music playback
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Notezilla for iPad syncs sheet music to high-quality audio
Notezilla for iPad is a library of beautifully laid out, classical sheet music which syncs to accompanying, high-quality audio recordings. From Beethoven's Fur Elise to Handel's Messiah, Notezilla comes preloaded with the well-known classical favorites as well as an ever-expanding library of Roman-era, Baroque, classical era and contemporary classical pieces, available for a one-off US$4.99 in-app purchase. The app is perfect for those wanting to develop their sight reading while practicing their instrument. Notezilla's clear and detailed sheet music allows users to create and repeat sections of the score, change the speed of audio playback as well as revealing letter notes in the actual note heads of the music. App developer Christopher Dickson has promised to add at least one new piece of music to the app per week, and encourages users to suggest pieces to be added. If you're a classical enthusiast, this free app is certainly worth checking out. With a great selection of free pieces to sample -- and numerous more for a one-off purchase -- Notezilla provides an exciting and encouraging environment to learn and hone your classical music-playing skills.
App review: Seamless for iOS and Mac (video)
If you're the kind of person who's always listening to music and wouldn't be caught dead headphone-less, pause that song for a quick second and check out Seamless. This lightweight app links your iPhone's Music player to iTunes on your Mac in a pretty clever -- not to mention Cupertino-esque -- fashion. The whole crux of it is the "transition," which simultaneously fades out a song on one end while bringing it to full blast on the other. All it takes to get started is a quick $1.99 download for your i-device and free Mac-centric companion app. Does it work as advertised, or is it really just a gimmick? Head past the break for a quick rundown of just how seamless this utility really is.
Android Honeycomb's music app extracted, brings cloud sync and streaming to phones
Those who are familiar with Android Honeycomb might have already come across its music player's cloud syncing feature, though previous attempts to port said app to phones hadn't been successful. Whatever it was that kept crashing the app back then, it seems to have fixed itself -- after xda-developers member WhiteWidows slapped the leaked app onto his rooted EVO 4G, the phone started to automagically sync his tunes to his Google account. The modder then swapped in an empty SD card, but he was still able to stream music straight from the cloud after checking the "Stream music" option in the app. Pretty neat, eh? That said, we do wonder if Google will be able to handle the exabytes worth of high-quality Justin Bieber and Spice Girl tracks.
VLC 1.1 released, adds hardware acceleration and new codec support
VLC 1.1 was just released, adding hardware acceleration on Windows Vista, 7, and Linux (no mention of the Mac just yet), along with a general 40 percent speed boost from a massive code cleanup. A new add-on and script framework now enables extensions, which should lead to some interesting additions, and the VP8 and MEPG-4 lossless codecs have been added, along with container support for MKV HD and Google's open-source WebM format. We just gave it a quick try and things certainly do seem to perform as advertised -- hit the source link for the download.
Motorola Milestone skipping on music playback, perfect for Billy Joel's 'Movin' Out'
For a device with as much superphone street cred as the Milestone, you'd think a basic task like listening to music through the headphone jack would be a cakewalk. No problems, right? So straightforward, really, that it's not even worth testing thoroughly -- and therein lies the problem, it seems. Milestone owners on both sides of the pond are reporting en masse that music playback occasionally skips over the jack -- though stereo Bluetooth, ironically a more CPU-taxing operation, seems to be fine. For many owners, particularly those who don't carry a separate PMP, that can totally be a deal-breaker. It's said you can work around the issue by putting the phone into airplane mode, which effectively makes it a dedicated PMP anyhow -- not an optimal solution, right? Yeah, Moto, this seriously isn't shaping up to be your week, so let's just make sure you earn some brownie points with awesome customer service through this rough patch. [Thanks, Vlad G.]
DS Daily: What would you have done?
Last night's breaking rumor about a DS redesign came seemingly out of nowhere, but with the next Nintendo conference right around the corner, maybe it's not such a surprise as all that. What we did find surprising were the purported changes in the redesign. Camera? Music? Interesting, sure, but how many of us are already strapped with devices that handle those functions just fine? Is this what you would have chosen for the next DS?
