The Download Blog

These days, there is a plethora of audio content available to stream over the Internet. Even traditional terrestrial radio often offers content streamed over the Web, diversifying the choices for how consumers can enjoy music and other audio. Although the legality is questionable, there are--and will always be--ways to record these streams. Streamed audio recordings for music are not going to offer the same sound quality as a ripped CD or even a purchased MP3, but it's a good option for talk programs and mixes that might not be available in other formats. This tutorial will show you how to record streamed audio as an MP3; just be sure to read the usage rules for any recording source before beginning.

Editors' note: This tutorial was completed using Windows XP.

Cost: Free

Time commitment: Varies

System Requirements: Windows

How to record streaming audio

FoxyTunes unlocks access to a wide range of music players.

(Credit: Yahoo)

FoxyTunes, the popular music-player plug-in for Firefox, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Thunderbird, and so on, is now a plug-in supporting Yahoo Messenger for Windows, versions 8.1, 9, and 10 beta.

Maybe we should to call it "FoxyHoo."

With the plug-in installed, you can control your desktop music player in addition to sharing what you're playing in the status bar. Specifically, you can launch about two dozen supported music players from the Yahoo Messenger interface, manipulating everything from volume to skipping a song. Here's a sampler of integrated players: iTunes, RealPlayer, VLC, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, and MediaMonkey.

In addition to commanding your music player, the FoxyTunes plug-in for Yahoo Messenger can also open lone audio files. To check out song lyrics while a tune plays, there's a FoxyTunes Planet button you can click. The Web site features music news, lyrics, and videos.

We would have thought that FoxyTunes' integration with Yahoo Messenger for Windows would have been the first thing Yahoo did when it snapped up FoxyTunes in 2008 for its music division. After all, the ability to share musical selections via Yahoo Messenger ha been available for the Mac client since 2006, a Yahoo representative told CNET. However, one look at the Web site, which promotes a Download.com review from 2006, tells us that maintaining the brand isn't very high on Yahoo's list.

That said, FoxyTunes has been far from idle. Back in August, FoxyTunes integrated support for posting music choices to Twitter, Facebook, Skype, Yahoo Messenger's status bar, and Last.fm (Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.)

The easiest way to get started downloading the plug-in is to click "Add Plug-ins" from your Yahoo Messenger interface and select FoxyTunes.

Corrected on 10/30/09 at 3:10 pm: A Yahoo representative has clarified that Yahoo Messenger has been able to post FoxyTunes selections on Mac since 2006.

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of fanfare about an application called DoubleTwist that is at its core a free music jukebox that offers content syncing to a variety of portable devices, including the BlackBerry, the PSP, and the iPod, as well as pretty much anything that can mount in Universal Mass Storage mode. One of the main draws of the program is that it can take your iTunes library and sync it to a variety of non-iPod players, an important feature for anyone who has ditched the ubiquitous device in favor of a music phone or other MP3 player. And soon, the Windows version of the jukebox will offer built-in support for Amazon MP3 store purchases as well (note: the Mac version already supports Amazon MP3 purchases), a move in line with the company's goal to offer consumers choice when it comes to digital music management.

The DoubleTwist video view.

Certainly, DoubleTwist is a useful solution for a lot of people, especially since it incorporates automatic video transcoding for a lot of the supported devices, which is the feature that drew me to the software. However, the program is not without its pitfalls, and some of them are sure to cause no small amount of frustration. For example, the video transcoding--done during the syncing process--takes forever. Conversion speed was roughly two times normal speed, so a 90-minute movie took 50 minutes or so to encode and transfer. Still, considering DoubleTwist offers this feature for free and integrates it so simply, I'm willing to forgive the sluggishness.

Much more annoying is how slow the video library loads in thumbnail mode, and while it is loading, you can't actually browse the selections. ... Read more

If you're a frequent iTunes user, you're probably looking for some helpful tools that will allow you to get more out of the software. If so, you might want to check out Yahoo Widgets. They're simple, fast applications that run on your desktop to provide a little more functionality than you'll find in iTunes itself.

To save you from doing all the footwork yourself, I've compiled a list of some really neat Yahoo widgets that extend the functionality of iTunes. Let's check them out.

Music time

iPhones: If you're wondering what the top songs are on iTunes at any time, iPhones is for you.

iPhones is designed like an iPhone. It displays the top 10 albums and songs, as well as new releases, featured content, and more. When you click on one of those options, you'll be brought to the song's individual listing page in iTunes. There's not much more to the app than that.

iPhones shows off all the top content on iTunes.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

iTunes Alarm Clock: If you want to personalize alarms and reminders with your favorite songs, try out the iTunes Alarm Clock widget.

iTunes Alarm Clock is what you might expect: an alarm clock that uses your music to wake you up or alert you to an event. In the app's preferences, you can set the alarm, choose any song you want from your catalog, and have it play at a specified volume. It's an extremely simple app, but I found it useful.

iTunes Alarm Clock is what you might expect.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit: 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!

Music service iLike, best known for third-party applications on platforms like Facebook, made its big iPhone app launch today. The company has rolled out an app for alerts about local concerts, and also launched its previously announced program for bands and artists to create custom fan applications.

Apple still has to approve the "Local Concerts" app, according to a release, but iLike is excited about its potential impact regardless.

"It's something that we really felt was a good idea on paper as we started developing it," iLike CEO Ali Partovi told CNET News, "but as it reached completion and we started using it ourselves it really started seeming like a killer app."

iLike already has had a concert app in the iTunes Store. The company didn't promote it much, Partovi said, because the iPhone 3.0 software was what really made the app worthwhile, and so iLike was waiting until that came out.

"We found that there really were a few key capabilities that the iPhone OS didn't support at the time," he explained, referring specifically to push notifications and some software tweaks that enable better personalization. So the revamped iLike concerts app, thanks to iPhone software upgrades, will scan the music selection on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and send pop-up alerts when a band or artist that the user listens to will be in town.

"It turns the iPod into much more of a live device to be connected to the world of live music," Partovi said of the free app.

The custom artist apps, meanwhile, haven't changed much from when iLike originally announced the program in May. Over 250 artists have signed on to the program, the company said, including Pete Yorn, Reba McIntire, and Enrique Iglesias. iLike takes half the revenues from sales of the apps, and charges a $99 fee with the right to serve ads if the artist in question decides to offer its custom app for free.

CNET News reported last month that iLike was also in talks with the major music labels to open a download store, after a deal to offer full-length songs through subscription service Rhapsody failed to materialize.

(Credit: 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.

Top 5 free iPhone music apps