Tag Archives | Digital Music

Slacker for iPhone Gets Caching

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2010 at 10:30 pm

Pandora may be the Web’s best-known personalized radio service, but it’s not the best one. That honor belongs to Slacker, which just upped its game by adding caching to its iPhone app. The new feature lets you download thousands of songs to your iPhone, listen to Slacker’s customized stations when you don’t have an Internet connection, or a reliable one, or you just want to conserve battery life. And as the Slacker folks are pointing out, it may prove especially appealing for folks who sign up for AT&T’s new, not-unlimited-anymore data plans–they can cache music over Wi-Fi, then listen without eating up any wireless data.

(When you tell Slacker to cache, it advises you to do so over 3G only if you’ve got an unlimited data plan–that alert will take on new meaning once there are iPhone users who don’t have unlimited data.)

Missing, at least for now, is the automated night-time caching feature that’s available on Slacker’s Android and BlackBerry versions. Maybe Slacker will add it once iPhone OS 4 is out and it can make the downloading happen in the background.

Dave Zatz liked this feature when he tried it a couple of weeks ago, and I do, too. It’s a point in favor of Slacker’s $4.99 a month Plus service; you can try it out for two weeks for free. After the jump, some screenshots.

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Lala: Now With Zombie Mode!

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 2, 2010 at 9:41 pm

When it comes to the closure of the spectacular Lala music service, I’m still working my way through the five stages of grief. For the first time since Lala went bye-bye at the end of last month, I idly launched its iPhone application. (The company never released it, but it gave me a prerelease version in November, less than a month before Apple snapped up Lala and chose not to release the iPhone app it had just acquired.)

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Lala Goes Bye-Bye

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 1, 2010 at 8:23 am

It’s June 1st, and it’s official: Apple has shuttered Lala, the wonderful music service which it bought back in December. Analyzing Apple’s motivations and predicting its actions is usually a horrible mistake, but I would think that the fact Lala went away a week before a Steve Jobs WWDC keynote is not a promising sign–if Apple was prepping to turn Lala into iTunes.com, wouldn’t it want to turn all those Lala subscribers into charter members of the new service rather than telling them their accounts are no more? I could, of course, be wrong–and I hope I am.

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Is iTunes in Trouble With the Feds?

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 26, 2010 at 1:23 pm

The New York Times’ Brad Stone is reporting that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating Apple’s tactics in the digital music market on antitrust grounds–a business in which Apple’s iTunes has 69 percent of the market and second-place Amazon.com has only eight percent.

The article doesn’t specify much in the way of alleged Apple misdeeds except for threatening to withdraw marketing support for songs if their publishers signed temporary exclusive deals with Amazon. Last time I checked, I wasn’t an antitrust lawyer–is that illegal?

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The Beatles on iTunes: No News is Bad News

Posted by Harry McCracken on May 18, 2010 at 12:10 am

When will the Beatles finally be available on iTunes, or anywhere else you can legally download music or stream it on demand? I’m beginning to think it’ll be when I’m 64–which gives the multiple parties involved in this saga until 2028 to get their respective acts together. Or at least this MG Siegler story at TechCrunch, covering recent comments by Sir Paul and EMI, provides no particular reason to expect any good news any time soon.

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May 31st: The Day the Lala Music Dies

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 30, 2010 at 9:53 am

Sad but in no way surprising: Apple is shutting down Lala, the excellent music service it bought last December. Lala has already stopped accepting new members; existing customers have access until the end of next month.

Unfortunately, Apple is continuing a long tradition of shuttered online services leaving customers who “bought” stuff at least partially in the lurch. It’s telling people who bought streaming Web songs that they’ll get an iTunes Store credit for the amount they spent “in appreciation of [their] support.”  But there’s no equivalent at the iTunes Store for Web songs, which played only online but only cost a dime apiece, so the credit is more akin to a discount. I hope nobody blew too much money on Web songs thinking that he or she was assembling a music collection of any permanence.

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Rhapsody's Offline Mode

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 26, 2010 at 3:32 am

Rhapsody’s new iPhone/iPod Touch version with offline listening is live in Apple’s App Store. I’ve been giving it a whirl, and the new features are pretty darn straightforward–and overall, they do a good job of filling in a major hole in the original iPhone edition of the music service. It’s the first music service for the iPhone that offers both streaming and downloading. (For U.S. users, at least–in Europe, Spotify has has both. And maybe Apple will see fit to unleash the wonderful unreleased LaLa app it now owns in some form someday.)

As before, whenever you’ve got a 3G or Wi-Fi connection you can search for albums and artists, pull up playlists (including ones you created on a PC or Mac), and stream an unlimited quantity of music from Rhapsody’s millions of tracks. But now your playlists have a Download button–tap it, and all the songs in that list get downloaded so you can listen to them when you don’t have an Internet connection (or have one that can be spotty, which is often the case when you’re driving).

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Rhapsody Gets Cheaper

Posted by Harry McCracken on April 6, 2010 at 10:10 am

When I write about the Rhapsody music service, I usually say nice things but express some caution about its pricing: $15 a month if you want to be able to listen on both computers and mobile devices. Well, the service just spun off from parent company RealNetworks, and its first big move as an independent entity is a major price cut. Rhapsody is now $9.99 a month for a plan that includes unlimited listening on computers and via an iPhone/iPod Touch (and presumably iPad) or Android device.

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