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.
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.
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.
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:
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. 🙂