Like audiobooks? Here's your chance to get two for free.
(Credit: Audible)I'm a longtime fan of Audible, an audiobook-download service that lets you burn your own CDs and/or transfer books to portable devices (iPods, BlackBerrys, etc.).
The company has offered various free trials and promotions over the years, but this is the best one I've seen: Sign up for a 30-day trial of AudibleListener Gold and get two free audiobooks.
So here's how it works: You sign up for a new account (which does require a credit card), then download the Audible software (available for Windows and Mac, or as an iTunes add-on if you're doing the iPod/iPhone thing). You'll automatically receive two credits in your account, which you can use to download the books of your choice.
After the 30-day trial expires, you'll start getting billed $14.95 per month for your Gold membership, which entitles you to one audio credit, 30 percent off any additional purchases, and a free subscription to The New York Times or Wall Street Journal (the audio versions, natch).
If you routinely buy one audiobook every month, the Gold plan is pretty solid. For example, Jonathan Tropper's "This Is Where I Leave You" (a terrific read, by the way) costs $23.95 on iTunes. If you used your Audible credit, it'd effectively cost you $14.95. Already burned through your credit? Your membership price is $19.59--still cheaper than iTunes.
Of course, you can always cancel your account before the end of the trial, end up paying nothing, and walk away with your two free books.
But if you spend a lot of time in the car, on the train, or even on the biking/hiking/jogging trail, nothing beats a good book. Like I said, I'm a longtime Audible fan. It's a great resource for scoring audiobooks for less than you'd pay elsewhere.
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CNET)
If you're a strategy gaming type of person, you know there is no shortage of tower defense games in the iTunes Store. It shouldn't be that big of a surprise, I suppose, because the iPhone and iPod Touch touch screens might be the best interface for games of this genre. Using your finger to choose and place towers couldn't be more intuitive. But even with the huge amount of tower defense games, some manage to rise above the rest. One of my apps this week is a sequel to one of the more popular games in the genre, and after having played several rounds, I can tell you it's definitely worth the price for tower defense fans.
This week's apps include a program that lets you control your music library through screen gestures and a new open-field tower defense game.
A four-finger tap locks or unlocks the screen
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)FluxTunes (99 cents) is a simple but extremely useful app that lets you control your music using onscreen gestures. Simply start up FluxTunes and you'll have access to your music just like running the iPod, but now you can use a number of different gestures to switch songs, change playlists, and much more.
FluxTunes is particularly useful when you don't have time to go through the regular controls such as while driving or when you have it in a shoulder strap while working out. Touch and drag your finger up or down to raise or lower the volume. A swipe to the right or left skips to the next song or skips to the previous song. A two finger swipe to the left or right switches between playlists. You also can touch and hold your finger in place to get the full list of available gestures. Anyone who uses their iPhone to play music while driving or those with limited vision will appreciate this simple, but effective new way to interact with your music library.
Sometimes littering the grid with missile launchers is the only way to win.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Parker/CNET)GeoDefense Swarm (99 cents for a limited time) is the sequel to GeoDefense, the hit tower defense game I wrote about in a previous post. The original game became known as the thinking man's tower defense game, requiring players to work out a strategy for the more challenging levels (and they were very challenging). GeoDefense Swarm continues in this tradition with another very challenging tower defense game, but moves the game from a set-path type of experience to an open-field game where you need to create your own maze of towers for creeps to navigate through.
GeoDefense Swarm has 30 playable levels split between the easy, medium, and hard categories, all offering the same vector-based graphics, pixel bursts, and warp effects found in the original. But now, along with the open-field gameplay in a hexagonal-grid, certain tiles have new properties to make the game even more challenging. Some tiles heal creeps or speed them up, forcing you to develop a strategy to stop creeps before getting to these tiles. Another type of tile can only be used by creeps, requiring you to work-around these tiles while trying to slow their path to the goal.
Along with the new maps and tile types, you get a new tower to experiment with as well. Called the Thumper, the new purple tower gives off waves of damage in its immediate area. Upgrades to the Thumper increase the damage and add a higher frequency of waves. Overall, GeoDefense Swarm is an excellent followup to the original game, but just like the original, might be better suited to those with a lot of experience in the genre or at least a high threshold for frustration.
What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you happy to finally find an app that lets you switch songs easily while doing other things? Is GeoDefense Swarm too hard for its own good? let me know in the comments!
Today is the last day we will ever see the triple single-digit date repetition--and Apple sure is making a big deal about it. As I'm sure you've already heard, the company has announced a noticeably refreshed Apple iTunes along with updates to all of the iPods in its line. We have a cadre of editors and photographers at the show who will be bringing you a feast of photos, videos, and info throughout the day. In the meantime, you can see some up-close-and-personal shots of the new hardware and software below.
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CNET)
I went to Portland, Oregon, to visit my parents last week and had a great time spending time with my family and checking out the local breakfast spots. I even found new places to explore (thanks to my trusty iPhone). One thing I knew going up there is that my father and his girlfriend had already bought two iPhone 3GS phones and I would not be hearing the end of how much better theirs were than my year-old iPhone 3G. But my mother and stepdad live up in Portland too, and once they saw how cool and fun my iPhone was (and had heard about my dad's iPhone), they brought me to the Apple Store in downtown Portland and bought two iPhone 3GS models for themselves.
Like many 3G owners who bought their iPhones when they were released last year, I have one year left on my contract before I can upgrade to a new iPhone at a reasonable price. This means, of course, that even as a reviewer of iPhone apps at Download.com, all my parental people have better iPhones than I do. My hope is that next year, there will be an even better iPhone, but for now I expect to be receiving a lot of iPhone 3GS videos, crisp 3.2 megapixel photos, mom saying, "I just called you using voice control!", and other iPhone 3GS madness. Just wait until next year, mom and dad. Just you wait!
This week's apps include an app that gives you a concert calendar for your favorite bands and a popular touch boxing game that came out last week.
You'll be surprised at some of the concerts available for the more obscure artists in your library
(Credit: CNET)iConcertCal is the iPhone version of an already popular iTunes plug-in for Mac that lets you find concerts for your favorite bands in your music library. The application starts by scanning the music library on your iPhone and then searches an online database to find upcoming concerts in your area using your location information. When it's done, iConcertCal presents a nice list of concerts at your local venues that you can touch to buy tickets, and get more information.
Beyond its concert-finding capabilities, iConcertCal lets you flip your iPhone sideways to get a full-month calendar view so you can easily plan which concerts to attend. Separate tabs let you view shows from artists in your library or all shows playing in your area. You also can search by artist or venue. Once you find the show you want to go to, you can buy tickets, send e-mail reminders to notify friends, and look at a built-in map with directions to the venue. Overall, we think anyone who enjoys going to live shows will find this app very useful, and with the ability to discover shows from your library, will make a great addition to any music lover's iPhone.
Keep your guard up and wait for openings to succeed in this game
(Credit: CNET)Touch KO is the long-awaited touch boxing game from Chillingo that mostly lives up to the hype. Either enter a quick match or battle through career mode to work your way to huge championship bouts. Play the tutorial mode to learn the type of punches you can throw by using different swipes on your screen. As you progress through your career, you can use your cash winnings to buy new trunks, gloves, and shoes to add bonuses to your stats, and there are several aesthetic options to personalize your boxer with such as tattoos, skin color, and facial features.
The thing I noticed right away about Touch KO, is that it's not your average arcade boxing game. You'll need to concentrate on blocking your opponent's punches just as much as finding the right moment to break through their defenses. But even with the more technical focus in this boxing game, the AI of each boxer is fairly easy to figure out, making it pretty easy to win fights against even the most challenging boxers. The folks at Chillingo have promised a better AI in future versions to make the game more challenging, but even in its current state, it is quite satisfying to go toe-to-toe in the ring against several different types of boxers.
There's no multiplayer component in Touch KO, but there is a leaderboard so you can match up against other players' records. Overall, Touch KO is a fun boxing game, and if Chillingo is able to enhance the AI for a more challenging experience, it will be tough for other boxing game contenders on the iPhone to compete.
What's your favorite iPhone app? Are you stuck in your contract and wishing you had an iPhone 3GS too? Is iConcertCal the live concert-finding app you've been waiting for? Have you made it to the championship in Touch KO? Let me know in the comments!
How good does a streaming-music service need to be before it replaces your collection of MP3s? That's the question Apple is asking itself right now, as it deliberates on approving the Spotify app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Here, finally, is a streaming-music app (and desktop application) that promises to stream any of over 6 million songs on-demand, give you the ability to create and save ordered playlists of songs, and best of all, Spotify can save your favorite tunes offline so you can play them even when you're not connected to the Internet.
Sound too good to be true? Well, you might be right. Spotify has been catching on like wildfire in Europe, but the company has been understandably cautious about coming to the U.S., where similar services such as Pandora, Last.fm, and Slacker have all been subject to strict licensing and streaming arrangements that would make a service like Spotify seem unthinkable. Another wrinkle in the Spotify mobile app's appeal is that it will only work for users who've upgraded to Spotify's ad-free premium service ($14/mo). To use Spotify for free, you'll have to relegate yourself to the desktop application.
Here's a look at the Spotify desktop application. To understand Spotify, just think of all the music you could download on iTunes; now, imagine not having to pay for any of it. It's legal and it's coming soon the the U.S. whether Apple likes it or not.
(Credit: Spotify)Legal and financial barriers aside, the idea that Apple would let Spotify onto the iPhone seems a little far fetched. For starters, it competes directly with the iPhone's own iPod music player app. Its second offense is that it may require a substantial chunk of memory to cache offline content (a feature not granted to Slacker's app). Finally, Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk reports that songs played using the Spotify app do not include links for purchasing the songs using iTunes. While linking songs to the iTunes store isn't explicitly required by Apple, it certainly hasn't hurt the majority of streaming-music apps that have included the feature.
At this point, all we can do is wait and see. With or without Apple's approval of the Spotify mobile app, there's still some reassuring signs that the Spotify desktop client will hit the U.S. before the year's out. If Europe's speedy adoption of Spotify is any indication of eventual U.S. success, the online music landscape (especially subscription and streaming-music services) could be headed for another shake-up.
Yes, Last.fm--like CNET--is owned by CBS, but it's also pretty awesome.
In a world teeming with increasingly similar tech products, Apple is one company that seems to have no problem churning out standout products. This might be attributed to sleek designs, fun features, and friendly interfaces--or maybe you want to chalk it up to good ol' marketing tactics. However, in the case of the iPhone and the iPod Touch, there's one attribute that undeniably separates these devices from the masses: the ever-expanding cadre of third-party applications. You can find everything from cookbooks and weight-loss trackers to games and productivity tools, but the area in which the iPhone and iPod Touch really excel is music, and there are hundreds of applications to choose from in this category.
To help you sort through the mass of options, we rounded up five of our favorite iPhone music apps. To keep things simple, we limited our scope to free selections that have a heavy focus on full music playback. Not everything included here will be a perfect fit for every iPod user, but you're sure to find something that will float your boat.
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If you are an iTunes fan with a large library of music, chances are you have several songs with missing tags and cover art. Most people get their music from a number of sources, making it inevitable that some of your music doesn't have the right tags. While you could go in and fill in the genre, album name, and artist fields by hand, a huge library would take a long time to get through--not to mention all the time it would take searching for all the missing album artwork.
TuneUp Companion (Windows or Mac) is a plug-in for iTunes that does all the tedious tagging and cover art retrieval work for you. In addition to cleaning up your library, TuneUp offers the "Tuniverse," which locates videos, concert tickets, and news on the Web about selected bands. You also can find out when the artist of the currently playing track has a concert coming up in your area. I wrote about an early version of the software in June of last year, and while it did a fairly good job of cleaning up tags and cover art, I didn't think it was quite ready for prime time.
TuneUp Companion shows up right along side of iTunes so it's easy to drag and drop tracks for cleaning
(Credit: CNET)Well, the folks at TuneUp Media announced today they have streamlined TuneUp Companion and added a new look and extra features to sweeten the deal. Along with the cleaner interface, users will now be able to choose which metadata to save through TuneUp Companion's newly added field-specific cleaning. Other tweaks include the ability to disable greatest hits compilations in search results and Mac users will now be able to choose whether they'd like TuneUp to create playlists of all the albums they've cleaned.
The Tuniverse tab gives you a nice overview of currently playing music along with online videos, news, and more.
(Credit: CNET)The downloadable trial will let you sample some of the program's features including 100 free track cleanups and 50 cover art matches, along with the Tuniverse information and upcoming concerts. The pricing for the full version of the program is a bit strange. You get unlimited use of the product for $19.95 a year, or you can pay $29.95 for a lifetime membership. Sounds to me like any sane person would pay $29.95, but that's probably what they're banking on. Either way, if you have a big or growing music library, TuneUp Companion is a great way to get all your music properly labeled. The additional easily accessible online news and videos as well as concert information are icing on the cake.
Get eight short stories and Mark Twain's most famous novel, all free from Barnes & Noble.
(Credit: Barnes & Noble)Good news, commuters: Barnes & Noble is offering nine audiobooks absolutely free. They're downloads, of course, but they're in MP3 format, meaning that you can burn them to CDs, copy them to your iPod/Zune/Sansa, and listen on your Netbook or whatever.
So, if they're free, they must be bargain bin books from no-name authors, right? Wrong. But eight of them are short stories, most ranging from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Thus, while you may not recognize the titles, you'll definitely recognize some of the authors.
Among the more notable names: Kurt Vonnegut, Louis L'Amour, Junot Diaz, Alice Munro, and Jonathan Lethem. Oh, there's also this guy Mark Twain, who provides the collection's only full-length novel: "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
To get the freebies, just add one or more of them to your shopping cart. (Although they're priced at a penny apiece, your cart will show a $0 balance.) Even though no money's changing hands, you'll need to create a Barnes & Noble account and supply a credit card. (If you'd rather not, choose PayPal as your payment method--even if you don't have an account.)
You'll also need to download and install B&N's OverDrive Media Console software, which manages your audiobooks and lets you play, burn, transfer, etc. It's available for Windows and Mac.
In the interim, you'll receive an e-mail with a link that takes you to the download page. So, yeah, you have to jump through some hoops to get your audiobooks--but such is the price of free, right?
Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? Amazon.com has nearly 800 MP3s free for the download.
(Credit: Rick Broida)Want to freshen up your music library? Amazon.com is offering a whopping 770 MP3s you can download free of charge.
I've long been a fan of Amazon's MP3 store, which offers DRM-free music downloads compatible with PCs, portable players, cell phones, GPS devices, MP3-playing fry pans, and other gizmos.
I visit the store almost daily to check out the Daily Deal, which is usually a complete album for just $2 to $4. (For example, last month, Amazon had U2's new "No Line on the Horizon" for $3.99. Alas, it's back up to $8.99--but that's still a buck cheaper than on Apple's iTunes.)
As for the freebies, you'll find singles from the likes of Neko Case, Robyn Hitchcock, Death Cab for Cutie, and plenty of artists you've probably never heard of. But so what? Free is free, and there's loads of good listening to be had here. Here are five downloads I like:
- "Hurt Feelings," Flight of the Conchords
- "Belated Promise Ring," Iron & Wine
- "Ghosts Under Rocks," Ra Ra Riot
- "Sean Connery," Craig Ferguson (8 minutes of stand-up gold)
- "All the Same Mistakes," Mieka Pauley
Unfortunately, there's no way to download all 770 tracks in one fell swoop--you have to grab them one at a time. (You'll also need to install Amazon's MP3 Downloader app, which, conveniently, can automatically add new tracks to your iTunes or Windows Media Player library.)
Amazon regularly adds new stuff to the freebie library, so make sure to check back every few weeks. Oh, and if you want an easy way to keep tabs on the Daily Deal, subscribe to Amazon's Twitter feed.
Music and Web surfing mashup Songbird is out with an impressive number of features that were missing from the last major update. For Windows, Mac, and Linux, version 1.1.1 introduces album art downloading, MTP device support, watch folders, improved sorting, and numerous other performance enhancements and bug fixes.
Album art comes to browser/jukebox Songbird.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)This version continues to push the more iTunes-esque feel of the jukebox/browser, but that's a change users will just have to get used to. Grabbing context-menu album art worked quickly, although users should remember to highlight an entire album to get the art to apply to all tracks. If you only remember to do that after the fact, select all the tracks and run the album art finder again to apply the art to all of them.
The album art feature doesn't work perfectly, though. Although users can replace album art through a track's metadata pane, if you resize the art window in the main dashboard the art itself won't resize. A minor bug, but slightly annoying.
The MTP device support includes the ability to sync DRM-restricted songs between Songbird and your portable media player. Zunes, Sansas, Zens, and others can now be used in conjunction with Songbird. The entire list of support MTP devices and known issues can be read here.
Using Watch folders to monitor regularly changed folders is one way to monitor for new songs or removed albums, but it also makes managing a third-party podcast catcher significantly easier. Setting this up takes a bit of hunting and pecking, but it turns out that the option lives under Tools/Options/Media Importer; then click on the Watch Folders tab. Note that this is a fairly sophisticated watch folder system, and it will remove from your library what you delete, as well as making additions.
Watch folders make it easy to keep your library free from detritus.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Some of the other changes include replay gain normalization, so if the metadata includes that information, Songbird will now play back the song as you intended. 'Bird-watchers who've been frustated with the unicode and sorting support should find big improvements in handling indefinite and definite articles at the beginning of song, artist, and album names.
There's also support for the 7Digital online music store, which offers high-end MP3s up to 320Kbps. The Mac download size has been reduced by 45 percent, and the memory usage in large libraries has apparently been reduced significantly. I encountered no stability or playback problems running Firefox, Songbird, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, and other programs simultaneously.
If the first two programs you start up are your Web browser and your music jukebox, and not necessarily in that order, Songbird keeps getting better and is worth a look.
