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Posts Tagged ‘Music Library’

Daimler’s Smart Drive kit for iPhone gives you big buttons, a dent in your wallet

If you’re one of the trendy hipsters driving a Smart Fortwo, here’s another way of pimping up your ride: Daimler has announced a Q2 2010 launch for its Smart Drive kit for the iPhone. As pictured above, the kit consists of a cradle for handsfree communication plus charging, and an app that “combines all the features needed on the road” by the means of “extra-large buttons and extra-large letters.” You’ll get access to your usual music library (plus Internet radio), contacts, phone functions and map by Daimler (points-of-interest data from Microsoft Bing). There’s also the handy “Assist” feature that can automatically mark your parking location when undocked, and can provide GPS coordinates to the Smart hotline for roadside assistance. What’s more, Daimler’s currently working on a camera for this kit that can identify speed limit signs, and can then warn you if you’re speeding. Want it? You’ll need to fork out a dear €240 ($326) for the cradle (which may or may not be necessary), then a one-off €9.99 ($14) for the app, and finally the optional annual €49.99 ($68) for on-board European and US maps plus live traffic data. We’ll reconsider if the app can also start our car.

[Thanks, Jason]

Daimler’s Smart Drive kit for iPhone gives you big buttons, a dent in your wallet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 18:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sonos adds a portable music player with room filling sound

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Audio, Hardware, Multimedia, Music

Sonos, best known for wireless music systems that link to your iTunes library and internet services like Pandora, Rhapsody and Napster, is offering a one piece, 5 speaker system that can be placed in any room. It’s called the Zone Player S5 and it’s US $399 direct from Sonos or dealers around the country.

Sonos shipped me a review system to try for 30 days, and I thought the sound was great. I already had a mutli-room Sonos system so adding the new portable player was just a matter of plugging it into AC power and pressing two buttons on the S5.

If you don’t already have a Sonos system, you have to plug your unit into a router to connect to your music library and the internet. If that doesn’t work in your home layout, you can buy what Sonos calls a Zone Bridge (US $99) that plugs into your router and lets the S5 make a wireless connection. Once that basic pairing is made, you can add as many other Sonos music systems as you like, all connecting over a wireless mesh network.

The system sounds quite good, given the limits of the small desktop-friendly size (8.5 x 14.4 x 4.8 inches). There are 5 speakers, two tweeters, two 3″ mid-range drivers, and one 3.5″ woofer all driven by individual amplifiers. The woofer is a ducted port design and the rear port serves double duty as a carrying handle.

Continue reading Sonos adds a portable music player with room filling sound

TUAWSonos adds a portable music player with room filling sound originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s Almost Here: Exclusive Video Of Lala’s Upcoming iPhone App

Last March I wrote a preview post showing off Lala’s upcoming iPhone app, which gives users the ability to stream their entire music collection from the cloud, without having to worry about syncing their files. At the time Lala wasn’t ready to give a release date for the app, but our impression was that it was due out fairly soon. Obviously that wasn’t the case. But now we’ve gotten our hands on the latest version of Lala for the iPhone, which was just submitted to Apple for approval. And it’s safe to say that it was worth the wait.

For those that haven’t used Lala before, here’s a quick overview of the service: Lala revolves around the concept of the ‘web song’ — you’re allowed to listen to any song you want totally free exactly once. If you like it, you can then pay 10 cents for the right to stream it as many times as you’d like from then on. This means that you can ‘purchase’ and entire album for around a dollar. You can also use Lala’s Music Mover tool to upload your entire library of MP3s to the cloud free of charge. This is all built on top of a very slick interface, but so far it has come with one downside: because all of the songs are streamed, users didn’t have a way to access them when they weren’t at a computer. Lala’s iPhone app changes that.

The app will be familiar to anyone who has used the iPhone’s native iPod app. The big difference is that all of your songs are streamed from the cloud, so you don’t have to worry about syncing your songs. The app is also better for music discovery than the normal music app, because you don’t have to wait for songs to download — you can instantly add an album to your music library in one click. And it’s significantly cheaper.

Of course, streaming has its own problems. Normally if you’re disconnected from a streaming music service, your music goes dead. Fortunately the Lala app uses caching to store hundreds of songs from your library, which it has waiting in case your connection dies. Lala wouldn’t say exactly how many songs are saved, but they say that the app uses some intelligence to determine what gets cached (e.g. it will generally save songs you’ve most recently added to your library).

So what was the reason for the delay? Lala CEO Geoff Ralston says that “basically everything” had issues, from dealing with licensing from content owners to tweaking the app itself. Suffice to say, it works very well now, and is sure to be a hit among Lala users. It has good timing too: Lala just launched as one of the partners powering Google’s music search service, which is sure to drive a lot of traffic to the site.

Other music streaming apps coming for the iPhone include Spotify, though that isn’t out in the US.

Check out a video walkthrough of the app below.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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How to discover new and interesting music online

Everyone has faced this conundrum at one point or another: you’re sick and tired of the music in your library, but you can’t stand commercial radio. As a result, you haven’t been exposed to new music in quite a while. How do you find new things to listen to that you won’t hate? Or, even better, music that you might actually like?

Aside from the brute force approach—just listen to everything!—there are numerous ways to discover new music right at your fingertips that are a little more intuitive. Thanks to an explosion of online streaming services, you can often listen to a plethora of recommendations based on what you already like without even opening your wallet—at least until you’re ready to commit to downloading.

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