TuneWiki is one of the most ambitious social music projects we've seen. It is part licensed lyrics spooler for your own songs and for streaming YouTube videos, and part network--you can see where else in the world other TuneWiki users are playing your track. What began as an Android app created for Google's Android Developer Challenge (and finished as one of 10 winners) grew into a Web site and is, as of Monday, a Windows Media Player plug-in.
TuneWiki for Windows Media Player has a few flubs and flaws, but on average, the lyrics and music maps add the utility and interest to make the free application a helpful addition to Windows Media Player.
Those familiar with TuneWiki's Web site will see the similarities right away. TuneWiki's interface reskins Windows Media Player's 'Now Playing' window. The top half of the screen displays either a music map of where else in the world songs are playing, a YouTube video, album art, or top songs nearby, depending on if you're playing a song from your library, watching a YouTube video through TuneWiki, or browsing the map.
The bottom half of the screen, below the ad space, is where you'll see the available lyrics stream, plus commands to translate into other languages, help TuneWiki resync the song, and expose the scroll bar for manual lyrics perusal.
The unskinned Windows Media Player playlist forms the right side bar unless you banish it. We suggest you don't--you may have a harder time queuing songs if you do.
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CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)
TuneWiki has its share of rough edges. Some tools aren't immediately intuitive, like the resyncing button. Instead of clicking it to have the song resync itself, you click it, then click each line of the song as it plays to help TuneWiki time the lyrics more accurately. Unless you're an approved editor, your version of the time-synced lyrics will be stored locally, but may not make it into TuneWiki's larger database.
Also not obvious is the fact that only approved editors can edit existing lyrics. A text notice on the editor-only area would wipe away potential confusion and frustration. Anyone, however, can add lyrics to TuneWiki's wiki if there aren't any to begin with. (You can apply to be an editor at forums.tunewiki.com. TuneWiki currently tallies abut 1,500 editors.)
Some other issues we encountered were performance-based or preference-related. We'd like the size of the YouTube video to be adjustable, for instance. If the YouTube video stops, as it did once during testing, we want to refresh it without closing and reopening the app. When searching for songs, we'd like a more elegant display of the artist and album information returned in the results. TuneWiki's plug-in is good enough to use on its own, but in a few iterations from now, after a scrub-up, it should be even more promising.
If you're never exactly sure which words a singer screams, mumbles, or sighs throughout a song's stanza, a brand-new add-on released this week was meant for you. TuneWiki (review), a free plug-in for Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows Media Player, can stream lyrics in time to songs you play from your local library. You'll also be able to spool lyrics for the YouTube music videos you initiate within TuneWiki, watching them appear in a pane below the player.
The heart of the application is TuneWiki's lyrics Wiki, an online database whose contents are driven by community contributions, just like Wikipedia's now-iconic encyclopedia. Lyrics may not be available for every song, but registered users are able to create them, thus filling in gaps. TuneWiki breathes fresh life into Windows Media Player 10 and above. If you intend to translate lyrics into your mother tongue, version 11 will more proficiently handle the task.
In other music application news, Songbird (review), the Firefox-based jukebox browser, has received a second serving of feature upgrades. New automatic file organizing, iTunes compatibility, and a 10-band equalizer entice audiophiles to switch from Firefox proper to this very specialized build.
What do you think of these two tunes-centric apps? Leave a comment, or type out a short user review of TuneWiki 1.0 and Songbird 1.2.
Updated, 8:15 p.m.: I heard back from Kluivers, and without going into details, he was concerned that Apple was taking a long time to approve Lyrics--he submitted it in January, but didn't get it approved until earlier this month. Consequently, the explicit filter was made very protective, to avoid any chance of offending the App Store gatekeepers. Jelle Krins, who co-developed the app, told me of an Easter Egg that lets you turn off the filter: just scroll all the way to the bottom of the "About" screen three times, and a filter on/off button appears. Turn it off, and the app works flawlessly.
When I looked at iPhone song lyrics application LyricsFind last month, I found too many gaps to make it worth paying for. Earlier today, programmer Joris Kluivers pointed me to a much better alternative that he created called Lyrics, which costs $1.99 in the U.S. and has became available in the iPhone App Store last week.
Now that's more like it!
The Lyrics app draws on the excellent LyricWiki.org site, which contains crowd-sourced lyrics for more than 700,000 songs. I love the site: it uses an embedded domain-specific Google search bar, which delivers great results. And if you're pedantic about your favorite bands' lyrics like I am, you can easily change lyrics that you just know are wrong--for example, in "Chip Away," Perry Farrell is obviously saying that he and the angel "both wore dirty faces," not that they "both were dirty faces," so I changed it accordingly. (Some songs, like REM's "It's The End of the World As We Know It," have been locked because so many people have different interpretations. The version up there now checked out perfectly against the audio track in iTunes, so I can't quibble.)
Unfortunately, while the Lyrics iPhone app draws on a great source, it's ruined by a persistent bug: it thinks perfectly innocuous songs like Led Zeppelin's "The Immigrant Song" and Pink Floyd's "Echoes" contain explicit lyrics. Maybe they're erring on the side of caution to avoid getting blacklisted like Trent Reznor recently did, but using it felt like listening to a crazy person muttering about how all the songs on the radio today are filth.
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Updated 2/11/09 at 6:50 P.M. PT to add more context to the licensing debate and to correct Amnon Sarig's title.
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TuneWiki)
Back in October, we took a look at close look at TuneWiki, a media enhancement application for Google Android that scrolls through a song's lyrics as you play a song or YouTube music video. The company announced this week an update to its free Android application that will let you also stream Internet radio on your phone. The update, which will be submitted to the Android Market this Saturday, will give streaming songs TuneWiki's lyrical capabilities, as well as its social networking enhancements. As a moral perk, many of the lyrics will be legally licensed. We'll lay out the program's highs and lows, general availability, and some legal particulars.
We mostly liked TuneWiki when it first came out--certainly the idea of it, and in general the application's performance. It is also the first application of this type that I've seen for mobile phones. (The free-to-try application MiniLyrics has been around for a while on the desktop.) TuneWiki wasn't always as stable as we'd have liked, and syncing wasn't always on-point. We looked forward to the media application's next steps. Lyrics precision and a few stability issues were still present in our preview version of TuneWiki; hopefully the latter will be addressed by the time TuneWiki 1.0 reaches the Android Market.
Streaming Internet radio
Providing Internet lyrics, and legal ones at that, are the two biggest points of interest in this update. First let's tackle the streaming Internet feature. Like Pandora, Last.FM, and Slacker Radio, TuneWiki's Internet radio feature (designated by a microphone icon on the application's navigation menu) lets you choose stations by genre and popularity, and save favorite stations. In addition, TuneWiki can display a music map showing you where else the song is playing at that moment, and can stream lyrics that users have uploaded into TuneWiki's database from its Web site--the 'wiki' element of TuneWiki's service.
TuneWiki's streaming lyrics component only works for some stations, and then the lyrics are only as good as the user-generated database itself. If you're lucky enough to get a station compatible with TuneWiki's lyrics software, making them sync with the streaming song is your next challenge.
TuneWiki tasks you with finding your place and then tapping on it, after which the software takes over and highlights the lines for you. This TuneWiki did, but on a song with a quick tempo, the feature didn't kick in until two more lines had played. This is by far the application's biggest drawback. In addition, artist credits were only present on stations that could stream TuneWiki's lyrics. For many stations, we were left in the dark.
Of legalities and lyrics
In addition to streaming Internet radio, TuneWiki is announcing a partnership with a major music publishers association that grants TuneWiki the rights to stream lyrics for almost 2 million songs. Music law is complicated stuff, but as TuneWiki's President, Amnon Sarig, explains it, the licenses let TuneWiki legitimately give the green light to many user-submitted lyrics. Those that fall outside the licensing scope are protected under the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Wikipedia). TuneWiki isn't breaking any laws--for now--by streaming any unlicensed lyrics its users upload, unless the rights-owner asks for a take-down. (Sarig told CNET in an interview that his company complies with publishers' requests to block song lyrics.) This is interesting stuff, especially in light of Warner Music Group's lawsuit against Seeqpod for its role in corralling copyrighted MP3s for users to play. Perhaps TuneWiki's show of good faith and latest licensing gains will shield it from similar lawsuits.
Availability
TuneWiki plans to submit the free version 1.0 of its lyrics application to Google's Android Market. By March or April, the company expects to release TuneWiki for BlackBerry, J2ME, Symbian, and Windows Mobile. These versions are currently being tested in a closed beta program. It is also possible to download TuneWiki onto jailbroken iPhones and iPod Touches, though there is currently no listing in the iTunes App Store.
Howcast, the how-to video host and platform, on Friday released its iPhone application, bringing its entire catalog of short-form informational videos to the popular device.
Much like YouTube's iPhone application, the Howcast app lets users search for videos, find them in a small selection of featured clips, or pick them by popularity or publication date.
Browse and view the latest how-to videos on your phone.
(Credit: Howcast; CNET Networks)It's wonderfully entertaining--including the option to shake the phone (or iPod Touch) and go to a random clip, no matter what part of the application you're using.
Where the mobile experience falls short of its Web counterpart is in lacking an integrated wiki system and wonderful custom Flash player.
The wikis, in particular, make the Web product far more compelling, since you can get the gist of any video in a few simple paragraphs that can be edited by the Howcast community.
For something like a food recipe, the wiki descriptions can be immensely handy, especially if you're planning to take your iPhone into the kitchen or use Howcast when you're out shopping.
Likewise, the lack of the Web service's video player, which lets you skip to different sections of the video, is a real bummer. It's something that's possible with QuickTime chapter markers, but it's not currently implemented in the iPhone app. In future versions, I'd love to see that change.
Howcast is free and available in Apple's App Store. If you're a fan of the site, it's definitely worth a download, despite its shortcomings.
Veveo, a company that aims to provide "video anywhere" solutions through its Vtap online video service, announced Thursday that it has launched a free app called WikiTap for the iPhone and for Android-based devices that's intended to help users quickly find the most relevant Wikipedia search results.
At first glance, having another Wikipedia app doesn't sound too thrilling, but WikiTap goes beyond accessing the popular online encyclopedia. According to the company, WikiTap will allow users to use improve the experience already offered by other Wikipedia iPhone apps by uploading photos and videos to the article. That ability makes WikiTap the first app of its kind on the iPhone and Android that allows users to not only read articles, but contribute multimedia while on-the-go. All the uploaded media will also be searchable by others using WikiTap.
"Built on vtap technology, which delivers over 250 million media search queries per month, the iPhone and Android community now have the ability to easily search through millions of Wikipedia documents, and micro-contribute by uploading videos on any topic, from anywhere, making it an even more powerful knowledgebase for other users," Murali Aravamudan, CEO of Veveo, said in a statement.
In order to upload relevant videos to Wikipedia, WikiTap will automatically "mash in" relevant videos from Vtap's video search index and allow users to rate its relevance to the article through a "Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down" voting mechanism.
Veveo's WikiTap application is available now in the Android Store and on the iTunes App Store.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Given that TuneWiki was one of the 10 top winners in Google's Android Challenge, it's no surprise we're taken by its originality and ambition.
The free music application for Google Android not only plays your media, but it also helps build your library with songs and YouTube music videos. An additional search for streaming lyrics attempts to get you singing the right words at the right time.
TuneWiki doesn't ace everything it sets out to do, but if you're willing to give it some leeway, you won't be disappointed. Check out the First Look video here for more details and an up-close view of TuneWiki in action.
Related:
Ringdroid: Awesome Android ringtone-maker
Gmote for Android gets Mac and PC music going
Full Google Android coverage
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CNET)
Does it strike anyone else as odd that Google has left some basic capabilities to third-party Android developers? Video playback in the day where multimedia is king seems like such an obvious application to perfect and include on a platform with a lot to prove, yet the only video-related application the T-Mobile G1 sports is a YouTube application.
That makes perfect sense, YouTube having been bought by Google and all, but what if the videos you want to see plain haven't been uploaded yet?
Thankfully, the Android add-on Video Player reliably fills a basic role by playing MPEG4 or 3GPP videos (H.264 and H.263 standards) from the SD card. It is, however, very light on the controls, with just a pause button and forward and backward advance and no extras on the Menu button. Android Market developer Jeff Hamilton also states in his specifications that videos need to be 480 by 352 for proper playback. We were able to convert, load, and play back 5-minute and 45-minute videos without a hitch.
TuneWiki, which I wrote about yesterday, is more of a replacement for the music player, though it also enhances basic YouTube functions when music videos are the focus. TuneWiki will attempt to sync lyrics to the music video and will save videos for repeat playback and karaoke practice.
So far, these options are slim when compared with other mobile platforms that offer fuller management features out of the box.
Read more CNET reviews and news on Google Android, Android apps, and the T-Mobile G1.
Updated: To correct licensing information.
The music player on the Google Android G1 phone isn't bad, but can it scroll lyrics while the song plays, download you new songs for free, and play music videos?
All that is packaged into the free TuneWiki music player, a much more complex and ambitious Android app than most of its cohorts debuting in the Android Market today. Not only does TuneWiki catalog the songs already on your phone, it also supplies you with quick links to download free songs, and links to play videos coupled with lyrics, some licensed.
You can use TuneWiki to create a playlist, listen to top 50 videos and songs, and search for song lyrics in multiple languages. TuneWiki's real ambition shows in its tools to search, save, and play YouTube music videos with synchronized lyrics.
It stumbles slightly, however, with a partial-screen playback of medium quality and song lyrics that don't quite sync if there's a spoken intro. While there is a tool tucked into the context menu to resync lyrics, this wasn't always successful.
Like most apps of our age, TuneWiki has a dorky-cool social-networking aspect. You can search a "music map" to see what people nearby are playing on TuneWiki at any moment, and then click on the anonymous TuneWiki user to see how many other people are playing the song worldwide. As another social-networking spoke, other users can contact you through TuneWiki, anonymously or otherwise, to talk tunes.
In other details, TuneWiki displays some small Google Ads, and you'll need an account to access some features. That's something you have to do online, though, not from the phone.
Regardless of any drawbacks, TuneWiki is one of the highest-reaching music applications we've seen on any mobile platform. It may be somewhat flawed at this stage of development, but it's well worth the download.
Read more CNET news and reviews on Google Android, Android applications, and the T-Mobile G1 phone.
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Google)
WikiMobile Encyclopedia has been around for awhile for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile Pocket PC, so it's no surprise to see it formatted for the Google Android G1 phone.
Just as advertised, WikiMobile Encyclopedia crawls Wikipedia.com for articles, offering up predictive search queries as you type your term. You can also search Wikipedia for a random article or browse what's popular, especially if you have a few minutes to kill or are looking for a factoid to impress people at a dinner party.
Interestingly, instead of scrolling or flicking the results page vertically, the app slices the text into pages. You click "next" or flick the screen to the left to advance. It's too bad there isn't an option for those who prefer consuming their articles in one gulp instead of being force-fed bites.
Much of the program's functionality hides out in the center menu button where you can view just the article's pictures, a table of contents, and, where available, a bunch of quick facts. It's useful being able to bookmark pages for reference; e-mailing them to a friend is the next natural progression. It's a good app for playing information fetch, but we'd like to see it take advantage of more of the G1's features.
Get more of CNET's news and reviews on the T-Mobile G1 and Google Android apps.
