The Nokia N8-00 is a mystery device, unless we believe the rumors. However, Engadget has managed to pull some specifications out of thin air, err.. actually, from an obscure XML file.

The XML file suggests that N8-00 will be powered by Symbian^3 OS. It will feature a touchscreen (most probably capacitive) with a resolution of 360 x 640. As expected from any high-end phone, the N8-00 will include a PDF and MS Office documents viewer (Word, Excel and PowerPoint files). Supported connectivity options include GPRS, EGPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSDPA and WLAN.

Feel free to dig through the source XML file to get more information about the upcoming flagship device from Nokia.

The starting page of Stereomood has this well-acknowledged quote:

behind every song there’s always an emotion. we don’t know why but maybe that’s why we love music. [sic]

This is why music is music. There are no hard-bound rules regarding the kind of emotions it will trigger in our minds. From rock n’ roll to trance and from pop to hip-hop, every little nuance and melancholic harmonic plays little chords in our heads, leading us to places we have never been before, or guide us to our destination. Stereomood is for the adventurous listeners who would like to go places instead of the same old songs on and on again. It is part music discovery and part radio and will be loved by anyone who is not in the mood to listen to their favorite bands, but instead is in the mood to listen to songs that resonate with their emotions.

All of the songs in the database are user-submitted/uploaded and registering for an account on this website allows you to maintain your library of favorite songs and upload your own songs.

The player is artsy and simple, with the requisite play/pause, stop, next, previous buttons, a seeker and a one-click option to submit this song to half a dozen websites. You also have the option of buying this song from iTunes or Amazon as well as tag it, add it to the library, send it via mail to a friend and shuffle the tracks (of course).

In all, this is a very very simple website simply existing for the sake of letting people hear great music. I’ve recommended this site to quite a few of my friends, and for all of you music-lovers who want great new music and do not want to pay for the $3/month subscription of last.fm, this is a great (albeit in less quanitity) alternative!

There are websites to search for music videos, websites to search for lyrics and even websites to search for MP3s. However, there are very few websites that allow you to search for all of these.

Museeca is a search engine solely dedicated to music. You can use Museeca to find MP3,music videos, Ringtones, Lyrics and even guitar tabs. The underlying search engine is Google so the results are pretty fast and accurate. For example, searching for an Mp3 of Fireflies would display a number of MP3 sites where you can listen to and download the song.

You can search for a song by artist, song or album name. While searching for a ringtone, you can narrow your search down to MP3 Ringtones, iPhone Ringtones or Polyphonic Ringtones.

Want to see which chords were used in a particular song? Another unique option that Museeca offers is to search for Guitar tabs. It searches popular guitar sites including Ultimate-Guitar and GuitarTab.

Techie-Buzz Verdict:

Museeca is an excellent resource to search for music and music related information. When you enter a query in Museeca, it searches Google for you but filters out all the noise and only gives you the results containing actual media.

Rating: 4/5

Music is one of the most soothing hobbies I have had for a very long time. I make it a point to always carry some form of music player or radio player with me whenever I travel. Most portable devices make it easy to listen to radio while on the go, however listening to radio on the desktop can be a bit difficult.

Of course there are several websites where you can listen to internet radio online, however, having a desktop tool would be good too.

AirFM is a Adobe Air based application which will allow you to listen to internet radio stations on your desktop. You can choose from a list of pre-defined radio stations and play any of them for free.

You can also add the radio stations to your favorite list and access them easily. You can also skip songs and play the next in queue by using the control buttons.

Techie Buzz Verdict

AirFM is a excellent lightweight internet radio player with a minimal interface. There are more than 200+ stations to choose from, however, the developer claims that users can add their own stations, but I did not find an option to do that.

It would be even more better, if the option to add custom radio stations would be available to users.

Ratings: 3/5 (Good)

Download AirFM

If you were looking for a good program to stream your music files online then we have something exiting for all of you. Now you can create your own music station and stream your MP3 files online with the help of Vibe Streamer. Vibe Streamer is a free MP3 streaming server that allows you to connect and stream your music using a standard web browser. It means that your friends can listen all of your songs right inside their browser.

The installation and setup of the program is too simple. This program can be easily configured with any router. It even protects your large collection of music files from unknown users with the help of user accounts and groups. You can even create your own customized skin or you can download skins from their website.

Features

• Free music streaming server.
• Easy installation and configuration.
• Share unlimited files and directories.
• Full support for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008/7.
• Full support for Linux through Wine.
• Protect your directories with user accounts and groups.
• Easily manage your users, groups and their access rights.
• Well designed web client that supports large collections of music files.
• Last.fm audio scrobbling integration.
• UPnP support for simple router configuration.
• Create your own skins or download new skins as they appear on our website.
• It includes standard skin support for most commonly used browsers.

Currently it supports only MP3 files. It works on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and even on Linux through Wine. I would recommend this program to everyone looking for a free MP3 streaming software on the Internet.

[ Download Vibe Streamer ]

iTunes is definitely not one of my favorite music players, and thanks to Keshav who showed me how to use a barebones player and convert Foobar2000 into a super music player, I have been using it more and more.

Of course if you have a iPod or iPhone you do require iTunes to transfer and manage music. But there are iTunes alternatives like Floola and iPhone PC Suite.

If you do not want to use a alternative but just want to export MP3 songs and albums for iTunes, iHandler a Adobe Air based application can definitely come in handy.

The software will basically allow you to load a iTunes Library and export the songs and albums and allow you to store it in another folder so that you can use it with other music players.

iHandler is based on Adobe Air so it can run on both Windows and Mac.

Download iHandler [via BlogsDNA]

If you are an audiophile and anything like me, you probably have got loads of music stacked up inside folders and folders. Managing a large collection of music can be a bit of a task sometimes, but with the help of some useful tools it can be made much easier.

Album Art is one thing that makes browsing your music library a lot more easier and fun. The graphic draws your attention towards the band or artist and forms a virtual connection that links your music taste with it. However, it’s not necessary that all your music would have embedded album art information. Probably, some of your music came from CDs, some from friends, a fraction from online stores and maybe, a larger fraction from, well, The Pirate Bay for instance.

Difference between external and embedded album art:

Album Art can either be external or embedded into the file, in the ID3v2 Tags. The ID3v2 tagging standard allows any kind of image to be embedded into the audio file. JPEG or PNG files can be embedded, but JPEG has been the norm. The difference between embedded information and external information is as simple as it sounds. When you embed something (an image file in this case) into the audio file, the size of the audio file increases relatively. Although external information does not increase the size of the file, the major drawback that it creates is unportability of the information. If one media player recognizes external Album Art, your media centre might not recognize. Plus, external files also increase clutter.

How to Embed Album Art into MP3 Files?

What we’ll need:

1. Mp3tag Mp3tag is an advanced ID3 tag editor that also lets you edit embeddable information, like Album Art.
2. The Album Art graphic file: You’ll of course need the graphic file that you wish to embed as album art. The recommended dimensions are 200×200 or 300×300. You can try searching for Album art on Google Image Search or Wikipedia. You can also you use a software like Album Art Downloader that will fetch you the Album Art for the specified Album from various sources like Last.fm, Amazon, various online music databases etc.

Here we go:

1. Open Mp3Tag, go to File > Change Directory (Ctrl+D). Select the directory of your Album or where your music files are located. Similarly, you can drag-n-drop the files you wish to edit and embed Album Art.

2. Select all the files with the mouse pointer or press CTRL+A. Right click on the selected files and chose Extended Tags.

3. A dialog box will open that lists all the extended tags of the files selected. On the right, you’ll see a box where you can select the Album Artwork. Click the Add Cover Button on the right (which has a star on it), browse and select the image file you’ve downloaded and chosen to embed as artwork and click open. Then click Ok.

4. Voila! Your selected music has been updated with the Album Art of your choice.

Mp3Tag is quite a powerful tagging software. You can use it to edit other meta information in your music collection and wash out the mistakes in the tags. incidentally, you can also extract artwork from mp3 files, by clicking on the save’ button.

Well, I think that solves it. Have an organized and lively experience with your music! :)

Image courtesy: tupton

If you have not yet taken advantage of the MP3 search engines we had told you about, here is another way to search and download the best MP3 files online.

All the best MP3s is a new service that will allow you to find the best songs and albums you want easily and let you browse them and download them in seconds.

The service also lets you browse the top music from different World music charts, along with providing a neat interface to browse the latest and top downloaded MP3 files.

The MP3 search is very good and shows results pretty fast. Overall a pretty good service for finding and downloading music online.

Abmp3.com

Please note: Downloading MP3 files may be illegal in some countries, please check your local copyright laws before downloading them.

We all admire our music collection and arrange them carefully, however no matter how much we try, there may be duplicate copies of the same music in our collection.

Now we do have a choice of painfully sorting through each and every music file to find duplicates and then delete them, or then we could just use a tool to do the hard work for us.

If you decided to use a tool, Similarity is one we would suggest you to find & delete duplicate music and mp3 files. Similarity is a useful program that helps you to find and remove similar, duplicate musical files (MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF, WAV, FLAC, APE, WV) with the same or similar sound content, music tags (ID3,WMF,Vorbis).

You can adjust sensitivity of searching criteria to find exact or similar files. In this way it is possible to identify similarly titles with smaller differences. Duplicate files can be deleted or browsed.

Similarity Features

• Three powerful comparing algorithms (content based, tags based and experimental).
• Support lossy formats: MP3, MP2, OGG, WMA, ASF.
• Support lossless formats: FLAC, APE, WF, WMA.
• Support ID3v1, ID3v2, ASF, WMA, Vorbis tags.
• Find files with same sound content (not byte to byte comparison, using sound analyzing).
• Tag editor (support MP3,WMA).
• Tag/file renaming tool.
• Very fast sound content scanning.
• Works with removable media devices like USB, etc.
• Search local PC and over network.
• Find duplicate from a selected set of folders.
• Show files tags and properties.
• Results can be exported to playlist.

Download Similarity [via Madhur Kapoor's Blog]

FoxyTunes is among the world’s most popularly used Firefox extensions. It’s extreme popularity and quick growth was the reason for it to be acquired by the IT giants Yahoo for a staggering sum of 40 million US Dollars. Yahoo Music acquired it so as to expand it further. FoxyTunes already had a number of inviting features that made it instantly popular amongst music lovers, and with the newest release where in it has has additional maintenance for YouTube, the most popular video sharing website, FoxyTunes fan following will surely increase.

YouTube has been added to FoxyTunes as a part of its web services. If you have FoxyTunes installed, along with controlling the videos from YouTube you can also browse all the playlists with the toolbar, at the same time. For the time you can control the videos on YouTube.com; however as per the developers you will be able to put in support meant for all the videos that a person embeds, and this will be a part of web services real soon. In case you are wondering about FoxyTunes and their function then perhaps the next paragraph would be able to shed some light on the matter.

FoxyTunes was started out in the form of an easy and straightforward add-on that would aptly control a music player. This also offered support for many types of players while also showing important info about every song that has been chosen by the user and this info is shown while it’s being played. Important information showed to the listener, includes lyrics, artist search, genre and more.

These bits of information have completely altered the way an individual listens to music and thanks to this software music listening has become more interactive. FoxyTunes also immensely supports many services from the web like the last.fm and Rhapsody Online and as we can understand that the FoxyTunes isn’t just a mere uncomplicated player add-on but it’s also a perfect way to attach several files of music to Internet-power.