Best Free Music Player and Organizer

Introduction
This article compares audio software that enrich the music experience or enhance everyday listening, and provide impressive music centric features. The best MP3 and audio player ought to quench our passion for music, such as by inspiring us to rip or download music, organize our music libraries, learn more about our favorite artists or music, or just listen to music.
The reviews evaluate products on sound enhancements, usability and unique features, support for common and useful audio formats (MP3, WAV, FLAC, WMA, and others), performance, security and privacy.
Thanks to our faithful followers, who have been pitching their favorite players and organizers, we have a set of carefully considered selections. We have 26 listed music players and counting!
Latest article update: Added more quick links at the top (8-27). Current product reviews in the discussion section are from a previous editor (they are his "I" statements).

 

 

Discussion

Light Music Players and Organizers

The following had to have light resource efficiency while impressing us with music centric features. They were the best candidates to be our primary music player and organizer, satisfying avid audiophiles for daily listening. They aren't the best for managing music files (ripping, converting, tagging), but they often have unique advantages over bulkier programs depending on your tastes and needs.

 

Jaangle was not, when testing first began, my first choice as my favorite music player and organizer, but when the others having first impressions wore off and they started to show their weaknesses, Jaangle returned to completely capture my attention and the Jaangle icon is now a permanent resident on my toolbar.
As it comes, Jaangle's looks are superior with a lot of built-in options to customize it to your liking. Along with a number of colorization options to ease or dazzle your eyes, as well as the library viewing options you can basically create your own player. You can select which panes you want to see, their size and where you want to see them. There's also a mini-mode for those who prefer to have Jaangle heard, but not seen.
For those who don't feel like creating play lists, just play a song. If you do nothing, Jaangle's auto DJ mode which will randomly go through your .mp3 files. It's like a radio DJ who knows all of your favorite songs and plays them all the time. The library is where Jaangle separates itself from the competition. It displays small thumbnails of every album in your collection along with the artist's picture and bio that it automatically downloads from the internet. Should Jaangle be unable to find the artist you can also manually insert or change the photos and bios. Right clicking on a song will bring up an option to download its lyrics.
A note of mocking laughter rang out when I saw the three-band equalizer, but it is surprising effective, more so than many 18-band equalizers I've used. There also an adjustable cross fading control. Click them off and automatic digital signal processing takes over for optimum sound.
While you can edit tags manually in Jaangle, extended tags cannot be edited. Just like any of the reviewed players, proper tagging, before you load up the library, is essential to your sanity and can reap many rewards. Seemingly, insignificant differences in entries can wreak havoc. Example: having or not having the decimal point in .38 Special will cause these items to be listed on opposite ends of the library. This looks like another motivation for using a separate tag editor. (Psst! You didn't hear it here, but I use a program called, MP3Tag. You can find it at Best Free MP3 Tag Editor.)
And here's a first for ANY music player. You'll notice a little icon on the top toolbar called "Games." If you click on it, you'll be presented with a "Name That Tune" type trivia game based upon the music in your library.
With all its features, Jaangle is the personification of a music player & organizer.
http://www.techsupportalert.com/files/images/pc_freeware/multimedia/aimp...

AIMP is a cute little Russian import that should win the award for doing much more with a lot less. It offers many features for its diminutive installation size of 9.39MB, something I found hard to believe and kept checking the properties over and over.
That tiny size is a bit misleading because, like anything that seems to be too good to be true, it comes with a couple of small negative aspects. The size of the AIMP folder grows as you create play lists. AIMP does not use the standard .m3u file that many of us are so used to. If you created a number of play lists with another player, they are useless in AIMP. The player makes its own unique play lists (.plc) that it stores within its own borders, which means the more you use AIMP, the bigger its footprint becomes. The other problem is that the average .plc file is 3 to 4kb and your AIMP folder will grow by that much with every play list you create. By comparison, the equivalent size of a .M3U file for the aforementioned files is less than 1kb each. Still, as I said, it's a little problem. If you were to catalog 1000 average albums in AIMP it would only weigh about 40MB more…still less than some of the other players here.
There is something very nice that I noticed about the play list editor. It reads the folder the music files are coming from and uses that name for the play list itself. Since most of my mp3's are arranged in complete albums, in folders with the album's name and year it came out, my play list naming is cut to almost zero.
Despite its little shortcomings, AIMP is a very versatile and useful little player. It supports more than 20 audio formats and 32-bit digital audio. AIMP can also access Shoutcast and Icecast internet radio and allow you record what you hear. It has a 16-band graphic equalizer along with controls for speed, tempo, flanger, pitch, echo and reverb. It will play your CD's, but it cannot rip them, nor can it convert files from one format to another because, unfortunately, the ripper and converter parts of the software have been separated and the only download is located on a site with a rather dubious reputation.
I did have a little trouble finding out how to access the top-notch library. After checking all the buttons on the player, I found you could bring up the library through the Utilities button on top, in the left-hand corner (or simply hitting Ctrl-M.) It will not only show you your play lists, but give you more information than need to know like the name every song you ever played on the player and when you played. The Utilities button also accesses the tag editor. Clicking on the center portion of the player's main window will bring up the visualizations. Being old school, I really like the VU Meters.
The player is skinable and comes with six skins already installed. A simple Google search will reveal a plethora of additional skins online.
All things accounted for AIMP a sleek looking player that is all about the music.
I would recommend this to beginners.
A word of warning…as stated AIMP is Russian and readily available on Russian sites, but please do not download from any Russian site due to security and virus considerations. I have provided download links located in the U.S.

 

Full Music Managers

The following are the best for managing music files and creating complex music libraries or play lists. They don't have light resource efficiency (sometimes doubling the light players above on some resource measures), but on modern computers they could serve as primary music players.

 

MusicBee is a musical Swiss Army Knife and I can see why so many people like it. Where do we begin?
Let's start with music management. You can listen to your music and categorize your collection in an appropriate manner with help of the program's array of utilities to help edit and find tags. You have your music arranged by genre, artist and album in the three top panes while other small panes display the current play list, song details, artwork and lyrics and a search tool to quickly locate any specific artist or track. Another panel helps you access internet services such as Shoutcast, internet radio, podcasts and audio books. You can import music from your personal music folders as well as from your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries and sync with iPods and other MP3 players
The player itself has an impressive range of controls such as a 10-band equalizer with presets, along with a preamp, digital signal processing plug-ins, an AutoDJ and a volume analyzer to normalize your collection so that you never have to touch the volume control again.
The package also includes a CD ripper with secure CD ripping with AccurateRip verification and a file converter. MusicBee supports the following formats: MP3, OGG, WMA, AIFF, ALAC, APE, BWF, CDA, FLAC, M3U, MP4, PLS, TTA, WAV, TAK, SPX.
With all this functionality, I am surprised that I didn't find a CD burner lurking inside. I guess you can only pack so much into 40.6 MB.
MusicBee does require a bit of extra software in order to function. You'll need Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 and the file converter requires the Lame encoder (Lame isn't a MP3 Encoder) to function.

Foobar2000 (Windows only) is a bit of a special case: if you're an average Joe or Julie with no particular skills in handling computers, Foobar will seem rather bland. Its features will appear to be very simple and perhaps limited or lacking imagination and style. Depending on the origin and previous manager of your collection, it might even fail to read a lot of tags (though that's not Foobar's fault). The majority of its configuration will look like Chinese to you (given that you do not speak Chinese already ;) ).
However, the story becomes very different if you're an advanced user with perhaps some skill in programming or otherwise "understanding" computers. If you're looking for a very technical, serious, obedient and not-dumbed-down music player and are not afraid of spending some time on setting everything up, then you will love Foobar. Its features include

• small memory, disk and CPU footprint leading to very fast startup and reaction times;
• completely customizable interface (a panels system that you can rearrange as desired, custom colors and fonts, etc);
• easily created and instantly updated library;
• direct access to everything about every file (direct access to metadata tags in particular, even offering things such as stable batch manipulation of over 8000 files at once and automagic copying);
• built-in converter based on commandline encoders, just as customizable as everything else;
• and a plugin system on par with Firefox's.

The most powerful feature of Foobar comes by its own name: Title Formatting and the accompanying query syntax (think SQL queries). Basically, if you can think of something and you can turn it into a programming string, Foobar can do it for you.
Title Formatting is a scripting language centered around functions, return values and variables. Functions include maths, string and date manipulation, raw and semi-processed tag handling and control logic (if, then, else). You can specify the display value of each and every piece of the interface (and create new columns/fields as desired) by writing a simple programming string containing any of the functions mentioned. Processing tag fields is independent of the filetype and tag protocol (ID3, VorbisComment, etc), meaning you can write TF strings as if all your files were of the same type and format.
A very short and simple example of TF would be a string that displays a track's Composer or its Main Artist if the former is not specified: $if2(%composer%,[$meta_sep(artist,', ')]). Now take this example, and know that you can use similarly simple coding to have Foobar automatically

• create folder structures and move + rename the files accordingly;
• display any tag or combination of tags as desired;
• render a treeview of your collection where the branching logic is under your control;
• list specific tracks as if you were querying a database, either on-the-fly in the query box or persistently in autoplaylists;
• write scripts (for plugins such as Masstagger) that can automatically parse, clean and reform thousands of tags at once;
• etc. Your imagination is the limit.

Being a programmer and having a very serious attitude toward file handling and such, Foobar is the best music manager and player (if not software in general) I've ever used. Not only have I learned a great deal about the technical aspect of music and tag protocols, but I've also been able to make Foobar automatically do what would take me days of manual work in other players (Mediamonkey, Winamp, etc) to make my music march at the pace of my own, very strict tag rules, folder structure and display wishes. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who considers himself or herself a poweruser, such as Linuxers and programmers.
Foobar2K review by Faziri

 

MediaMonkey is on my "Nay" list, but I will review it because of its popularity.
Right from installation, my immediate impression of MediaMonkey is that it is not a monkey, at all, but a 1000 lb. gorilla. Just like another well-known media player that will remain nameless, it wants flex its muscles all over your computer and be your be all-do all media player. It instantaneously began searching my hard drives for media files, without my permission, while registering itself as the player of record making it necessary to go through my files and reset their associations so that all would be well once I uninstalled this beast. With all that off my chest, let's get on to the features as there are many.
First and most important MediaMonkey can organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a potent and insightful interface. It will rip and burn cd's. Its audio converter can convert MP3s, OGG, FLAC and WMA files into other formats. It will download and show album art. For those who want to play DJ for your church group or social organization, there is a Party Mode which lock down your media files while still allowing requests. Last of all, but most important some, is MediaMonkey's ability to synchronize with iPods and other MP3 players. There are more features, but they are too numerous to mention here.
While I shouldn't concern myself with the following, but believe I must bring it up for reasons which will become immediately apparent. There is Gold Edition with additional features available for $19.99 and $39.95 for a "Lifetime license for all future updates." In the computer world there is no such thing as "Lifetime." Does anyone remember music software known as MusicMatch? It's still around, but totally commercial payware. At Version 1.0 it was a fairly good program for its time and I purchased a "Lifetime license" for $39.95 for full program. Two years into the "Lifetime license," I began to have difficulty upgrading the software. The good folks at MusicMatch were very accommodating and issued new registration codes. A year later the company was sold and my continuing references to the fact that, "I wasn't dead yet." Fell on deaf ears. Despite the good intentions of the people at MediaMonkey, they cannot realistically, offer a "Lifetime license."
I have no idea how they managed to fit all this functionality into 34.2 MB, but as far as I'm concerned MediaMonkey is just bit too over the top and is far more than I or the average music fan needs and far more than the novice can handle. If I were a professional DJ, then all bets would be off.

 

A Note on Sound Quality

Occasionally I see claims that a particular piece of software has superior sound quality, and I too would want the player with the best sound quality (regardless of its features or lack thereof). Sometimes I've played individual products and thought “gosh that sounds crystal clear and rich”, but then found that the volume was maxed on the player's initial settings (and that other players sounded the same at their max volume settings).
It's difficult to rule out wishful thinking and inexact comparisons until you try out many players on your sound system to judge for yourself. I've opened music players side by side, gone through their settings to ensure equivalence, and found that it's seemingly impossible to detect sound quality differences on the sound equipment that came with my computer (Foobar's FAQs and forum posters make this argument as well).
However, Gizmo noted in some of the first comments on this article that sound enhancement plug-ins, such as ASIO, have a noticeable improvement in sound quality on expensive equipment. Note that your sound card must support higher output settings, or the settings could degrade sound quality. And if you maximize the settings on your sound card, then music players will use significantly higher system resources.

 

Note 2: Lightest Players

Here is a list of music players with the best average of three measures: CPU use, I/O bytes, and RAM. The overall test list included MP3, FLAC, and WAV files (using Process Explorer and Vista Ultimate to measure).

1. Cool Player
2. Evil Player
3. XMPlay
4. Winyl
5. VUPlayer
6. Winamp Lite
7. Trout
8. Foobar
9. AIMP
10. Jaangle
11. JetAudio
12. Spider

The lightest player above was measured as an MP3 player (and is included because no other product did better as an MP3 player).
Some micro players (that are light on RAM memory) didn't make the top 10 (they often have high CPU or I/O bit activity).
By the way, mini player modes and tray icon modes (that shrink or hide the visual size of a player's interface) don't decrease the consumption of system resources, but some players have graphics that subside when the player loses focus (resource hungry visualizations were disabled for this comparison).

 

Micro Music Players

There are also basic and further stripped down music players that either didn't make the cut for the main review or don't fit the review criteria. They are listed in order of impressiveness (for sound enhancements, usability and unique features, support for music formats, state of development, performance and security).

• Winamp Lite: I recommend the separate lite download (you have to scroll to the bottom of the download page) since the lite installer doesn't have the controversial OpenCandy, but it still has a pre-checked option to send off your usage stats. Privacy issues aside (just be sure to carefully inspect all the installation options), it plays an impressive number of audio formats for such a lightweight and resource efficient player, and mimics the wide array of options and feature richness of the full version. It lacks a library for organizing music (unless you already have the full version and use the 'Winamp classic' skin). Quick tip: save your eyes and use 'Double Size' from the options.
  Note from site:  "Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date"
  
• XMPlay: Has a wide range of sound enhancements (gapless output, 32 bit output, DSP and MOD settings), additional downloads (skins, visualizations, ASIO), and hidden capabilities (Internet streaming). It didn't support my primary music format (FLAC), but the site has many additional 'native input plug-ins' that expand XMPlay's compatibility. A minimal library sorts by various categories based on tag information (use control + A to select your folders and drag and drop them into the play list or queue or library).
  The negatives: a scattered interface (with many independent components) may not be to your taste, and the random play feature didn't work (random play only worked for me by manually right-clicking the play button each time, which I would only do to test whether it works). Developed by un4seen (known for the BASS audio library and MO3 audio format). Portable installation, very lite download.
  
• Spider Player: Solid 'middle weight' music manager and player. It uses the trustworthy BASS engine, has many impressive enhancements (32 bit output, DSP effects support, 9-band equalizer and many presets, cross fading) and music managing tools (CD ripper, converter). One of the most interesting capabilities is an auto lyrics down loader, which displays lyrics in a pane next to your play list (you can manually save lyrics to tags), and an Internet radio player and recorder. If only it came with a library organizer it could have been a contender. And I couldn't pretend that a 'favorites editor' was good enough since I ran into error messages with it. The Pro version is now free and unlocks many extra features (mentioned above).
  
• VUPlayer: Plays many audio formats and has a simple and user friendly interface (though some of the icons seem outdated). Comes with several sound enhancements (32 bit mixing, gapless playback, adjustable cross fade, 9-band graphic equalizer, and MOD/MIDI mixing) and other tools (converts files, grabs/rips CDs, retrieves freedb tags). In the forum some users report that it works in Windows 7. But it hasn't been updated since 2007 (it uses an old BASS library version) and has 1 moderately critical Secunia advisory (related to opening un-trusted play list files).
  
• Winyl: Refreshingly simple and lite BASS player that is well worth watching for future improvements. For now it has a few basic enhancements (32 bit processing, equalizer) and tools (tag editing). More interesting is the care that went into its design. The library comes with long lists of radio stations and a few 'smartlists'. The smartlists automatically display your most played or highest rated songs, and you can create additional smartlists. The 6 skins that come with it are diverse and useful to fit your taste. To further please music fans, Winyl needs to work on additional sound enhancements and play options (I'd also like a random play option or perhaps better play list access).
  

 

Cuts: The Other Players

Here are music managers and players that are impressive enough for a quick mention, but not quite enough to get featured in the review:

• Quintessential Media Player (qmp) had great potential, but testing was mired by equally great difficulty in finding a FLAC plug-in. Otherwise, it surprised me with a small download size, a thorough MusicID updater, and feature richness. Massively edits tags, renames files, and writes MusicID info to tags (or updates its library info from tags). It has flashy visualizations, three mode sizes, and automatic online radio lists.
  
• JetAudio: Surprisingly lightweight and efficient for such a feature rich, flashy, and capable music/media player. It has many features to help build and manage your media library. Rip, Convert, Record, and Burn all in one program. Use countless auto play lists (the most I've seen, but some are based on tags you must create) in its library, view a simple lyrics windows, get radio stations (many languages), browse to music stores and fan sites from within the player, and choose between several unique skins. However, I found its separate media center/main window setup confusing (the media center does not reduce to a mini player and I kept accidentally exiting the whole program). Other negatives: limited tag editing, no 32 bit output capability in the free version, and 1 'less critical' Secunia advisory (and four past advisories in a previous version).
  
• Songbird: An open source, refreshingly simple interface that highly integrates to Internet resources like a browser (integrating many Mozilla Firefox features). One advantage is the ability to expand and customize it through add-ons, but the underlying interface is still the most bulky and inefficient of all tested music players (nearly as heavy as Firefox and getting heavier all the time). But I keep going back to it, so maybe they have something for the future there. It's in constant development, with nightly Beta versions for testing. See its "Roadmap Wiki" for information on its ever growing list of new features.
  
• Winamp Full has privacy concerns and now includes the controversial OpenCandy in its installer. Read its privacy policy to see if you agree with its automated data collection of non-personal information (some of which you can only opt out of by hiding or not using certain features). Privacy concerns and nags aside, the program is popular and professional with excellent support for many music file formats, good integration with Internet resources, and top-notch library and music organizing features (it's somewhat incorporated as the media library in The KMPlayer).
  

 

Some of these have fans, but didn't impress me in comparison to other players in the review. The quick negatives beside each aren't comprehensive comments; visit the respective sites for plenty of positives. Listed alphabetically.

• 1by1. High I/O bit activity, limited support for music files.
• Billy. High I/O bit activity (esp. for WAV files), limited support for music files.
• Clementine. Stealthy association of files.
• Cool Player. Unpatched Secunia advisories (related to using un-trusted play lists and skins).
• Cool Player+. High memory use (near Media Monkey size).
• Evil Player. Simplistic interface, problems running in a standard account.
• iTunes. Ad-supported: promotes purchasing Internet products as an essential feature.
• J. River Media Jukebox. Ad-supported: promotes purchasing Internet products as an essential feature.
• Moo0 AudioPlayer. High CPU use, limited support for music files.
• QuuxPlayer. Poor interface design/usability.
• Trout. Problems with interface usability (slow loading of audio files, error messages).
• Xion. Problems with interface (CPU spikes, crashes), Secunia warning (un-trusted play lists).
  
  Source: http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-music-players-and-organizers.htm

Google launches free music streaming ahead of Apple Music debut

The company's great, human-curated playlists are now free (with ads)

As Apple Music nears its June 30th launch, Google is getting more aggressive about trying to sell users on its own Google Play Music service. Today the company is launching a free, ad-supported tier that offers curated playlists (a la Songza) designed to accompany every moment of your day. The handpicked stations themselves aren't new; Google brought them to Play Music's paying subscribers last year after its acquisition of Songza. But now everyone in the US can listen; the curated playlists are available today on the web and Android, with an update for iOS also due very soon.Google is another big fan of human curation

For Google, sticking with playlists was an easier approach to free music than the on-demand, ad-sponsored tier that Spotify offers. The free half of Spotify's service has been the subject of harsh criticism from musicians who feel the company underpays artists. Google seems confident it can avoid this by going the "music radio" route, and its existing licensing agreements guarantee a big selection at launch. If you can already stream a band's music with Google's subscription music service, all of those same tracks will be part of the now-free radio side. (Yes, that includes Taylor Swift's back catalog.)

A hipster-friendly example of Google Play Music's curated playlists. The difference between this and Spotify is that with Google you never have control over exactly what songs are playing. Google Play Music product manager Elias Roman seems to think that many people won't mind, since he believes most consumers are after an effortless "lean back" experience. "They want the music to be awesome. They want it to be contextually relevant, but they don’t want to tweak a lot of knobs," he told The Verge. The company's team of music experts has assembled every curated playlist from top to bottom. Here, Google shares the same "humans over algorithms" philosophy that Jimmy Iovine and Apple Music have been pushing. Whenever you pick a mood, genre, decade, or activity-based playlist, you can be confident that an actual person programmed what you're hearing. But Google does lean on algorithms for some things. If you start a new radio station based on a particular artist or song, that's when everything gets handed off a computer.
Free users get ads, limited skips, and no offline playback

As you might expect, the free service loses out on several features that premium subscribers get — and also handcuffs you with some restrictions. Free users are limited to six skips per hour, a number that's become the industry standard in recent years. You can pause tracks, but there's no ability to rewind, scrub through songs, or even see what's coming up next. People who pay for Google Play Music have full control over playlists and can manipulate, edit, rename, and save them for offline playback. "You can make it your own," said Roman. Free listeners get none of those things; a playlist is much more like a radio station and you don't get to customize it. One nice perk is that even free tier users can listen to streams at up to 320kbps so long as you've got the data connection to support it.
Apple and Google are running the same playbook: streaming, cloud, and store

What Google is doing here isn't nearly as ambitious as Apple's second try at music radio; there are no live 24/7 broadcasts or renowned DJs introducing you to new artists. But people still use Songza for a reason; the playlists are pretty excellent. Google's app is much more polished and nicer to use, so if you don't mind ads, it could be a great soundtrack for the gym or work commute. And ultimately, Google hopes it will be enough to convince people to start paying. Subscribing lets you listen without interruptions, take playlists offline, or instantly start streaming any song in Google Play's catalog of 30 million tracks — the same number Apple and Spotify point to.

The company refuses to say how many subscribers it has, a hint that it's not faring nearly as well as Spotify. But when you add free streaming to Play Music's premium service, free cloud locker, and the regular MP3 store, Google's music ecosystem starts to look pretty compelling. Apple's running a very similar playbook, after all. Which will you choose?

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/23/8830629/google-play-music-free-streaming-now-available

Apple Music vs Google Play Music vs Spotify

Update: Apple Music goes live today

When Apple bought Beats Audio, the headphones weren’t the main event: Apple wanted Beats Music, the streaming music service. Beats is now the heart of Apple Music, Apple’s rival to Spotify and Google Play Music. How does it compare? Let’s find out in our Apple Music vs Google Music vs Spotify comparison and see if Google's curve ball of a free ad-supported streaming radio service mixes things up.

• How to set up the Google Play Music app
• Best music player apps for Android

Highlight recent changes

Apple Music goes live

Apple Music goes live on June 30 at 11 AM ET, alongside iOS 8.4. The first radio broadcast on Beats 1 will air an hour later at 12 PM ET. Beats 1 will be hosted by ex-BBC Radio 1 host Zane Lowe, who will kick things off in style with an interview with Eminem. Other first week interviews include Elton John and Pharrell Williams. Will you be tuned in?

Google Play Music free streaming radio goes live

Google announced its free, ad-supported streaming radio service as part of Google Play Music on June 23, one week ahead of the Apple Music launch. The service is now available in the US (on the web first and on iOS and Android by the end of June) and provides a bunch of curated radio stations.
The service makes use of the same content found in Google Play Music's paid subscription, but with the occasional ad, just like Spotify free. The only difference is you can't choose your music, you simply choose the station, just like you would on the radio.
If Apple music decides to offer a free streaming radio service we'll be sure to update this article to compare free versions of these services.

Hell froze over. Apple's bringing an app to Android. / © Apple

In the main part of this comparison we’re going to look at the paid-for versions of the services - mostly because we don't have three free versions yet. Spotify has a free tier that omits some key features and intersperses ads, while the free version of Google Play Music gives you access to streaming radio channels and your own uploads and purchases. Currently Apple Music only offers a paid service. Here we’re comparing the paid-for, unlimited streaming services of each company.

Apple Music vs Google Music vs Spotify: price

Three nines appear to be the magic number for streaming music: Spotify Premium is $9.99 per month, and Google Play Music All Access is also $9.99 per month. Spotify currently offers a 60-day free trial and Google currently offers 30 days. Apple Music is also $9.99, with the first three months free.
In an interesting move, Apple has made it possible for one account subscription to cover an entire family. $14.99 covers up to six people.

Apple promises its recommendations will be better than rivals' algorithm-based recommendations. / © Apple

Apple Music vs Google Music vs Spotify: availability

Both Google Play Music and Spotify are available worldwide, and you can get them on Android, iOS, on Macs and PCs and via a web-based interface too. Both services also have offline modes so you can download tracks for listening when you're in a no-internet zone.
We heard rumors that Apple would bring Apple Music to Android, and they turned out to be true - but not just yet: so far Apple Music is for Macs, iOS devices and PCs. It's going to be available in 100 countries from July. An Android version is coming in the Fall.

Beats 1 is a 24/7, global, live radio station for Apple Music users. / © Apple

Apple Music vs Google Music vs Spotify: catalog and quality

Both Spotify and Google boast catalogs with more than 30 million songs, streaming at a top-quality 320Kbps. Apple's iTunes reportedly holds 30 million songs streaming at 256kbps AAC, but through the Connect part of Apple Music you'll also be able to access content that isn't in iTunes yet.
Imagine an app that combines what you can buy in the shops with the works-in-progress that artists post to SoundCloud (and to Instagram, and to Facebook, and to...) and you'll get an idea of what the Connect part of iTunes is designed to do.

If it's in iTunes, or if it's headed there, you should be able to stream it. / © Apple

Apple Music vs Google Play vs Spotify: what's so special about it?

The sales pitch for Apple Music is that it's all about the people helping pick music you might like. As music business legend Jimmy Iovine yelled on stage at the Apple Music launch, "ALGORITHMS ALONE CAN'T DO THAT EMOTIONAL TASK", and in a video Trent Reznor laid out the pitch to artists: it's about a "sense of respect" for music as an art form, not just a bunch of bits being chucked down an internet tube.
We've been here before, of course, because that's what Beats Music was all about. But Beats didn't have Apple's massive competitive advantage, which is that its app will be on millions of iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs.
On phones, the exceptionally fast rate of new OS adoption means that most Apple customers will have access to Apple Music as soon as the iOS update appears in July. That sheer market clout could attract musicians in a way previous Apple efforts, such as its ill-fated social network for Music, Ping, didn't.

Apple Music vs Google Play vs Spotify: which one's best?

That depends on what you've got. Until the Fall, Apple music isn't relevant to Android users - but when that app drops, things are going to get interesting. Apple will have had several months to iron out any wrinkles, and it'll be clear by then whether Apple Music's Connect is something artists actually use or if it's destined for the same fate as Ping.
Right now we'd recommend Google for ease of use and Spotify for its pretty good playlists (and included ''curated'' radio stations), but come the Fall we could be singing a very different song.

	Apple Music	Google Play AA	Spotify Premium
Price	$9.99 per month $14.99 for up to 6 people 3 months free	$9.99 per month 1 month free	$9.99 per month 2 months free
Platform	iOS, Mac, PC Android in Fall 2015	Android, iOS, Mac/PC, Web	Android, iOS, Mac/PC, Web
Catalog	30 million	30 million	30 million
Bitrate	256 Kbps (AAC)	320 Kbps	320 Kbps
Offline access	tbc	Yes	Yes

Which paid service do you think is best? Do you think Apple with offer a free streaming service?

Source: https://www.androidpit.com/apple-music-vs-google-play-music-vs-spotify

Google to offer free version of Google Play Music-USA Today

SAN FRANCISCO — Google will offer a free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music two years after the debut of its paid subscription service.
The move comes as the streaming wars intensify with the imminent launch of Apple Music and the continued growth of Spotify.

The ad-supported version of Google Play Music is launching first in the USA. It will be available on the Web on Tuesday and on Android and iOS devices later this week.
"We want to attract even more users, give them a taste of the service and hope they subscribe over time," said Zahavah Levine, vice president of partnerships for Google Play.
Radio stations on the service are curated by music experts — including staffers from Songza — so users can browse stations by genre, mood, decade or activity or by artist, song or album.

A paid subscription gives consumers access to other features such as skipping ads, listening to music offline, creating playlists and perusing the library of 30 million songs. Subscribers also get early access to YouTube's subscription service.
Levine declined to say how many subscribers Google Play Music has. MIDiA Research analyst Mark Mulligan said Google is a "minor player" in the streaming market.
Google wants to be on every screen and on every device so online advertisers can target consumers wherever they are and no matter what they are doing. With more consumers streaming music on smartphones and tablets, Google is looking to keep people hooked on Google services and Android mobile devices.
"Free is what Google does best — they know how to build user engagement around free and monetize it with advertising better than anyone else," Mulligan said.

USA TODAY

Streaming music: To make money, you better be a superstar

The major music labels have complained that easy access to free music has kept people from paying for music streaming. So far, music aficionados, not mainstream consumers, are the ones paying for subscriptions, said Jan Dawson, chief analyst for Jackdaw Research.
The vast majority of Spotify users are not paid subscribers. Spotify offers a free ad-supported service as well as paid subscriptions.

"Spotify numbers show it's a small subset of users who feel this is something worth paying for," Dawson said.

Google's video service YouTube is the world's most popular streaming destination. Google is testing a subscription YouTube service that lets viewers skip ads while watching millions of videos for a monthly fee. But the Internet giant's main focus remains advertising "because it helps them drive user engagement which generates more data and thus more ad dollars," Mulligan said.

"I think Google will do a much better job of enticing passive music fans to the free offering than it will converting them to paid," he said.

The music industry is hoping that Apple's new service, Apple Music, set to launch on June 30, will entice hundreds of millions of iTunes customers to embrace the subscription model on the same devices on which they already download and listen to music.

USA TODAY

Can Apple get consumers to pay for digital music?

Apple, Google, Spotify and other players are in a race to capture the streaming market as the music industry makes the transition to consumption from ownership. Downloads generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2014, down 8.5% from the year before while streaming generated $1.87 billion last year and overtook CD sales for the first time, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Spotify has a big lead, having doubled its paying subscribers to 20 million over the past year. But the vast majority of its users — some 60 million — do not pay for the service.
Apple Music will offer a $10-a-month streaming subscription plan that includes a free Internet radio station and a media platform that will let artists upload songs, videos and other content. The service which has a song catalog of more than 30 million tracks offers a free introductory period but no permanent free tier. Apple's Internet radio offers stations curated by live DJs introducing consumers to new artists.

"We are very excited about the growth of streaming generally and we think there's room for all boats to rise here," Google's Levine said. "Streaming is growing so rapidly that we are all beneficiaries of this great new way of consuming music."
Dawson says it's unclear if Google's strategy of offering a free ad-supported version of the service will eventually net paying subscribers.
"It's not a gateway drug to a subscription service," Dawson said.

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/06/23/google-launching-free-ad-supported-version-of-google-play-music/29156687/

The Best Streaming Radio

Turning an online music service into a powerful automated DJ isn't easy. You can give an algorithm millions of songs and millions of data points, but it's still not going to have any style. So of all your options—including Google's new All Access—what's the streaming radio most worth your time? We found out.

A decade ago, when Pandora unleashed its service based on its Music Genome algorithm, it was impressive enough that something so simple even worked at all. You just punched in an artist or a song, and Pandora would populate a playlist of similar stuff, and send it to you over the Internet. Magic.

A lot's changed since then. Today's best online music services are way more powerful sound machines with slick interfaces, granular control over what you're listening to, and loads of additional features that open the door to a world of music you might never have otherwise discovered.

Let's talk about robotic taste...

Before diving into the more sophisticated features of each of the services, I did a little baseline test to see how well they could generate a simple, single-artist playlist. After using each service for a couple of hours so it got to know my taste a bit, I asked each service to make me a station based on the 70s/80s British punk band Wire and took note of the first 40 tracks played. Here's the breakdown of how many unique artists each station played. (Note: There are other online radio services, like upstart Songza, that don't offer generative playlists so we didn't include them.)

Slacker: 21

Pandora: 21

Spotify: 23

Rdio: 23

Last.fm: 27

Mog: 29

Google Play Music All Access: 29

iHeartRadio: 36

In short, there was a pretty broad discrepancy at even this simple task. That's not to say more was better, though; while the services that generated the least variety were noticeably repeating artists, stations with the most variety often felt random, and in the case of iHeartRadio, jarringly so. But they all basically got it done.

While Pandora's Music Genome was first, it wasn't a very hard system to replicate. In fact, most of these services are using the same core brains: iHeartRadio, Spotify, Rdio, and Mog all pull their original taste profiles from a company called the Echo Nest, which specializes in music metadata for exactly this type of application. At a certain point, the algorithm isn't worth re-engineering from the ground up. Last.fm and Slacker have homegrown versions. It's not clear whether Google built its own formula.

In other words, the best radio experiences aren't powered by the smartest algorithm—especially when the algorithms are all largely the same. A confluence of factors, including everything from integration with social networks to the design and overall usability of each service's unique features adds up to a total package that's more meaningful than simple numbers might suggest.

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8th place: iHeartRadio

 

 

Even after managing to belt out the most variety in our basic initial test, iHeartRadio came out at the bottom of all of the services because it does so little and doesn't do it especially well. After punching an artist into iHeartRadio's search bar and launching a station, you can fine-tune your station according to three settings—familiar, mixed, less familiar—which are self-explanatory. (For the test above we turned the variety up all the way whenever a service gave us the option.) Besides the old song/artist/genre radio, you can play about 70 generic curated radio stations. Oh, and the regular radio.

Really, iHeartRadio is a radio in the most traditional sense. The Clear Channel-owned company started out as a simple platform for listening to the huge conglomerate's terrestrial radio stations from your computer. And it's actually weirdly entertaining to listen to LA's KROQ all the way from New York...for about a second, until you remember that regular radio stations are terrible, which is why we turned to the Internet in the first place.

Monthly price: Free

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7th place: Pandora

The original gangster of Internet radio remains a very popular service, but it's showing its age. It's also noticeably less evolved than some of its counterparts. Beyond the basics, you can introduce variety to your mixes by adding additional artists to the calculation. Or you can mix everything together into a giant party shuffle.

Following the success of services like Spotify, Pandora has added some very basic social integration that lets you see what artist-based radio station your Facebook friends are listening to, which is very basic compared to other stuff out there.

If Pandora has a selling point it's simplicity, but you get the sense that it still harbors intense pretensions about the strength of its music genome. For example, look at this explanation it just gave me for why I was hearing a song:

mellow rock instrumentation, punk influences, extensive vamping, major key tonality and use of the wah pedal.

But as we learned before, there's nothing all that special about the algorithm. 

Monthly price: Free (ad-supported, 40-hours maximum on mobile), $4 unlimited, ad-free

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6th place: Last.fm

Last.fm's interface feels ancient, and in a lot of ways, the service is a relic of a time before technology was delivered in such precisely crafted products. Basically, if you're the type of person who wants to obsessively track every moment of what you listen to everywhere on the web, then this is the service for you. There are apps—both homegrown and third-party—that use Last.fm's API to pull data from what you're listening to and send it back to your listening history on the service. Your iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube history in a single place is a wonderfully nerdy thing. From there you can get RSS feeds—RSS!—of your favorite songs, or of your recently played songs. Or you can add new metadata tags to songs. Or you can write in a music journal. You get the point.

Still, all of that data makes Last.fm more of a recommendation engine than a polished way to listen to music. Using your data, it will serve up some choice stuff you've never heard of, as you dig around in the community, Last.fm opens itself up in the way a record collection used to. Luckily, because Last.fm's platform is open, you can take advantage of all of its good parts, and use it to improve other services with better user interfaces.

Monthly price: Free or $5 if you want to listen to music on the standalone desktop app.

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5th place: Mog

Mog is the on-demand streaming music service recently acquired by Beats Audio, and is full of nice touches that make it feel more sophisticated than it really is. And there's no better example of how design can make something fun than the service's 11-position HTML 5 slider that allows you to fine-tune your mix, from just a single artist to maximum variety. Man, that slider makes you feel like you're in control, even if that level of granularity doesn't actually have much of an effect in practice.

Besides the basic song/artist/genre method for starting points you can also browse what's trending on the service, or if you link Mog up with Facebook, you can see what your friends have been rocking out to also.

None of this is all that special, but the service is visually lush, and fun to browse around. Even if it's not presenting you with anything but someone else's metadata categories, it's fun to follow Mog's long lists of related artists and sub-sub genres. 

Monthly price: Free (ad-supported), $5 unlimited music on your computer, $10 unlimited music including mobile.

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4th Place: Slacker

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Its on-demand service notwithstanding, Slacker's focus has always been radio, and importantly, curated radio stations. This is real radio because it's assembled by real people rather than by an algorithm. Many of these stations are excellent. I've been a big fan of stations like Dive Bar Jukebox, which plays everything from contemporary cult hits to vintage soul. It provides the kind of variety you can't really get from a machine.

But trends being what they are, Slacker has had to evolve its generative playlist features to keep up with everyone else. A few months ago, Slacker launched a redesign centering around intensely fine control over what you're listening to. In other words, after you make an artist-based playlist, you can tweak the mix of music with six different sliders, which can be used to create some interesting blends.

Slacker's new UI is ambitious and it's very good-looking, but it's pretty confusing too. Everything is dynamic and some menu is always sliding out from somewhere. The whole thing needs some streamlining.

More importantly, though, Slacker has completely missed the potential of social—which it actually sees as one of its selling points to people who are embarrassed about their musical taste. No matter how powerful those curated stations are, there's no better indicator of what you're going to like than what your friends like.

Monthly price: Free ad-supported, $5 unlimited radio with mobile station caching, $10 unlimited radio and on-demand music.

 

3rd Place: Google Play All Access

 

Google's newly-launched subscription service makes being easy look, er, easy. As I noted in my hands-on impressions, it's minimal in all the right ways. It feels like a more powerful service than it is because the navigation is so easy. You hardly ever need to click more than twice to switch up what you're listening to.

Google Play Music All Access Hands-On: All You Want (Minus Friends)

Today at its I/O developer's conference, Google launched Google Play All Access, its… Read more

All of this, though, masks the fact that Google's radio offering is a very basic artist/album/song station generator. Subjectively, I think All Access made the best playlists of any of the services. And that's without any way to modify the variety of what you're listening to. Sobresaliente!

But when it comes to getting beyond your own taste—and the taste of Google's obviously excellent algorithm, All Access leaves you all alone. You're pretty much stuck with boring brain. You've got very little idea what anybody else is listening to because All Access only connects with Google+. Sorry, no Facebook, no standalone social network, no way to look at other people's playlists. All you get is the option of pushing a post with what you're listening to onto Google+. Lame.

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2nd Place: Spotify

 

Spotify just rolled out its new web-based UI, which goes a long way towards fixing the catastrophe of an interface it had before. Don't get me wrong, Spotify was probably the most-important on-demand pioneer, and along with Rdio, Spotify was amongst the first to show how important social integration could be.

The new interface erases the distinction between radio stations and playlists. Every time you make a playlist from Spotify's catalog, the it's added to your list of stations as well. Spotify has been listening very carefully to what people want, which is why the new look is centered around a flashy "Discover" page, which recommends artists, playlists, and other users based on your taste.

The problem with Spotify's Discover tab is that it can feel like a disorienting jumble of artist and song recommendations when you're just trying to pick something. There are some nice touches to the UI, but it's a little too much reading and thinking to be an easy way to jump off a listening session.

What's more, Spotify still hasn't managed to make social totally useful to listening to stuff. The new design conflates following your friends with following international music superstars. You can listen to your friends playlists. That's neat! But realistically, you don't want something your friends have curated—you want to know what they're listening to a lot. 

Monthly price: Free on-demand on your computer (ad-supported), $5 on-demand on your computer, $10 on-demand including mobile. 

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Bestmodo: Rdio

 

Rdio kills this test on the strength of is UI and social integration. Link Rdio up with Facebook, and it's impossible not to find new music from your friends, or even, to find new friends on Rdio with good taste in music. Who knew music discovery could get you laid?

And that's really important. Rdio takes a lot of the thinking out of generating a station. You can go the traditional song/artist/genre/trending routes we've been talking about all day, or it'll make you a station based on a playlist you've got as you can on Spotify. But Rdio's options keep going. How about a station based on your best friend's most-played albums? Or a station based on stuff that's trending in your network? You could create these stations yourself manually, but Rdio skips that step and just crunches the data to create the playlist for you. And remember, everybody is basically working with the same data.

Monthly price: $5 unlimited music streaming on your computer (including on-demand), $10 unlimited music including mobile.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-best-streaming-radio-486515844

Spotify Vs Rdio Vs iHeartRadio: The Best Music Streaming Services

Music on-demand

On-demand music streaming services are becoming increasingly popular these days. Vendors like Spotify, Rdio and iHeatRadio, are some of the best choices among music lovers, including the vast community of music teachers and students.

By signing up for their monthly subscription, you can practically enjoy the premium services they offer – from unlimited music streaming to offline audio playback and real-time music access across all your devices. Some of them even offer live broadcasts of featured radio stations across the globe.
However with so many features, it can be confusing to choose a vendor that covers all your music needs. 

In this post, we’ll give you an in-depth comparison of Spotify, Rdio and iHeartRadio in terms of features, price, user experience, and device compatibility.

Spotify

Photo courtesy of Titanas via Flickr Creative Commons

Spotify, boasting over 20 million tracks, claims that it has more than 24 million users worldwide, and is now available in 56 countries. Looking for a song in its search box will present you with the most popular and relevant track or album as the top result. It also allows you to filter your searches based on individual artists/bands, playlists, and albums.
An interesting inclusion to its streaming service is the “radio option” that plays the kind of music that is relevant to the genre of your chosen artist. In its browse section, you can search for thousands of tracks based on the following categories: top lists, new releases, mood, pop, party, workout, rock, chill, urban, club and many more.

The streaming services from Spotify can be enjoyed using a Web player, a dedicated Windows/Mac desktop program, or through its Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iOS applications. With a bit rate quality of up to 320kbps, the audio output of Spotify is superb.

Basic subscription is free, if you don’t mind ads in between tracks. This type of subscription is also limited to playing music on shuffle mode only. The premium service, which includes the ability to download up to 10,000 tracks for offline listening, is offered at $9.99 per month. However, your mobile capacity will still dictate the number of songs you can store offline.

Rdio

Photo courtesy of Masayoshi Sekimura via Flickr Creative Commons

Rdio is the younger rival of Spotify. It has a slightly smaller music library as compared to the former (20 million tracks). When it comes to user experience, it has a slight edge over its rival – it’s completely ad free.

One of its major selling points is its strong social networking integration with Last.fm, Twitter, and Facebook. As featured by Verizon, Rdio combines the usual music streaming options with a heavy dose of social networking. Within the app, it allows you to “search your Facebook, Twitter, and email contacts to share music  your friends and follow their selections.”

It also supports a wide-ranging Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Mac, and Windows PCs. When you use its desktop version, the program also has the ability to match your Windows Media Player and iTunes content to give you relevant track/album suggestions from its catalog.

However, Rdio is quite expensive at $9.99 a month, while bit rate audio playback of the streaming service is only 192kbps. Despite being ad-free, it still lacks some of the advanced search features included in Spotify such as ‘search songs by year and genre’.

iHeartRadio

Photo from iTunes

Unlike the first two we’ve mentioned, the iHeartRadio is a free radio-style streaming service that is available on a range of platforms: Android/iOS handsets, Kindle Fire, Windows 8, Mac, Windows Phone 8, and web browsers. In here, you can listen to over 15 million songs on its catalogue and stream radio from over 1,500 AM and FM Live radio stations across the globe. It also provides an intelligent search bar which allows you to look for your favorite music by typing the album title, track, and artist through its audio quality of 128 kbps.

Since it’s free, it’s expected that the ability to record your favourite songs for offline playing is not available. However, you are still allowed to create your custom radio station and playlist for easier access the next time you log into your account. Skips are also disabled. Upon searching for your choice of song, you’ll be presented with a playlist or custom radio station containing a minimum of five songs, including your preferred track. You’ll still have to wait before you’ll be able to listen to it. But the best thing about this service is that the custom radio stations and playlist are completely advertisement-free.

iHeartRadio is available in all regions of the United States and have extended their coverage to Australia and New Zealand since July 2013. As an extra benefit, the music streaming platform regularly hosts online concerts and music festivals with guest DJs and artists.

Conclusion

These are three of the best and most popular music streaming services on the market.

Based on features, Spotify is still the ideal choice for music enthusiasts. Apart from its multi-platform support and over 20 million+ songs in its catalogue, you also have an option for offline listening. Perfect for travellers, this on-demand music service features the widest coverage among 56 countries. Spotify also gives you to power to search for your favorite tracks individually, without requiring you to listen to the entire playlist.
For easier comparison, we have provided a table below.

We’d love to hear the opinions of our fellow teachers. Don’t forget to leave your comments and recommendations.

Source: http://timtopham.com/spotify-vs-rdio-vs-iheartradio-the-best-music-streaming-services-guest-post/

Some footnotes/updates:
-Pandora streams at 64 kbs for their free radio service
-The new Google Play Music radio streams at 320 kbs for their newly announced free radio service.

How To Add Files To Bootable ISO In Windows

Updated on Sep 15th, 2014

Earlier last week, we discussed about a fantastic online tool to generate and download unattend.xml file that we use while performing unattended or silent Windows 7/8/9 installation. The tool also lets you generate Config.xml file required to perform unattended Microsoft Office installation.
After generating and downloading the unattend.xml file, I had to add the XML file in the bootable Windows 7 ISO file and test the same using a virtual machine before writing about the handy tool.

As you likely know, editing a bootable Windows ISO isn’t a very straight-forward procedure if you don’t want to shell out a premium for paid applications. While there are dozens of free software around to create, burn and mount ISO files, a quick web search reveals that there is not even a single free program for Windows to edit bootable ISO files.
Those of you who want to add files to bootable Windows ISO files without purchasing a premium software can follow the given below instructions to edit your bootable ISO file. Since we don’t have a free program to directly edit the bootable ISO image file to add files, we need to first extract the ISO file, add files and then create a bootable ISO image again using a free application called ImgBurn.

Include files in bootable ISO image

Following are the steps that you need to follow in order to edit a bootable ISO to add files in Windows.
Step 1: If you haven’t installed a file archiving program, please visit this page to download 7-Zip (free) and install the same. If you’re using any other file compression tool such as WinRAR or WinZip, you don’t need to install 7-Zip.
Step 2: Navigate to the location where your bootable ISO file is located, right-click on it, click 7-Zip, click Extract files and then select a new folder in your preferred location to save contents of the ISO file. If you’re using WinRAR or WinZip, simply right-click on the ISO file to see Extract option.



Step 3: Once the contents of the ISO have been extracted, simply copy the file(s) that you would like to include in the ISO file.



Step 4: Now, we need to create a bootable ISO file out of those extracted files. In order to do so, we need to download and install another free program called ImgBurn.
Visit this page to download ImgBurn (free) and then run the setup file to install the same.
Step 5: Launch ImgBurn, click Create image file from files/folders option.



Step 6: Switch to the Advanced tab (see picture). Click on the Bootable Disc tab that appears when you click on the Advanced tab.



Step 7: Next, click on the small browse icon that appears next to the Source box and browse to the new folder containing the contents of your extracted ISO file plus the newly added files.
Once done, select a location to save the bootable ISO file that you’re going to build in a couple of minutes. To do so, simply click the browse icon next to the Destination box and then browse to the location where you want to save the ISO and then enter a name for the new ISO file.
Step 8: Under Bootable Disc tab, select the option labelled Make Image Bootable, select Emulation type as None (Custom), and then type 8 in the box next to Sectors To Load. If in case, you’re working on Vista ISO, please enter 4.



Step 9: Finally, click the small browse icon that appears next to Boot Image box and browse to the Boot folder located in the newly created folder where you have saved extracted ISO file contents. Select the file labelled etfsboot.com file and then click Open button.



Step 10: Click Build button to start the process of building your bootable ISO image file. Click Yes or OK when you see the following three dialog boxes to continue building the ISO file.





That’s it!

Source: http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-add-files-to-bootable-iso-in-windows/