Forbes is reporting that Facebook is currently testing a new streaming music feature. Rumors about Facebook launching its own music service to complete with iTunes are nothing new. However, Forbes’ report suggests that Facebook won’t actually be launching its own music service. Instead, it will be tapping into Spotify, which is already a sensation in Europe.

The new feature will show up as a small Spotify icon on the left hand side of the Facebook news feed. Clicking on the button will download the Spotify app in the background, providing users with access to Spotify’s massive library of songs. Spotify already has a Facebook app; however, this collaboration will enable them to integrate more tightly, besides reaching millions of more users. Facebook users will also be able to play songs together with their friends. This is an interesting feature that is likely to be particularly appealing to the lovebirds.

The catch is that this service will only available in regions supported by Spotify. Spotify’s services are currently available only in select few European countries including the UK and France. US launch is in the cards, but has been taking a lot longer than anticipated.

Facebook will not be paying Spotify for its services. For its services, Spotify will get access to a Facebook’s user base, many of whom might sign up for the premium subscription. Free users are only allowed to listen to up to 10 hours of music per month.

[Windows Only] Many years ago, I remember recording broadcast radio stations using reel-to-reel, 8-track and finally cassette tape recorders. It was pretty simple tune in your radio, start your tape recorder and let it run. The biggest drawback was that you didn’t have a song list and it was often hard to identify the artist or the name of the song playing.

These days, computers have made it much easier to record music. There are many methods to record the streaming music at internet radio stations and I’ve discovered that the MP3 VCR is one of the easiest. All you have to do is:

• Search Shoutcast.com for a radio station
• Drag the station link to the Source Informationfield
• Set music storage folder
• Click the Start Recordingbutton

Here’s what the setup applet looks like:

At Shoutcast, the link you need to drag and drop is the yellow TUNE INbutton.

Once you’ve started recording, you’ll see the main interface. There are a few buttons at the bottom that you can use for Pause, Stop, Listen or Mute while recording, Timed Recordings, Station Listings, Setup and Exit.

The station list is a nice feature. It allows you to play, add and remove Shoutcast radio streams.

MP3 VCR actually detects the song titles of most station streams and creates an MP3 file for each song.

This recorder is also advertised to work with stations at Live365.com. I haven’t had much luck with that, but I never use their service. There are thousands of stations at Shoutcast, what more can you ask for?

Download MP3 VCR

http://www.mp3vcr.com/

Techie Buzz Verdict:

There are plenty of ways to record music from the internet. MP3 VCR is free and it’s one of the easiest recording methods I’ve tried. In addition to plenty of documentation, this program’s source code is also available. Based on what I’ve found so far, I can highly recommend MP3 VCR.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

[Windows Only] The other day, I ran into a new listing for a freeware application named Last Recorder. Here’s what the author says about this little tool.

Last Recorder is a small program that can save tracks from Last.fm audio streams into separate tagged mp3 files.

While I can’t confirm that I actually used this program to download music, I can confirm that this program does work. It does download full length mp3 songs from Last.fm while preserving the song titles. Here’s what Last Recorder looks like:

Last Recorder is a single executable file and no installation is needed. When it first launches, it will prompt you to enter your user ID and password. Then you can select a choice of radio stations by using the drop down on the left and these are the options:

Tag
Artist
My Tag
My Radio
My Loved Tracks
My Neighbors
My Recommendations
Custom URL

You will also have to select a download location on the right side drop down box.

Given the fact that this download tool seems to work, the question that many people will have is, Is this legal?. I did find an FAQ on the site regarding this question and the answer was I don’t know for sure.In my opinion, downloading these songs is about the same as recording music from the radio stations or television. Do I think it’s legal? It may be legal to download the information (music), but you are definitely breaking your agreement with Last.fm’s Terms of Use. Whether or not that agreement is actually binding on you may depend on where you live and which way the courts are swinging that day.

So, I’ll leave it up to you.

Last Recorder Home Page

Techie Buzz Verdict:

This application does what it says and it also portable. While those are both good features, the question of it’s legality leaves me doubting that I will use it.

Techie Buzz Rating: 2.5/5 (Average)

South by Southwest (SXSW) is one of the biggest music festivals held every spring in Austin, Texas. Every year thousands of music lovers and performers descend on Texas and revel in music played across 80 stages all over Austin.

SXSW also offers users a chance to download DRM-free music from these concerts for free on their site, however going through hundreds of songs can be quite time consuming.

If you are looking for a better way to download the songs to your computer, TorrentFreak spotted a torrent site, which lists a torrent with all the music from SXSW. The torrent contains 646 songs totaling 3.35GB in size.

If you have been looking to download music from SXSW, this torrent is the simplest way to do it. The MP3 songs in the torrent are legally available from the official SXSW site, however, this makes it much easier to download. Enjoy the music.

Download SXSW MP3 Songs

The iTunes store is being generous once again, this time around for reaching 3 million fans on Facebook. iTunes users will be able to download a free sampler of 15 songs from the House of Soul, featuring music from Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Budos Band, Sugarman Three, Lee Fields among other artists.

In addition to that users will also be able to download 20 free songs from the Artists to Watch sampler featuring upcoming artists including Fanfarlo, Cold Cave, Local Natives and Surfer Blood.

To create and redeem a code to download the free House of Soul sampler from iTunes, head over to their Facebook fan page and become a fan of iTunes or head over to this page and follow the instructions to create a code and redeem it.

The Artists to Watch sampler will be available for free till March 15th and the Songs from the House offer will expire on 30th April, however, the offer may expire before that date, so hurry up and get your free songs right away.

Providing full music streams for free isn’t child’s play, but a 16 year old is certainly doing a damn good job of it. Muziic is a free service which utilizes YouTube’s API to provide free streaming music on pretty much every platform.

Muziic Desktop Player

Muziic is the brainchild of David Nelson, who manages the service along with his father Mark Nelson. Muziic is currently available as a web player, Facebook app, desktop player and an iPhone app. Any music available on YouTube is also available on Muziic. Additionally, it also leverages publicly available online radio stations.

Muziic Web Player

The web player has all the essential features including playlists, shuffle and repeat. It even supports crossfade and features social network integration (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc.). I wasn’t able to test the iPhone app, but the Facebook app impressed me. The desktop based player is obviously the most feature packed and is the way to go if you want to make the best use of Muziic. It has a couple of handy additional features including AutoTweet (posts now playing information on twitter) and support for YouTube channels. It is also capable of playing local music files.

Muziic Facebook Application

Techie Buzz Verdict

I didn’t find too much to complain about in Muziic’s web offerings. However, the desktop app has room for improvement. To begin with, the installer takes an unnaturally long time. Also, Muziic doesn’t allow users to opt out of the bundled free MP3 offer (eMusic). The app itself works well, but the user interface isn’t very smooth.

Muziic isn’t the first service which relies on 3rd party content providers to bypass licensing issues and it is definitely not going to be the last. It’s unlikely that the music labels are going to be too pleased about Muziic freeloading their content without sharing any revenue. However, it has been approved by YouTube and hopefully won’t run into trouble soon. If you mainly use YouTube for listening to music, I am sure you would love Muziic. It offers a great way to listen to the hottest new music anywhere, anytime.

Techie Buzz Rating: 4/5 (Excellent)

[ Visit Muziic.com ]

I am not sure about everyone, however, at-least once in your lifetime, you might have downloaded free music from the internet when it is not legal, or at-least had had the urge to do it.

Those days could now be a thing of the past, thanks to FreeAllMusic, whose service will allow users to download free music legally to their computers, albeit after watching some video ads. So does free mean crappy? Not exactly, according to NYT, 2 out of the 4 major music labels have signed up with the service and will provide the full catalog of songs for downloads. They even have a lineup of 6 major advertisers on board, including Coca Cola, Warner Bros and Zappos.

The best part about FreeAllMusic is that, you can legally share the music you download with anyone else. In technical terms, the music you download from the site is DRM free.

Users will have to spend 15-30 seconds to watch a video ad, before they can download the songs. However, that would mean that you save .99 cents per song. Limitations? Yes, there will be limitations as to how much music a user can download, however, there is no indications as to what the limitations are.

This is a win win situation for both advertisers and the users, as advertisers will be assured that their ads will be viewed and users will get free music.

Nevertheless, this system has it’s own flaws. For example, imagine that, I as a user want to download a MP3 file and start the process to download it, the video ad plays, and I walk out to get my coffee. After returning back, I download the free music without even watching the advertisements. Based on this, it is hard to say how long this will be a success, however, the concept is good and may become quite popular. Only time will tell, whether it is a hit or it is a fail.

FreeAllMusic is currently in beta and will open to public in late January. Would you prefer to download free music in lieu of advertisements? Let us know about your thoughts.

By the way, if you notice this, this is the 4000th post on Techie Buzz :-).

Today is Christmas Day and Amazon seems to be in a really generous mood. We have posted some awesome music deals in the past, but this one probably tops them all. At the moment, Amazon is offering more than a thousand MP3s for FREE. Yes, you read that correctly. You can legally download more than a thousand tracks from Amazon right now. The only catch is that, you have to be within the U.S. All the free music on Amazon can be accessed through this page.

The MP3s are sort of a mixed bag. But that is to be expected, since the above link only aggregates all the free music currently available on Amazon. You will find everything from Symphony to New Age to Rock and even Bollywood. Enjoy the music and make sure that you are subscribed to Deal Buzzer. We will keep scouring the net for the best freebies and deals and bring them to you.

Honda has teamed up with Rhapsody – RealNetwork’s online music service, to offer free full MP3 downloads. This giveaway is a part of Honda’s “Everybody knows somebody who loves a Honda” campaign. In order to take advantage of this offer, head over to the ShareTheLove webpage. You can either preview the songs and download them individually, or download all of them together. No registration or personal details are required. The only catch is that you will have to watch a short Honda commercial before being allowed to download. The artists available are:

• The Raveonettes
• The Helio Sequence
• Foals
• Foreign Born
• Islands
• Headlights
• Pacha Massive
• Wolf Parade
• Band of Horses
• The Dodos
• Volcano Choir