music

Shazam Entertainment today announced the availability of a paid version of their wildly successful Shazam application. For those who don't know, Shazam allows you to identify music as its playing using your iPhone or iPod touch's microphone. Shazam Encore [App Store, $4.99] includes several enhancements over the free version such as improved tagging speed, music recommendations, and search. One very cool new feature is the ability to see the top tracks being identified by Shazam.

The company also notes that they will continue to support the original free version of Shazam [App Store], although it will be limited to five tags per month. Current users of the free version will not have a limit.

Last month Real Networks announced that their Rhapsody music streaming service would be coming to the iPhone in the form of an iPhone app. Today the company has announced that the app is now available in the App Store [App Store, Free].

Rhapsody subscribers can download the app and immediately start enjoying their subscription on their iPhones. If you're not already a subscriber, you can sign up for a 7-day free trial, which includes full access to the service.

One of my personal favorite bands, The 88 [iTunes Store], recently recorded an entire single using nothing but an iPhone and their instruments. The app they used is called FourTrack [our review] and the song is called "Love Is the Thing" [iTunes]. We could honestly go on and on about how cool it is that they published a song recorded entirely on the iPhone to iTunes, but it may be more succinctly explained in the video below. Enjoy!

Simplify Media has released Simplify Music 2.0 to the App Store today. Simplify Music lets you stream non-DRM music from your iTunes library on your desktop to your iPhone or iPod touch over Wi-Fi, Edge or 3G (respectively), as well as music from libraries of up to 30 friends. The new version adds search features, favorites, playlists, and a "scrub bar". Video after the break.

Not long after it's unveiling at CES for the Blackberry, Slacker Radio has been released in the US App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app offers both personalized internet radio stations based on similar concepts to Pandora Radio, and pre-programmed stations.

Pandora is a great application that can complement your musical tastes with its music rating system, and the application received an update today. Pandora 2.0 [iTunes] adds a myriad of new features including CoverFlow to browse music history.

American Idol winner David Cook is releasing his latest single "Light On" as part of a $1.99 iPhone app featuring a virtual lighter. Described as a "power ballad", the song starts to play when the lighter is flicked on. It uses the same controls in the iPhone's iPod app controls popup. Those of you not interested in buying yet another lighter app just for a song can get the track for $0.99 in the iTunes Music Store [link].
[via USA Today]

Apple is threatening to close down it's massively popular iTunes Music Store pending a ruling this Thursday by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. The National Music Publishers Association is demanding that Apple raise their rates from $0.09 per track to $0.15, a 66% increase. However, Apple refuses to raise the price for consumers, and rather than absorb the cost and operate at a loss, they would simply close the store down.

Rumor has it that Apple is getting ready to release a killer new iPhone app that will serve as an interactive album application, delivering lyrics, artwork, behind-the-music photos and other bonus content to supplement the lack of a physical CD. Little about the alleged app is known, but it is suspected to offer a new interface for the digital booklets that some albums come with in iTunes.

XM first announced that they were creating an official XM Radio client for the iPhone and iPod touch back in June, but little was heard from the company since then on an official app. More recently, however, information was leaked that GeeksToolBox is working on an app called StarPlayr as part of the StreamSmart project. It is suspected that it is in partnership with NiceMac because of their audio streaming Mac app by the same name.