901am

New Media News Every Morning

Death of CD Imminent, Apple Says

By 1 Comment

The death of the CD has been imminent since its inception back in 1985.  However that hasn’t stopped over 200 billion from being sold.  While the number seems to decline each year, thanks in part to the vast amount of music that is available in digital format, the medium is still rocking (weakly) on.

Apple is ready to take the compact disc to the brink, offering a new application later this month that promises to deliver many of the features CDs offer that the digital medium does not.  Among them, lyrics, images, artwork and other extras.

Some reports are saying that the first album to drop with the new digital features will be Snow Patrol’s forthcoming A Hundred Million Suns.  Expect future iTunes albums to get the features over time.

Up until this point Apple has been super protective of individual’s music libraries, not permitting third-party developers from accessing content.  Will this new app change all of  that?  Stay tuned!

Originally posted on September 1, 2008 @ 9:32 pm

DoubleTwist Wants to be the iTunes for Android

By

When I got my Google Nexus One, one of the features that I missed which the iPhone gave me was the iTunes media management interface. Nothing beats the iPhone and iTunes interface when it comes to managing your phone’s media files as well as synching your iPhone to your Mac or PC.  Yes, the Nexus One comes with a USB cable that you can use or the Bluetooth feature but these are so 1990s if you have used, assimilated and embraced the iTunes life.

Enter DoubleTwist, a new media management software which aims to “create a unifying media platform that connects consumers with all their media and all their devices, regardless of whether they are online or offline.” It is very similar to iTunes but works with any devices. It lets you drag and drop songs to playlist, sync music, photos and videos to your devices as well as share your media with friends.

Although it was not designed specifically for Android phones, such as the Google Nexus One, DoubleTwist recently partnered with T-Mobile which could very well make it as the Nexus One’s closest choice for managing their media files and for synching their phone to their Mac or PC.

T-Mobile is set to promote DoubleTwist on all their retail stores as well on their online site. But the biggest break for DoubleTwist is the fact that it will soon be preloaded on some Android devices that T-Mobile is going to release.

I’ve downloaded DoubleTwist on my Mac and currently installing it. Will check it out to see how good it fares up with iTunes. If you want to give it a try, you may download if from here.

Originally posted on January 25, 2010 @ 5:28 pm

Apple approves 100,000th app, and then some

By

The road to application approval hasn’t always been smooth, with apps approved and then pulled, or outright banned on rather shaky grounds, but that hasn’t stopped Apple powering to 100,000 approved apps in the iTunes App Store.

The web site Appshopper.com has counted 102,485 approved applications and 93,659 available.

That’s a mind-boggling number, and unfortunately says nothing about the quality of those applications. Bear in mind that there are many variations on the same theme, and some (a lot) of them are complete and utter rubbish. [Read more…]

Originally posted on October 30, 2009 @ 11:01 am