December, 2014 | IT newspaper

Microsoft’s giving 100 more insanely great music albums away for free

December 16th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Dec
16

Put away those Bitcoins, folks. After dishing out 100 free, full albums during Black Friday Weekend , Microsoft’s at it again, giving away another 100 full albums for the low, low cost of absolutely nothing through December 15.
Some of the albums overlap with the previous giveaway, but there appears to be numerous new freebies in there as well, and all of the songs are stuff you’d actually wantto listen to, rather than the garbage tunes usually handed out as freebies. Here are just some of the albums available:

Babel by Mumford and Sons
Watch the Throne by Kanye West and Jay-Z
All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2
Exodus and Catch a Fire by Bob Marley
Believe Acoustic by Justin Bieber
Unapologetic by Rhianna
2Pac’s Greatest Hits
Quadrophenia by The Who
Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science
Born to Die – The Paradise Edition by Lana Del Rey
Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi
The Fame and The Fame Monster by Lady Gaga

The Microsoft Music Deals app highlighting the free albums is also offering 80 percent off numerous holiday albums and many of the top albums of 2014, selling the latest music from Maroon 5, Lana Del Rey, Weezer, and others for $1.99.
The terms of the deal are the same as before. You’ll need access to Microsoft’s Music Deals app to see the freebies, which then bumps you over to the Xbox Music app when you select a free album—meaning you’ll need Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. You’ll also need a Microsoft Account to snag the songs. The last giveaway was a U.S-only deal, and it’s very likely this one is as well, though I’ve yet to confirm that.
Once you claim the albums as your own you’re able to download the tracks as DRM-free MP3 tunes, so you’ll be able to listen to them on virtually any device—even ones that Xbox Music fails to call home.

Source: www.pcworld

How to download audio from any streaming video

December 13th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Dec
13

Streaming video is great, but sometimes it’s more than you need—or more than you canrun, if you’re away from an Internet connection. If you like to listen to podcasts, lectures, or other audio while you drive, work, or exercise, you should be able to take advantage of the huge amount of content published online every day.
In this article, we’ll show you how easy it is to download just the audio file from any streaming video and save it to your hard drive for offline listening.

Option One: Audio from YouTube videos

If the stream you want to capture is on YouTube (and let’s be honest: most of the time it will be), you can save time and use a tool designed specifically for that platform. There are a number of apps that will do what you want, but a great, free choice is Peggo.co, a web app that makes it easy to capture audio from a YouTube video.

The interface at Peggo.co is about as simple as you could hope for—there’s nothing but a big address bar, where you can copy the URL of the YouTube Video you want to capture and hit enter. You’ll now see an embedded view of the video, along with a few simple controls:

From and To: Drag the sliders if you don’t want to record the entire video.
Title and Artist: Use these two input boxes to choose a filename for your download, as well as to set the artist metadata—very useful for any software that organized media files.
Remove Silence: This option just clips any silence from the beginning or end of the video. A lot of YouTube videos have a splash screen at the beginning or end that won’t come across well in an audio-only file, so it’s worth leaving this checked.
Normalize: Keeps the volume of the video in a consistent range, so it won’t sound out of the place with other audio files.

And that’s about it—click on the Record MP3 button to save the audio stream to your disk. Incidentally, if you want to record a video, you can do that from the same Peggo.co interface. Just click on one of the video links directly below the video window.
Note: I was having difficulty getting Peggo.co to correctly download files in Chrome until I temporarily disabled my extensions. This fixed the problem, and I had no issues with either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Option Two: Audio from anything else

If you want to grab audio from a source other than YouTube, your options are a little more limited. I haven’t found a good audio-only downloader for non-YouTube videos (if you have, please share in the comments), but there are several general-purpose FLV ripper extensions that install into your browser and easily save streaming video as a file on your disk. If you use Chrome, a good option is Video Downloader. And if you use Firefox, tryDownloadHelper.
Once you have the video file saved to your machine, you can use any number of programs to save out the audio track. For reference, here’s how you would do that with the popular VLC player:

Open VLC
Click Media -> Convert/Save
In the next menu, click on the Addbutton next to the File Selection box and browse to your downloaded FLV file. Click Ok.
Next, click Browse next to the Destination box, and choose a location and file name for your completed audio file.
Click on the dropdown box marked Profile and choose “Audio – MP3”
Click Start

VLC will open a new playback window, with the progress bar displaying how far along the transcode is. When it’s complete, you’ll find your finished MP3 on your hard drive wherever you told VLC to save it.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Windows 10 no ‘loss leader’ for Microsoft, but making money may rely on services

December 11th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Dec
11

Microsoft won’t talk about what Windows 10 will cost until next year. But it’s looking unlikely that it will be completely free, either for users or for PC makers building larger devices, after Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said that Windows 10 won’t be a priced to keep users in the Microsoft ecosystem.
“We haven’t announced the Windows 10 pricing framework yet. But the one thing I can tell you that we’ve not had any conversations on is Windows 10 being a loss leader for us,” he said at the Credit Suisse technology conference.
The way Microsoft makes money from PCs is changing. Windows hasn’t been the biggest earner for Microsoft for some time: Turner said it was in third place behind the Office and enterprise businesses.

He also gave indications that Microsoft would look to extend the kind of deals it’s done with makers of smaller devices who get Windows for free but are encouraged to bundle deals like Office 365 subscriptions that bring income for Microsoft. Notebook makers can already get a cheaper licence for Windows 8.1 if they make Bing the default search engine. But Turner seemed to suggest Microsoft would extend that even further.
“We’ve got to monetize it differently,” he explained. “There are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product in a creative way.”
Unlike analysts, who have suggested that low-priced PCs may undermine the Windows 10 market, Turner was notably enthusiastic. “It’s wonderful to see these 9-inch and below devices explode, because that was an area where candidly, I was blocked out and I had no share of what was being built. The $199 laptop, the HP Stream, is an amazing device.”
Turner confirmed that Windows 10 will ship “by late summer and early fall” of 2015. And, he said, Microsoft will reveal what the Windows 10 business model will be “in the early part of 2015.”

Source: www.pcworld.com

Firefox is headed to iOS, browser restrictions be damned

December 9th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | software

Dec
09

After years of vowing not to bring Firefox to the iPhone and iPad, Mozilla is changing its tune—and is presumably willing to work with Apple’s rules.
“We need to be where our users are so we’re going to get Firefox on iOS,” Mozilla Release Manager Lukas Blakk wrote on Twitter. TechCrunch believes he was paraphrasing Jonathan Nightingale, Mozilla’s Vice President for Firefox, who revealed the plans during an internal company event.
Mozilla isn’t a complete stranger to iOS. Four years ago, the organization released Firefox Home, which synced bookmarks and tabs from other devices but was not a full-fledged browser. Mozilla shut down the app in 2012. While Mozilla now lets users sync their tabs and bookmarks with an online login, iOS users have been left out, potentially making Mozilla less attractive as a whole.

In the past, Mozilla has said that it wouldn’t offer Firefox on iOS because Apple doesn’t allow third-parties to use their own browsing engines. Chrome, for instance, is based off the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari, despite having its own engine called Blink for other platforms. Mozilla has bemoaned thisdominance of WebKit as promoting a “monoculture,” in which mobile webmasters only target WebKit to the exclusion of other browsers and open standards.
Unless Mozilla has a trick up its sleeve, it seems the organization will freeze its anti-Webkit crusade as it tries to win back lost users.
The story behind the story: While celebrating Firefox’s 10-year anniversary last month, Mozilla stressed its newfound emphasis on privacy, with new features like a “Forget” button and support for the DuckDuckGo search engine, which doesn’t track users. For Mozilla, bringing similar features to iPhone and iPad users may be worth adopting Webkit, even if it is a loveless embrace.

Source: www.macworld.com

Sony’s e-paper smartwatch prototype has been hiding in plain sight

December 6th, 2014 | Edited by Zoran Stosic | hardware

Dec
06

On Wednesday 26th Oct, word broke that Sony was working on a smartwatch that eschews the typical LCD screen and instead uses a wrap-around e-paper display. But this wasn’t a hush-hush secret project like what you’d expect from Apple: The Wall Street Journal reports that Sony’s Fashion Entertainments group did little to keep its smartwatch prototype under wraps.
According to the Journal, the Fashion Entertainments team showcased the watch—which it calls the FES Watch—in a campaign on the Japanese crowdfunding site Makuake that launched in September. However, since Sony’s name wasn’t on the campaign, it was able to fly under the radar and look like just another crowdfunding campaign.
The story behind the story: Fashion Entertainments is part of a larger group within Sony, called the New Business Creation Department, whose sole goal is “to draw on internal and external insight to provide a catalyst for innovation and to provide the opportunity for new ideas to transition into successful new businesses.” Sony has lost some of its cool and its reputation as an innovator over the years, and these efforts seem to be an attempt to reclaim some of the company’s dulled luster.

Not ready yet…

The FES Watch wouldn’t be the first e-paper smartwatch, but in a market currently dominated by comparatively bulky—albeit more feature-packed—LCD-based devices, the FES Watch prototype looks to be a bold step in a different direction…assuming the company is bold enough to actually release it to a wider audience, that is.
Although contributors to the crowdfunding campaign can expect to get their own FES Watch in May, according to the Journal, a Sony spokesperson stated Thursday that the company “decline[d] to comment on specifics such as the possible commercialization of this project, or any targeted product launch date.”

Source: www.pcworld.com

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