First MP3.com's artist has reached the barrier of two million downloaded songs through MP3.com. Pianist Ernesto Cortazar, who has dominated MP3.com's classical charts, was that artist. He has also earned over $37,000 from MP3.com's "payback for playback" program.
InterVideo Inc. announced today that it will soon release software based DVD player/decoder for Linux operating system. Program, called as LinDVD, finally gives a legal solution for Linux users who want to watch their DVD movies with their operating systems.
Lack of Linux-based DVD software was one of the main reasons for people to develop programs like DeCSS that would decrypt DVDs' encryption code called CSS.
MP3.com announced that it has became a shareholder of PacketVideo Corporation, company that provides wireless solutions for audio and video providers.
This is a yet another step in MP3.com's MSP (Music Service Provider) strategy - wireless markets will be the next major growth in music business, many analysts say.
MyPlay announced today that it will provide virtual net harddrive for AOL users, specially for users of AOL's music services, WinAMP and Spinner.com.
With this deal, AOL can fight better against MP3.com's My.MP3.com service which already provides users a way to store their music into Internet.
Through MyPlay, users can access their "locker" that contains their music virtually anywhere. Users can also share the access for their lockers with other MyPlay users.
Emusic.com, world's biggest retailer of downloadable music, announced today that it has made an agreement to produce three co-branded services with AOL. Services will be ICQ, Winamp and Spinner.com -- sites will be enabled to get access to Emusic's over 90,000 downloadable tracks.
MP3.com and Tickets.com, world's leading concert, sports and arts ticketing company, announced their co-operation agreement today. Based on the agreement, MP3.com's artists can sell tickets to their events through Tickets.com and MP3.com can sell tickets to major events through its site.
As some of you propably already know, the multimedia operating system BeOS is released today as a free version. This nice-looking, multimedia feature-rich, fast operating system is meant specially for audio and video editing/producing, etc but of course you can do whatever you want with it. Very reasonable solution for people who get pimples when installing Linux (hate all the complicated stuff, hm?) and get frustrated when Windows crashed AGAIN.
BeOS v5 personal edition can be found from Be.com.
We will propably add bunch of Be software to AfterDawn later on this week..
Microsoft today announced Windows Media Player 7, company's hit into jukebox software markets. MP7 will be able to play regular audio formats (MP3, WMA, WAV, etc..), video formats (with various codec, about anything - MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, ASF, ...), streaming audio, streaming video, etc.. New additions are that finally Microsoft steps into audio encoding business in big way - MP7 is also CD ripper, audio encoder, multimedia manager and much more.
This is an obvious try to crush Real's dominant position in consumer multimedia markets. Interesting thing is to see how MusicMatch Jukebox will fit into this picture...
Anyway, product will be released to the public in next summer, so Real and co have a little bit time to plan their defense.
Creative started shipping its latest portable MP3 player, NOMAD II, to retailers and etailers today. The player doesn't offer anything very special new - just little things, but not the most important one - MEMORY.
Prices of the devices are about to set to $329 for 64MB version and to $229 for 32MB version. Player has reprogrammable firmware which makes it easy to upgrade if any new audio formats come to the market.
Major news agencies on the web are raported about this pretty-familiar-to-aD-users technology called "DivX ;-)" that is based on MPEG4 video and MP3 audio compression.
"DivX is what MP3 was to the music industry," said Wayne Chang, a Haverhill, Mass., student who manages the discussion boards for the Napster online music trading community, and who says he's begun to see the format catch on. "It's definitely going to stir up some trouble."
Some very naive comments mentioned in this Yahoo article, I might say... Check it out:
"It's never going to be as big as music," said Seamus McAteer, an analyst for Jupiter Communications. "It's a lot easier to (copy) music, to post it and to download it. It's not going to happen (with video) in the foreseeable future."
What can I say? Some of us remember the times when getting the freaking 2400bps SupraModem was the coolest thing ever. Now everybody who uses even a little bit more Internet than average citizen is at least considering to get xDSL connection. And with xDSL, downloading a full-length DivX ;-) movie it takes few hours with no cost. And even the major players, like AOL-Time Warner and Microsoft are pushing people to get faster and faster net connections..
National Record Mart Inc. announced that it has reached an agreement in principle to acquire MP3Board Inc. Based on web traffic, MP3Board is the second biggest MP3 site in the world that is mostly based on music offerings, getting appx. 980,000 unique users a month (MP3.com is the biggest with 4.1M unique users a month).
Former Beatle's, Paul McCartney's, publishing company MPL Communications Inc. has filed lawsuit against San Diego based MP3.com accusing that its service my.mp3.com violates company's copyrights to its artists' materials...
MP3.com is now facing big boys in many different courtrooms, I'm interested to see what happens..
Like reported earlier in this and last year, some major universities have banned usage of Napster because it takes too much of their bandwidth. Now Napster Inc. announced that it is currently working to solve the problem and is suggesting the following model; in future versions Napster would first try to find the files inside the campus network, secondly it would try to find the files from so called "Internet 2" which is faster Internet that many universities are already members of. As a last resort it would try to find the files from regular Internet.
A new program, or more like a hack, has been lreleased called Wrapster that uses Napster's existing server and query technology, but allows people to share also other files than MP3s. Napster which is internally limited to recognize only MP3 files, has huge amount of existing users, existing server network and other stuff that you would need to make it a global file sharing community. So, now also software and movie vendors are afraid, not just the RIAA...
Eiger Technology's Korean subsdiary EigerNet announced today that it got orders for its MP3 player, Eiger Man 2000, for worth of $35 million (Canadian dollars). Due contract reasons, they can't tell the companies behind the orders, but one of the two orderers is North American computer company and another one is Korean conglomerate.
MP3.com is getting a nice reputation as one of the most sued websites ever. Today The Harry Fox Agency sued MP3.com claiming that MP3.com's My.MP3.com service violates its copyrights and is seeking $150,000 from MP3.com.
AudioHighway.com announced that it has entered into marketing agreement with Yahoo! and RealNetworks to promote its websites that contain information such as MP3s, audiobooks, entertainment news and more. AudioHighway expects to get millions of new users from this partnership deal.
Flynote.com, FortuneCity's MP3 storage site, and EZCD.com, digital music retailer announced their partnership contract today that will allow EZCD's users to download tracks directly to their Flynote directories.
Digital Video Engineers have released new beta version of their MicroDVD Player. MicroDVD Player is designed for playing back MPEG4+MP3 formatted video with menu structures, multiple audio streams and subtitles.
Definitely worth checking out, if you think you can handle it ;-)
Get the software from MicroDVD's homepage
MP3.com announced today that it has invested in Voquette Inc., a company which developes personal web-based audio utilities and solutions. Also in the same time they have made an promotional agreement which guarantees Voquette's software to be marketed to MP3.com users.
Project that was widely reported yesterday - Nullsoft's competitor for Napster, called Gnutella - was shot down late yesterday by AOL. Nullsoft announced that project's website was taken down yesterday because the project was unauthorized by AOL, it was just Nullsoft's coders own project without a blessing from the mother company.
MusicMatch and Pine Technology USA annouced a partnership deal that provides award-winning MusicMatch Jukebox 5.0 software for purchasers of Pine's D'Music portable MP3 players and soundcards.
Nullsoft, a subsdiary of AOL-Time Warner and author behind WinAMP, is going to release a competing program for Napster, a tool that allows people to share and search MP3s around the Internet.
Unlike Napster, which model is to use centralized server that handles all the traffic, this new product dubbed as "Gnutella" makes small sharing communities insted of one huge network of users. This also will prevent blocking attempts against it - many U.S. universities have blocked access to Napster's servers from its students because of high traffic.
Nullsoft's product is planned to be released as open-source, but it still has bumps on its way -- AOL which recently bought Time Warner has its own interests in music business now and by publishing a product that would ease online music piracy, propably isn't in its main priorities...
Our MP3 search engine is currently changing into real MP3 meta search engine and we currently keep two separate versions online, since the new so called "version 2.0" is under developement and may cause problems while using it.
But in anyway, if you want to take a look at what we're working on currently, check out this URL:
*URL removed*
Epitonic.com announced today that its underground music is made available for Yahoo! Music and WindowsMedia.com. WindowsMedia.com is part of Microsoft's MSN network and Yahoo! Music is part of Yahoo!, world's biggest consumer portal. Music will be available mostly in WMA format, but also part of it is spread in MP3 format.
Gaming-Intelligence.com has revealed a couple of tricks for playing back region 1 DVDs on the Japanese Playstation 2 unit. The tricks don't always work, but if you're lucky enough to own one, you might as well give it a shot.
Read the tricks here
Napster Inc. is expected to collect more than $15 million in second-round funding from investors. Previously in last year Napster got over $2 million from investors like Excite founder Joe Kraus.
(full article here)
MPEGTV released PocketTV, world's first MPEG-1 video player for WinCE handheld computers. With MPEG-1 video compression you can fit 60min video with audio to bigger CompactFlash memory cards. PocketTV is freeware and can be downloaded from After Dawn.
Download PocketTV
MP3.com announced that their executive vice president, Tom Spiegel, has resigned from his job. Reason for his resignation is his will to focus on some other businesses. Mr. Spiegel was responsible for sales, partner marketing and the deals transactions group.
EMusic.com has introduced a technology enabling customers to download entire MP3 albums at once. There's no need to download the songs individually. When the customer purchases an album, the system automatically manages the downloading of multiple tracks. The album is still saved as individual MP3 tracks on the customer's hard disk drive.
iBeam Inc. announced today that they've made an agreement with America Online to offer streaming media for AOL's customers via AOL's network.
This is a major win for iBeam since AOL has HUGE customer base and as the usual opinion goes, the customers are very loyal for services AOL offers to them.
Yesterday government and dozen major broadcasters announced so called "iBlast" technology, which will offer high-speed connections for American houses wirelessly in beginning of 2001.
This network is based on digital TV technology which leaves bandwidth free for also other multimedia broadcasting, such as games, videos and music.
More about this from CNet
Our ISP made some maintenance work during night (starting 3AM EST and ending 10AM EST). This shut down our whole server for that period - we're sorry about the problems this may have caused.
-Petteri Pyyny / webmaster
EMusic.com, Internet's biggest music reseller, announced today that former Jethro Tull's frontman's Ian Anderson's new album "The Secret Language of Birds" will be available in MP3 format through EMusic.com for price $8.99. Album will contain also one track exclusively meant for MP3 format only.
EMusic.com
ArtistDirect is going to acquire MJuice.com - formal announcement is expected later on this week. Deal is worth of $15 million.
ArtistDirect is a website that has investments from all five major record labels and it offers over 30,000 tracks for download on its website. By this deal it would add a very important factor to its puzzle - secure method to download MP3s, method that MJuice has.
(article from yahoo)
MP3.com Inc. formed today a new business unit to focus of company's music service providing (MSP) businesses. Their strategy is to offer music and media providing services for other companies - there's a great demand for these services in Internet business nowadays, MP3.com told.
Just like an Internet service provider provides access to the Internet, a music service provider offers access to music," said Michael Robertson, chairman and chief executive officer of MP3.com. "For users this means accessing their music through many channels and from a variety of devices and locations, not just their desktop, and we need partners to make this a reality."
(article from internetnews)
Major software upgrade is here when MusicMatch released a new major version of their MusicMatch Jukebox, version 5.0. New in this release:
-CD burning
-visualization (sort of a plug-ins)
-auto update
-MP3 encoder is now nagfree even in demo version
-artist lyrics/discography/album covers/shopping links/etc (remember the news few weeks ago..)
-music matching feature (sounds awfully lot like Real's "find music that suits for your taste" feature)
Anyway, download it from After Dawn, so you don't have to add those annoying information sheets that they ask you to fill...
Seagram's Universal Music Group announced that they will start selling music online during this spring. This is another announcement from major label to start finally selling digital audio over the Internet -- big boys are finally realizing that MP3s and other digital formats wont change the audio industry - they have already changed it.
Cybertropix, very good MP3 resource site, and one of our affiliate sites, has changed it outlook a little bit - now they "tick" headlines from many different sources, so it works like a news center for MP3 people.
In other hand, this means that personal editing of the news is lacking and you get one opinion less now when jark has slowed down his own article writings.
Anyway, in the same time they started a service called NewsSeek.net which offers all kind of news headlines on one page from various sources (including business news, mp3 news and much more).
Cybertropix
NewsSeek.net
Sonic Solutions Inc. announced today its latest product, called DVDit! that allows people to stream DVD video over the Internet with all the DVD functions that are available in regular DVD movies (menus, etc).
Ok, hold your horses and don't order that OC12 / T-3 line yet. Software basically just reduces the video and audio quality in the level that is reasonable to broadcast over Internet. But the fancy thing is the ability to use DVD menus and other features..
Software is meant for educational purposes, such as having lectures over the Internet in standardized way. But as we have always found out, the pirates are normally the first ones to adopt new technologies (CD-R, MP3, VCD, SVCD, miniDVD, ....) - we'll see.
Semiconductor maker Cirrus Logic Inc. announced that it has developed a chip that is meant to prevent audio piracy - chip was developed in teamwork with Intertrust Inc., a security software maker.
Chip is meant for hardware based audio players that support various kind of formats, including MP3s. When people download media from ecommerce sites, the media file is encrypted for that user's audio player -- chip verifies that the encryption code is correct for the current audio device, if not it doesn't allow user to play the file.
Cirrus says that chip isn't limited for audio encryption, but other content can be encrypted with it as well, including graphics, movies, etc..
Microsoft announced yesterday that they have released Windows MediaPlayer for Windows CE. This means that owners of audio capable WinCE PDAs can now play MP3 and WMA files with their hand-held computers.
This is a major thing for those few manufacturers in WinCE software scene who have already published their MP3 players for WinCE - most of them are commercial. Who would buy MP3 player if you get it free with your operating system? Good old MS trick works still - remember Netscape...
Anyway, good news is that now people can choose from two different audio formats - Microsoft's own WMA format and de facto format, MP3.
The Windows Media Player is now available for download for Casio Cassiopeia E-100 and E-105, the Compaq Aero 1500 and 2100 Series and the HP Jornada 430SE.
Users can download the software for free from this url.
PTEK Holdings Inc. announced that they've invested $10 million in i2Go.com Inc., a company which has developed a system for delivering audio content from Internet to customers' MP3 devices.
(full coverage from yahoo)
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