On paper, Tone Target sounds like a fine way to improve one’s musical ability. This iPhone app displays musical notes moving across the screen, along with a cross-hairs indicator that shows your pitch as you sing, whistle, or play an instrument. If you sing the right notes, the app scores that as a hit. If…
Step aside, Chuck Woolery! There’s a new matchmaker in town — actually, two. The latest round of Spotify apps — Tastebuds.fm and Fellody — offer to help people find romance through music. These are by no means the first apps to attempt to match lonely hearts based on their musical taste, which is as good…
If you were told to make an iPhone app that to capture the current zeitgeist, what would it look like? A gas price calculator, perhaps, or something like the Inhuman Microphone? Or how about an app that lets you make dubstep tracks from Tim Tebow’s voice –does that sound about right? We thought so. Enter…
Application Programming Interface, thy name be “awesome!” Excuse the geek-out, if you’re not up on your API ABC’s, but how else are we to react to the fact that Facebook just added a Listen button to its artist pages that lets you play songs from that artist just about instantly, by hooking in to each…
It’s tax day once again — that joyful, once-a-year occasion when liberal types like the author are asked quite literally to put our money where our mouths are, as folks on the other side of the aisle get to sit around telling us they told us so. We kid. We can still be friends, right? This…
Upon arriving at MusicGrid.me, users are greeted with, yes, a grid full of music. MusicGrid presents new releases by everyone from love-’em-or-hate-’em blog darlings Sleigh Bells (“Like a really evil ’80s R&B record” according to one reviewer) to those milquetoast purveyors of primetime soap soundtrack cheese, The Fray (“music you can comfortably shop with your…
Last year’s Music Hack Day Boston gave us Drinkify, a web app that went viral by suggesting the perfect cocktail to drink while listening to any musicians. For Johnny Cash: equal parts Jack Daniels and honey. For The Mummies: 6 oz. of Bud Light. For Gwar: 8 ounces of Beefeater gin, of course. This year, at Music Hack…
Earlier this month, the mixtape-ish music service Songza impressed us by launching free music stations that apply to specific situations, Music Concierge. Our favorite: the station that includes only instrumental music with no lyrics, because it’s easier to work listening to that than, say, word-heavy rap music. There’s a good reason that one of the…
You’re following the live blogs about Apple’s big press event today. You might even be following Gawker’s live blog of Gizmodo’s live blog. But what do you listen to, assuming you’re not tuned in to these chatterboxes (who have succeeded in restreaming illicit livestreams at Apple events in the past, but appear to be failing at…
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….
What if Spotify threw a weekend-long party for digital music hackers at a Manhattan ping pong club co-founded by Susan Sarandon? Your correspondent was too laid up with the flu to find out in person, but has pieced together some details. The winner of Spotify’s $10,000 grand prize for the best app to be created…
Just yesterday, we posted a widely-disseminated guide to zapping music from Android smartphones and tablets to Apple AirPlay devices. Why? Because Google has been slacking on its wireless Fling technology, leaving Apple to eat its wireless music lunch. As we put it yesterday, “Google should be worried. This is how people develop a taste for…
By now, you’ve probably heard about SOPA, PIPA, and the controversies surrounding these proposed, well-meaning legislations, which threaten the end-to-end nature of the internet in the name of copyright (if not, here’s what you need to know). Because you’re on the internet right now, you may have noticed that the English version of Wikipedia is totally blacked…
There will probably never be another MySpace, which once thoroughly owned the meeting place for artists and fans, before people moved on. However, Facebook has done a decent job of picking up MySpace’s pieces with its band pages, according to statistics assembled by RootMusic. That company, which makes an easy-to-use app called BandPage that artists…
We’ll keep this one short, because this news item is about, well, us. Evolver.fm staffers, engineers, and interns have been working on a music app directory behind the scenes for a while now. We quietly launched the first iteration of it just before Thanksgiving. We have plenty of powerful music-app-discovery features to be thankful for, which…
