November 26, 2013

How to Turn Your Old Gadgets into Cash (So You Can Buy New Gadgets)





Whether you want to sell off your old smartphone to pay for the new one, add a little cash to your fun money pile, or to put the proceeds towards Christmas, we’re here to help. Read on as we outline the best ways to turn your old gear into money.
When it comes to turning your older gadgets into cash, there are three main venues to explore: trade-in programs, auction sites, and local sale. Each of these venues has distinct advantages and disadvantages which, after reviewing our breakdown of the venues below, you’ll need to balance against your own desire for speedy resolution, amount of cash, and degree of risk you’re willing to take.

Converting Gadgets Through Trade-Ins

When you want the money right now and you don’t want to have to wait for someone to actually purchase your device, trade-ins are the best option. Instead of listing your device on an auction site or haggling back and forth with a buyer on Craiglist, trade-in services allow you to simply say “You’ll give me X amount of money for my old iPod? Great. I’ll mail it in right now.”
That’s the huge upside to the trade-in system, assuming you describe the condition of your device accurately when submitting it for a trade-in (e.g. you don’t claim your cracked screen iPad is mint condition) it’s a frictionless process. They offer you the money for the gadget, you accept, you mail it to them, and you receive your payment for the gadget.
The downside to the trade-in system is pretty straight forward: the resellers you’re trading the gear into want to profit from the exchange so of course they’ll offer you less than the open market (eBay or Craiglist, for example) would bear. What could sell for $300 on eBay might only fetch $200-250 on the trade-in sites.
So what do the sites look like and what can you expect when you use them? We put the five biggest trade-in sites through the paces using four common last-generation gadgets many of our readers would potentially sell: an iPhone 4S (16GB/ATT), an iPad 3 (32GB/Wi-Fi only), a Samsung Galaxy SIII (16GB/ATT), and a Kindle Fire HD (7″/32GB/Wi-Fi only).
Here’s how we fared checking the trade-in values at the sites. Listed prices are for the previously mentioned items in like-new condition:

Gazelle
Gazelle specializes in Apple products (iPhones, iPads, iPods, as well as Apple computers) as well as smartphones and tablets from other major companies.
Trade-In  Breakdown:
iPhone 4S – $170
iPad 3 – $230
Galaxy SIII – $126
Fire HD – $49
Total Trade-in Value – $575
Shipping: Gazelle foots the bill for shipping on any item worth more than $1 (why you would pay to ship them an item worth less than a dollar is a mystery).
Local Trade-In: No.
How You Get Paid: Gazella will cut you a check (you’ll be waiting on the mail for this option), PayPal you the money (instant), or convert it into an Amazon Gift Card (also instant). It’s nice to have options; we definitely appreciate organizations using PayPal.


Amazon Trade-In
Amazon Trade-In is as diverse as you’d expect any Amazon offering to be. Although we only tried it out with the electronics we’re using for this roundup, you can trade in just about anything: books, DVDs, routers, video games–you name it.
Trade-In  Breakdown:
iPhone 4S – $200
iPad 3 – $241
Galaxy SIII – $140
Fire HD – $116
Total Trade-in Value – $697
Shipping: Free. If there’s anything Amazon has on lock down, it’s the shipping industry. You trade it in, they pay the shipping bill for you.
Local Trade-In: No.
How You Get Paid: If you expected anything buy Amazon gift cards at your payment, well, we don’t know what to tell you. You trade it to Amazon and, whether Amazon pays $10 or $1000 for your loot, you get it all back in the form of an Amazon gift card. In light of how many things you can by on Amazon and through the Amazon checkout system on participating web sites, it’s about as close as a gift card can get to cold hard cash.


Nextworth
NextWorth offers a more diverse spread of categories than Gazelle and includes not only smartphones, tablets, and laptops but also digital cameras (including DSLRs), video games, and game consoles.
Trade-In  Breakdown:
iPhone 4S – $135
iPad 3 – $217
Galaxy SIII – $140
Fire HD – $65
Total Trade-in Value – $557
Shipping: Free. There’s a pattern developing here. Clearly the trade-in shops know that most people will balk at spending $20 on shipping for their old gadgets.
Local Trade-In: Yes; NextWorth has partnered with over 1500 retail locations (most notably Target) so you can trade your gear in without the hassle of packing and shipping it.
How You Get Paid: You can collect your payment via PayPal, Target gift card, check, or with a NextWorth branded prepaid Discover card.


Best Buy Trade-In
Best Buy
Trade-In  Breakdown:
iPhone 4S – $99
iPad 3 – $220
Galaxy SIII – $126
Fire HD – $50
Total Trade-in Value – $557
Shipping: Free.
Local Trade-In: Yes; you can walk in to any participating Best Buy location (pretty much any major location, barring small holiday satellite stores) and they’ll assess your gear and either accept it or offer to recycle it.
How You Get Paid: You guessed Best Buy Gift Cards? You guessed right. Great for buying yourself or your loved ones more gadgets, not so great for paying the electric bill.

BuyMyTronics
BuyMyTronics, a subsidiary of GameStop, offers something that none of the other major trade-in shops offers: they’ll buy broken electronics. For example, you won’t get the like-new price of $191 for selling them an iPad 3 with a broken screen but they will offer you up to $60 for it. If you don’t want to deal with repair costs on older gear, it’s worth seeing if they’ll offer you anything at all for it.
They buy ebook readers, camcorders, GPS units, and a wide variety of electronics in addition to the typical smartphones and tablets. What’s strange about their offerings beyond the typical smartphone/tablet listing is that 90% of them are “recycle only”. Why they felt the need to make two dozen listings for different BlackBerry models just to tell us that it was old and they didn’t want to do anything but recycle it is rather puzzling.
Trade-In  Breakdown:
iPhone 4S – $149
iPad 3 – $191
Galaxy SIII – $138
Fire HD – $55
Total Trade-in Value – $533
Shipping: Free.
Local Trade-In: Yes; but the system is only partially deployed. All GameStop locations accept trade-ins for store credit when dealing with game consoles and video games (as they always have) but very few GameStop locations are fully equipped to accept the wide range of electronics you can trade in through the BuyMyTronics web site. Call ahead to see if your local GameSpot is participating.
How You Get Paid: Check (3-5 mailing time) or PayPal (instant).
With all these variables at play, you really have to weigh what is most important to you. If you want money to spend on Christmas gifts right now, taking advantage of the in-store systems offered by Best Buy and NextWorth make it worth losing a few bucks over a better offer from Amazon, for example. Regardless of the system you use, however, the real benefit of the trade-in system is that (whether you get a lot or a little) you’re going to get cash for your gear.

Auctioning and Listing Your Gadgets


If the upside of the trade-in sites is that you get your money quickly, the downside is that you definitely don’t get the market value for your gadgets. If you want to get top dollar for your gear, you’re going to have to take the harder route and sell it on an auction site (like eBay) or list it on moderated listing sites (like Swappa) or local listing sites (like Craigslist).
The upside of taking such an approach is that you can get top dollar. The downside is that getting top dollar is completely dependent on someone purchasing the product you’re trying to sell and, in the case of site like eBay, you lose some of the money to fees.
So how do auction sites and listings stack up? We compared the biggest auction site, eBay, against the biggest cellphone and gadget listing site Swappa. Because Craigslist doesn’t have any sort of historical price tracking feature and has more volatile prices, we can’t offer concrete numbers on how much or little money you’d make.

eBay Instant


eBay used to have a legitimate trade-in program like the ones we were just discussing, known as eBay Instant. They stopped the trade-ins in March of 2013, but they kept the Instant portal. Now, instead of allowing you to send your loot to eBay for sorting and a pay out, the Instant portal serves as a ridiculously fast way to list gadgets you want to sell as quickly as possible. If you’ve skipped using eBay in the past because you didn’t want to deal with the hassle of making a listing, you should really trying eBay Instant out. You search for your item, eBay tells you what the current average sale price for the item you’re trying to offload is, and you can click a single button to preview the listing (and another to immediately list it). We went from looking at iPhone 4S prices to creating an iPhone 4S listing in under 30 seconds.
You can always use the regular eBay interface, of course, but the eBay Instant interface was most like the trade in sites and offered similar convenience. Here’s what eBay suggested we’d likely get for our various listings:
Average Sale Prices: 
iPhone 4S – $260
iPad 3 – $362
Galaxy SIII – $280
Fire HD – $172
Total Sale Value – $1074
Now, those of you that have been keeping a running ledger as you’ve read along are likely saying “Over a thousand dollars! eBay is for me!’ You will definitely make more money on eBay, no doubt, but there are some additional expenses to consider. eBay takes 10% as a fee for most electronics sold (for both auction and buy-it-now format). That’s $107 right there. Let’s also assume we’re going to spend $5-10 packing and shipping each item. That’s $20-40 making sure that iPad and friends is securely packaged. So by conservative estimate we’ve burned up $127 worth of our profit right there and brought the average price down to $947. Never the less, assuming we can move all the product we’ve listed on eBay, we’ve still made around $250 more than our best trade-in option for the total sale.

Swappa
Swappa is site dedicated to buying and selling smartphones and tablets. You can’t sell your old Xbox 360 or Macbook Air here, but you can get eBay style efficiency without eBay’s listing fees. You are, however, still at the mercy of the market and if nobody is looking for what you’re selling you may not even make the $50 Amazon and the like was offering you. Swappa does do a nice job giving you the average sale price of the item you’re listing over the last few months. Here’s what we could expect to make off our loot:
Average Sale Prices: 
iPhone 4S – $240
iPad 3 – $283
Galaxy SIII – $231
Fire HD – $155
Total Sale Value – $909
You’ll still need to fork out for shipping the items you sell, but you won’t lose any money on listing/auction fees. Assuming you spent $20 shipping the gadgets we listed above, you’d walk away with around $890.

As we mentioned early on the in guide, you have to find the venue that provides the right balance of return for your effort and convenience. If you want the money right then to spent on a new iPad, driving to a nearby store for an in-store trade is as fast as it’s going to get. If you want maximum return for your money you can try your luck with a buy-it-now eBay auction and eat the auction fees in order to get potentially 50-100% more than the trade-in venues would offer. Regardless of how you move your old electronics, though, it’s still better to find yourself with cash in your pocket than a drawer full of rapidly depreciating last-gen gear.

Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/176204/how-to-turn-your-old-gadgets-into-cash-so-you-can-buy-new-gadgets/

November 21, 2013

How to save Internet Radio Stations in WMP

I've been comparing the various media players and still enjoy Windows Media Player. iTunes is a memory hog. Foobar is lightweight and does not play video. WMP does not take up much memory and has a lot of features. I listen to a lot of free Internet Radio and like to save my favorite stations in the playlists. Below is info on how to do this.




You can search for Radio Stations from the Seach Bar.




   
How to Add a Radio Station to Windows Media Player:

a. Click the Windows "Start" menu and click "Windows Media Player" to launch your media player.

b. Click the "Guide" tab located on the top to access the Windowsmedia.com Media Guide. Click the "Radio Tuner" link to launch the Radio Tuner.

c. Click the radio station name you want to add to Windows Media Player and click "Add to My Stations." Click the "Guide" button to return to the radio stations list.

d. Click the "Library" button as your radio station is playing if you want to add your radio station to a playlist. Click the "Now Playing List" and click "Save Playlist as." This launches the "Save as" dialog box.

e. Type a name for the radio station in the "File name" dialog box and click "Save." The playlist for your radio station is saved in the "My Playlists" folder.



 

You can also refer the following links for additional information:

Step 1:

Listen to radio in Windows Media Player:


   
Here is a YouTube video how to it:


November 3, 2013

14 Websites To Find Free Creative Commons Music

We’ve at MakeUseOf.com have introduced you to a variety of quality image sites where you can find Creative Commons images, but the Creative Commons license goes far beyond just images. Different types of content are licensed online using Creative Commons — videos, music, and even blog content. You’ll find plenty of it online to share, remix and use commercially. When it comes to Creative Commons music — there are certainly no shortage of websites with audio you can use for any occasion.

With Creative Commons licenses, you do have to be sure to take a careful look at the specific license which will show you exactly how you can use the content that has been provided for free. There’s no better place to learn about the various CC licenses than the official Creative Commons website.  


SoundCloud

SoundCloud


SoundCloud is a great resource for people looking to share their music, podcasts, and more, so it’s no surprise that you can find a lot of decent Creative Commons recorded sounds as well. There are a few ways you can find CC tracks on SoundCloud. The easiest way to find quality sounds is by going to the moderated Creative Commons group, which currently has over 3,000 clips. There are also some accounts that share tracks including we are cc and Crazy Language. To find out more about the service, check out our in-depth review of SoundCloud.  


JewelBeat

JewelBeat provides its users free-to-use music, which you can use in your online videos, ads, and more — the only requirement is crediting the site by adding a credit link to the website. You can also let them know, via Twitter or Facebook, where you used the music. There isn’t too much to choose from, and no way to search the site, but the complete lack of restrictions make it a good place to start if you’re looking for totally free music.


Jamendo

Jamendo


Jamendo boasts a library of over 400,000 tracks, but not all of them are licensed under Creative Commons, so when selecting music from this site, be sure to choose only the tracks that are available to use for free. While you can’t filter your search results to show only CC-licensed results, any tracks that aren’t free to use will have a ‘pro’ button next to them so they’re easy to spot. The license for the tracks are listed at the bottom of the page, so be sure to scroll down to the very bottom to check exactly how you can use the audio.


Audionautix

Audionautix


Audionautix features only music licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 unported license. That means you are free to share and remix the audio, and use it commercially. A nice feature that Audionautix brings to the table is allowing you to search for tracks not only by genre, but also by mood and tempo. This could make it much easier to stumble upon the perfect track for your work.


Free Music Archive

FMA


The Free Music Archive’s tagline is one that will appeal to anyone who’s been on the hunt for decent Creative Commons music — “It’s not just free music; it’s good music.” As you search for music, by genre or curator, you can open up each track or album to see what kind of license its creator has shared it under. Genres include spoken, international, rock, hip-hop, electronic, and more.


FreeSound

FreeSound


FreeSound allows its visitors to search music by tags. A huge tag cloud will give you a place to start if you’re not entirely sure what type of song you want to use. You’ll need to sign up for a free account to download audio files, and as always, be sure to take a look at the exact license listed on the track’s page so you know how you can use the audio.


Incompetech

Incompetech is a good place to find full-length Creative Commons tracks, and like Audionautix, you can search the library by genre or by mood (or feel as they call it). Music on this site is licensed under the Attribution 3.0 Unported license, meaning you are free to share, remix and use commercially, as long as you credit the site. If you’d rather not credit the site, Incompetech allows you to pay a nominal fee to do so.


CCMixter

CCmixter


Another major Creative Commons library that is not to be missed is CCMixter. The site is packed with music that is free to download, sample and share. As is the case with all sites, you should take a close look at the license on each clip so that you adhere to the license restrictions — particularly as far as using the music in any sort of commercial way. To find out more, check out our in-depth review of CCMixter.


Bumpfoot

Bumpfoot describes itself as ”a non-profit netlabel in Japan,” which releases full albums under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license — meaning you can share and remix their tracks, as long as you credit Bumpfoot and this is one site which explicitly states that you cannot use their tracks for commercial purposes. The tracks are mainly techno, house, ambient, and IDM. (A netlabel, for those of you who were wondering, is an online label).


Musopen

Musopen


In its own words, Musopen is a “non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. We provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.” If you’re looking for a piece of classical music for your project or video, they provide recordings, as well as the sheet music. You can browse by composer, performer, instrument, period, or form.


CCTrax

CCTrax


CCTrax allows you to search an entire Creative Commons library of music by genre. Genres listed on the site include electronica, dub, hip hop, house, jazz, piano, and modern classical. They also have a handy flowchart that breaks down the Creative Commons licenses so you can better understand what each individual license means and, if you want to share your music, which one is right for you. 


Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a place you can go to find a lot more than just free music, but one section of the site links to a bunch of netlabels, including Bumpfoot among many others.


iBeat

ibeat


iBeat offers free tracks which you can browse by genre — alternative,  urban, pop and more. In addition to browsing tracks by genre, you can also browse by instrument.




Audiofarm

AudioFarm


Finally, Audiofarm provides its visitors with Creative Commons tracks, and in addition to finding music of various genres, you can also download voice recordings, if that happens to be what you’re looking for. Voice recordings included on Audiofarm are voice acting, comedy, and news. This is another site where you need to check the license as not all content shared on Audiofarm is licensed under Creative Commons.

You can be sure that there are more music libraries out there. Can you think of any other sites to add to the list? Do you use Creative Commons in any creative way? Let us know in the comments.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/14-websites-to-find-free-creative-commons-music/



Honorable Mentions:


Noisetrade.com







Bandcamp.com