehacker’s poll on the Five Best Media Center Applications has the results in.

• XBMC (Windows/Mac/Linux/Xbox/Apple TV)

• Boxee (Mac OS X/Apple TV/Linux)

• Windows Media Center (Windows/Xbox 360)

• SageTV (Windows/Mac/Linux)

• MythTV (Linux)

… along with some info on capabilities.  Some of these are freeware; others allow free trials.

Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better

Lifehacker has a post on how Killer Add-ons Make Songbird So Much Better.  Songbird is an open source media player.

Like Firefox and other open source software, Songbird has the ability to accept some useful addons which greatly improve the ability of this player to handle music and video easily and conveniently.

iPod, QuickTime, and Windows Media playback, streaming players, extra info for what’s playing, and more.

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website is a Digital Inspiration post with practical instructions on how to handle RSS feeds, videos, audio, photos and slideshows, web albums, events from Google Calendar, very large photos, charts and graphs, animated gifs and screencasts, chat functions, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheet data, PDF files, Flash (SWF or FLV files), LinkedIn profile, Google Maps, another webpage, Windows Media or QuickTime movies, other fonts, and FriendFeed lifestreams.

Whew!

MP3DirectCut 2.10 edits MP3 files

MP3DirectCut 2.10 “is a small tool for frame based editing of MPEG Layers 3 and 2. You can remove parts, change the volume (on MP3 only), split files or copy regions to several new files. All without the need to decompress your MP3 into a PCM format. This saves work, encoding time and disk space. And there is no quality loss through any re-compressions. mp3DirectCut is very fast and gives you extensive control over your MP3s: Several prelisten functions, MP3 visualisation and VU meter, Easy navigation, Fading, and volume setting. Version 2.10 includes adjustable overlap time for split save, VBR improvements and Cue sheet compatibility.”

Windows. Freeware.

TagScanner for your music files

TagScanner 5.0.525 “is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection. It can edit tags of mostly state-of-the-art audio formats, rename files based on the tag information, generate tag information from filenames, and perform any transformations of the text from tags and filenames. Also you may get album info via online databases like freedb or Amazon. Supports ID3v1, ID3v2, Vorbis comments, APEv2, WindowsMedia and MP4(iTunes) tags. Powerful TAG editor with batch functions and special features. Playlist maker with ability to export playlists to HTML or Excel. Easy-to-use interface. Built-in player. Version 5.0.525 includes support for online databases like Discogs or Amazon.”

MEDIAPORTAL is a free media center

MEDIAPORTAL is an open source program to do much of what Windows Media software does on the “ultimate” version of Windows.

“MediaPortal turns your PC / TV into a very advanced MediaCenter / HTPC. [Home Theater PC]  Our software allows you to listen to your favorite music & radio, watch and store your videos and DVDs, view, schedule and record live TV as a digital video recorder and much much more. You get MediaPortal as Open Source software. This means you can help in developing MediaPortal or tweak it for your own needs with lots of innovating plugins from our great community. “

So if you’re worried that you missed out by not upgrading to that fancier Windows package, this may cover some of what you missed.

MP3Gain and easyMP3Gain raise the volume

Rolling along, listening to your music… and you hit that one really low-volume song you have, so you have to turn up the volume — and then hastily reduce it again for the next song.  Ever wonder if there’s a solution?

A search on SourceForge.net turned up MP3Gain, which raises the volume of MP3 files that turned out to be too low for your use.

Also here is easyMP3Gain, a front-end for MP3Gain, to make it even easier to use.

With both of these, you can raise the volume of those individual MP3s to something like that of everything else you have.

LMMS – Linux MultiMedia Studio

LMMS – Linux MultiMedia Studio is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.

Features

• Song-Editor for composing songs
• A Beat+Bassline-Editor for creating beats and basslines
• An easy-to-use Piano-Roll for editing patterns and melodies
• An FX mixer with 64 FX channels and arbitrary number of effects allow unlimited mixing possibilities
• Many powerful instrument and effect-plugins out of the box
• Full user-defined track-based automation and computer-controlled automation sources
• Compatible with many standards such as SoundFont2, VST(i), LADSPA, GUS Patches, and full MIDI support
• Import of MIDI and FLP (Fruityloops® Project) files