Grandpa’s CD player was an awful piece of technology by many estimations. Purists hated the idea of slicing precious analog sound waves into bits, on philosophical if not auditory grounds. Owners of cassettes and vinyl were justifiably bummed to have to buy everything all over again. And on the label side, that CDs didn’t include the copyright…
Apple makes iTunes. Android comes from Google. That doesn’t stop you from controlling iTunes using an Android phone or tablet, because iTunes is compatible with something called DACP, which you can use without knowing what it is. Once you run one of these apps, it’ll generate a four-digit code; enter that into iTunes once, and…
If you’re one of the 15 to 26 million people who use Spotify to listen to music on the regular, you’d probably appreciate being able to control it remotely from your iPhone, Android, or other device, so you don’t have to walk over to your computer, Android, or iPhone in order to skip a song,…
We’ve seen plenty of apps promise to allow musicians to play with each other in real time across the internet, as if they were in the same room. However, they generally didn’t work perfectly, due to the signal taking too long to traverse an internet already teeming with cat videos and Angelina Jolie’s right leg….
There are plenty of reasons not to buy Apple TV or Google TV, and some of them have to do with the people who hold many of the cards being perfectly happy with the way things are today. You can’t really cut the cord if you like television programming, as many of us do, which is…
Rock Band has been available for a number of mobile platforms for years, but it was always a solitary pursuit in which you’d battle your way to rock stardom on your lonesome. No more. Verizon’s 4G phones, rolling out later this year on the company’s 4G LTE wireless network, have fast enough connections to allow…
Your speakers are probably dumb, in the sense that a telephone was considered dumb compared to a smartphone. All most speakers do is turn electricity into sound, as they have for well over a hundred years now. While they’re the most important contributor to sound quality (along with headphones), they haven’t had any features at…
Like many people these days, I do almost all of my music listening with streaming services — on-demand subscriptions, online radio, random things shared on social networks, and my collections and playlists on various services. Even then, I occasionally need to listen to something on my home computer — friends’ recordings, interviews, MP3 albums I’ve…
Beats Music, released Tuesday, is the first of three big, new, different music services expected to launch this year. In our testing so far — on iPhone, Android and the web — we encountered a rough start: The iOS one forgot my profile over and over again, pages loaded without content, I had to delete…
Apple offers a remote control for its Mac computers, as well as a remote control app, but neither one can control the volume outside of Apple’s own software. Meanwhile, some Windows Media Center computers come with remote controls too, but they are similarly limited to Microsoft’s software. Since when did volume — something that we can…
The cassette player, compact disc, MP3 player, and today’s smartphones and tablets were all portable music evolutions. Newsflash: Humans are not always in motion. Sometimes — a great deal of the time — we are at home. And yet as a general population, we are all hackers and settlers-for-good-enough in this place where we spend most…
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Nobody buys a gaming console for music. Yes, modern consoles increasingly run all kinds of non-game apps — especially the entertainment kind — as the manufacturers of just about every type of consumer electronics aim to be the primary interface between people and their favorites 1s and…
An anonymous source cited by 9to5Mac claims that Google is working on a Google Watch, as rumored — a “fifth screen,” if you will, to complement the computer, television, smartphone, and tablet. The smart watch makes sense, from the consumer electronic industry’s perspective, if only for size reasons, which is one reason Samsung already has…
One of the most serious problems facing music fans in 2013 is that music is no longer truly portable, at least in the sense that matters now: between devices, locations, services, and apps. OnAir Player solves part of this problem in a powerful, elegant way. Simply put: It takes the music files on every Mac, Windows PC,…
Attention, Mac people who just bought or are about to receive a new iPhone. If your old iPhone is still fairly new, you don’t have any kids yammering for an iPod Touch (that you want to give them), and you have no other reason to keep it, you should probably sell it. Thanks in part…
