Top Webapps - Music

By Benjamin | April 30, 2008

There are lots of great audio related web apps and sites. Everything from blogtalkradio, eMusic, Finetune, iLike, Live365, and Pandora. But I wanted to highlight three excellent web apps and sites to you:

AmazonMP3 - Amazon’s MP3 store has had a banner year. The service sells DRM-free MP3s of entire musical albums, ripped at a very high bitrate and with digital copies of the cover art. The service offers over 2 million tracks that are available for sale individually or by the album. In order to download albums, users must install a small helper program that lets you download several tracks at the same time. It will also automatically take the tracks and add them to your iTunes and/or Windows Media Player libraries.

Because there’s no DRM, the files can be played on any portable media player, which has helped Amazon jump to within the top five music sellers worldwide. Also, starting in January, Amazon signed a deal with Sony BMG that gave the music store access to all four major record labels, bringing it up to spec with its competitor, Apple’s iTunes.

Last.FM - Last.fm is a music discovery and listening service owned by CBS Interactive. It’s got a wide range of tracks users can listen to and share with others. It also has a handy recommendation engine that will give you a list of artists it thinks you’ll like, based your personal favorites. Users can make their own playlists and even share them with friends using the service’s widget-making tool or Facebook application.

One of its more helpful services for music junkies is Scrobbling, which tracks the music you’re listening to on your computer and sends the information to Last.fm. From there, everyone can look at what you’ve been listening to, how often you’ve listened to it, and give it a go themselves. Users also can have their own blogs where they can write about and reference music they’re listening to, or just write about whatever they want.

In early 2008 Last.fm finally got licensed, full-length tracks to stream as part of a deal with all four of the major record labels. The tracks are supported by ads, although users are now also getting the added benefit of some of CBS’ 140-plus radio stations that shuffle up their catalogs.

Apple’s iTunes - iTunes is Apple’s software jukebox. It started out as a Mac-only app before making its way to Windows users in late 2003. The software will let you manage photos, videos, and music files on your computer, then sync them up with Apple’s array of portable media players.

People have mixed opinions of iTunes since it’s only been open to Apple branded devices like the iPod and iPhone instead of being open to many competing devices as a platform. Despite this, it was one of the first mainstream programs to offer Internet radio and CD-ripping free of charge in a time while other jukebox software providers were not.

One of the reasons it’s free is the inclusion of the iTunes Store, which lets users buy music, TV shows, audio books and movies, as well as subscribe and browse podcasts. This year, Apple unveiled the iTunes rental store, which forgoes the usual $10 purchase fees for films and lets users rent them for a limited period of time for about a third of the cost.