Last.fm’s decision to start charging for web streaming of their radio service outside the US, UK and Germany made reasonable financial sense for them didn’t make me too happy.

As a consequence of the news (it seems), a new open source project was started called libre.fm. Right now the project is in closed alpha and will allow you to collect the information of songs you’re listening to, similar to audioscrobbler.

If you get an invite, all you have to do is install turtle to start sending the information of your listening habits. Libre.fm will have all of the code released under GNU AGPL and much like laconi.ca, you will be able to launch your own instance or use their own hosting to store your data.

Right now it is an early stage project, but since it is open source who knows what will appear in the future?

Now if only I could get an invite…

Songbird, our favorite open source music manager has just released their 0.6 version. According to the website, the new release is “harder, better, faster, stronger”.

Looking at the release notes, it shows that the team has been placing quite a bit of work to improve its performance and usability. This project created by Mozilla promises to be the next big thing in the way you discover, play, and manage your music. We actually agree.

Although it hasn’t reached its mature full 1.0 release yet, Songbird has been of quite good use for us since last year. I really like the add-ons built for it and its main strength, being able to browse the web and discover songs with it.

Running on Java, aTunes is a multi-platform application that manages your library of songs. Do not let the name resemblance fool you, according to the site aTunes will only read songs from your iPod but not write to them.

The program can play pretty much all the major audio track formats (mp3, ogg, flac, wma, and more). The playlist functionality, podcast management, and cd ripper tools look to be pretty solid.

Honestly, I don’t like applications running on Java since they tend to be very sluggish. But, I like the fact that aTunes is cross-platform and can be a very nice program for those constantly working between different  operating systems.

If you’d like to try it, download it here.

Although I’m not a musician, I have an aunt who is. While trying to find everything that she would need to convert to Linux, I found MuseScore, a music score typesetter.

From their official site, the list of features include:

• WYSIWYG, notes are entered on a “virtual note sheet”
• unlimited number of staves
• up to four voices/staff
• easy and fast note entry with mouse, keyboard or midi
• integrated sequencer and FluidSynth software synthesizer
• import and export of MusicXml and standard midifiles (SMF)
• platform independent code for Linux, Windows and Mac
• GNU GPL licenced

You can download MuseScore for Linux, and there is also a test version for Windows. Now I’m one step closer to convincing her to switch.