Soundsnap is a great platform where you can find and share free sound effects and loops. So you might ask where do these sounds effects and loops come from, well It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s. This is exactly what makes it legal.

It was originally started by a small group of so called “sound people” from all over the world. Their belief is that sounds and samples should be free for everyone to use in their projects, commercial or not!

Their users are a diverse mix of sound designers, sound artists, web game developers, filmmakers and music producers. Hobbyists and home video makers are welcome too. They encourage everyone to upload high quality sound FX and samples, helping them make every kind of sound available on Soundsnap. I like the domain name as it seems pretty relevant and interesting but very hard to find in near future.

Some of things that Soundsnap shouldn’t be used for are:

• An alternative to Myspace, Limewire or BitTorrent.
• A place to upload your band’s songs or your favourite mp3’s. Soundsnap is only for sound effects and loops.
• A place you can upload or find sounds from commercial libraries. All sounds here are original- made or recorded by its users.

I love to promote this company as it is free to use and as i am a lover of open-source. Hope to see this company grow huge on the net.

Please share your thoughts and opinions on this great music sharing website.

I found a free version of software that will show song lyrics as it plays and the software is called EvilLyrics. Evil Lyrics automatically searches for lyrics as your song is played in your player.

• Searches over 15,000,000 lyrics
• Karaoke: create & share timestamps
• Stores lyrics for offline viewing
• Translates lyrics
• Allows searching for guitar chords, AMG profiles, album covers arts, posters etc.
• Only 800 kB installation file

It supports wide range of players including Winamp, iTunes, Windows Media Player, Yahoo Music Engine.

The great thing about this software is that it is not only free to use but also has addon which adds additional functionalities to the program just like wordpress :-)

Happy Lyricing!

I know many who are interested in ripping as it is free to do. Well, in some cases it is not as you don’t know which software to use and even if you know, it might cost you to buy it. I found a couple pieces of software that can rip music from music CDs.

You can use Audiograbber, CDex, EAC = Exact Audio Copy.

Audiograbber is a beautiful piece of software that grabs digital audio from cd’s. It copies the audio digitally-not through the soundcard-which enables you to make perfect copies of the originals. It can even perform a test to see that the copies really are perfect. Audiograbber can also automatically normalize the music, delete silence from the start and/or end of tracks, and send them to a variety or external MP3 encoders, such as Fraunhofers L3enc, or even use some MP3/WMA encoders internally for automatic creation of MP3’s. Audiograbber can download and upload disc info from freedb, an Internet compact disc database. You can even record your vinyl LP’s or cassette tapes with Audiograbber and make wav’s or MP3’s of them. There are a lot more functions in Audiograbber, but to put it simply: Audiograbber has the most features one can wish from such a program!

Advantages:

• Easy to use interface
• Include a documentation (Help File)
• Easy to configure to your needs!

CDex is a CD-Ripper, extracting digital audio data from an Audio CD. The application supports many Audio encoders, like MPEG (MP2,MP3), VQF, AAC encoders.

Operating System: All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP)

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are :

• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

With other audio grabbers you usually need to listen to every grabbed wave because they only do jitter correction. Scratched CDs read on CD-ROM drives often produce distortions. But listening to every extracted audio track is a waste of time. Exact Audio Copy conquer these problems by making use of several technologies like multi-reading with verify and AccurateRip.

Want to share something, please feel free to do so using the comment form!

Happy CD Ripping!

I know many of us want to know this because we love music. This is useful especially when the storage/social networking sites such as eSnips don’t let their users download the files. Although there is a way to  directly edit the URL and download from eSnips, it doesn’t really work for all the sites. I guess this might be illegal as you are ripping the music. I am NOT responsible for anything related to this post!

Streamripper first connects to the stream in question, this happens over TCP (not UDP). For Shoutcast-style streams it finds the “meta data” or track separation data (defined by a meta-interval), and uses that as a marker for where the track should be separated.

The data is buffered back about 10-30 seconds. When a track has changed, it goes back through its buffer, decodes the mp3 data in that buffer then looks for a silent point of the audio. It uses that silent point as a place to separate the tracks.

I saw three main platforms it support and they are Unix, OSX, Windows. It has many other platforms that you can use for free.

You can view all the information about this program including the downloads here.

Happy Recording!

I have found a couple of programs that specialize in playing different types of music files.

To play an Audio CD…use TinyCD

Quite possibly one of the smallest Windows CD players in existence. This is intended to be a highly simple, no-frills CD player. If you want a more sophisticated one, there are plenty out there that will mow the lawn, walk the dog, play chess, and trade stock on the Nasdaq and the NYSE. But if you want a simple, easy-to-use player, this is for you.

To play a CD, open the program, put in a CD, and hit the green “Play” button. That’s it. Nothing more.

Features

• Blinking Light: Shows you the CD is playing
• Position Display: Shows current track and time
• Eject: Click to open the CD tray
• Stop: Click to stop playing the CD
• Pause: Click to pause playing at the current position
• Play: Click to play the CD
• Previous Track: Click to go back to the previous track
• Rewind: Hold down this button to rewind in the current song
• Forward: Hold down this button to skip forward in the current song
• Next Track: Click to skip to the next track
• Exit: Click to close TinyCD

I would recommend this mainly because of its size, it is just 60k.

To play an Audio File, there are 2 programs you can use. You can either go for Foobar2000 or XMPlay.

Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

Features

• Audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA.
• More audio formats supported through optional components, official or third-party.
• Full unicode support.
• Customizable user interface layout (new in version 0.9.5). View screenshots…
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the Converter component. Read more…
• ReplayGain support - both playback and calculation.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.

XMPlay is an audio player, supporting the OGG / MP3 / MP2 / MP1 / WMA / WAV / CDA / MO3 / IT / XM / S3M / MTM / MOD / UMX audio formats, and PLS / M3U / ASX / WAX playlists. A load more formats are also supported via plugins. When XMPlay was first released in 1998, only the XM format was supported, hence the name “XMPlay”.

Linux, Mac OSX or PocketPC user? Want to enjoy the same quality MOD playback as XMPlay users? You can… BASSMOD.

I would personally go for XMPlay because of its functionalities and mainly because it has some cool skins to download on its homepage.

If you want an alternative to Real Player, then you can use Real Alternative to play (.ra and .rm) files.

- Quick and easy install
- It’s easy to make an unattended installation
- Proper uninstallation
- No background processes
- Use a player of your own choice
- Low on resources
- No advertising, no registration forms, nothing annoying

You can see all its features, limitations on its website.

Want to share a great software or some tips with us, please feel free to share it with our readers using comment form.

Happy Playing!

Many of us already know how to play all songs in a folder without a program just by selecting all of them and then doing a right click and clicking play all. But if you want a specialized software to do that, then here is one for you.

The software is called 1by1.

1by1 is a small, fast and handy audio player which is not only small: it provides a smart and versatile environment to handle your file collection and listen to your tracks - with no need for playlists or databases

Features

 
• Directory Player: directly plays your folder contents
• Full Resume play: remembers last track and position
• Supported decoders: ACM (mp3), mpglib (mp2, mp3)
• Winamp input plugin support (ogg, wav, cd..)
• Gapless play · simple crossfading · Audio enhancer
• Folder tree file navigation · Directory finder: plays a whole drive
• File utils: copy, move, rename while play, delete, date change
• Cue sheet support · Playlist support · Favorites · Big title display
• Very small size · Low resource usage · portable
• Folder compare utility
• View screenshots

 

Want to share something, please use the comment form!

Happy Listening!

I found a great software that will help you organize your MP3 collection. You can either use Media Monkey or Media Manager. Their purpose is to help you organize your MP3 Music Files.

Is your music library a mess?

Missing Album Art and other information?

Scattered across various locations?

Full of duplicates?

Get MediaMonkey and get organized.

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.
• Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata.
• Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.
• Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.
• Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume.
• Record CDs and convert MP3s, M4A, OGG, FLAC and WMA files etc. into other formats.
• Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.
• Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.
• More Features…

I found a free software which allow you to manage all your iPod stuff without the use of iTunes.

YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod under Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. Take a look at the feature list to find out what it can do and feel free to suggest anything that might be missing.

Features:

• stand alone program, no installation required
• iPod is automatically recognized
• mp3 and AAC files can be copied to/from iPod
• read/write access to mp3 id3 and AAC infos
• playlist support (On-The-Go included)
• playlists import (PLS,M3U)
• playlists export (PLS,M3U)
• full unicode support
• auto-download new versions
• advanced song import/export settings
• 2 restore features
• built in music player
• iPod informations
• 2 search features
• remove duplicated tracks
• find lost music files
• easy ratings edit
• PC to iPod synchronization
• create and edit notes (with unicode support)
• automatically update song playcounts
• News RSS and podcasts to iPod upload
• Growl support (Apple only)
• export song lists to HTML or plain text files
• multiple iPods support
• Last.fm support

All iPod generations (except iPhone and iPod touch) were reported to be working under:

 Mac OS 10.3 or newer

 Windows 98SE or newer

 Any linux distribution with GTK 2.0