Radio and Musics

HD Radio technology is the next big thing because it makes it makes FM stations sound nearly as good as listening to a CD. The sound is just amazing – clean, pure and crystal-clear. It even enables AM stations to sound as good as an FM station today.

What’s the difference? While both HD AM and HD FM are digital, AM radio has smaller sections of bandwidth than FM radio. This means there is not enough "space" to give AM stations the same near-CD quality as FM stations. But there is enough bandwidth that AM stations will be able to broadcast with the same clarity of signal as one of today’s analog FM stations. This performance boost is expected to make AM radio a better alternative to FM than it has been – to give you more listening choices.

Because HD radio is digital, its signals can be subdivided. This allows a station to multi-cast. meaning it could broadcast two or more programs at the same time. So, its listeners might be able to choose between music from the ’60s, ‘70s or ‘80s – on the same station at the same time.

This could change everything you know about radio because it allows stations to do more niche broadcasting, just as cable as brought niche channels to television. For example, the radio station you’ve always tuned to for classic rock, might subdivide into classic rock, and reggae, or classic rock and old school hip-hop.
Naturally, you would be able to hear these stations only if you have an HD receiver. If you don’t, you’ll still hear the same AM or FM station you’re used to.

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The CD label market is on an upward swing since the explosion of computer awareness and release of user-friendly printing software on the market. People are eagerly switching to easy and innovative ways of CD labeling, and companies are investing money in research to come up with even faster and more user-savvy labeling options. The CD label makers are also cashing in on the increasing laser and ink jet label market.

Many methods are used to commercially label the CDs. Out of these, screen, offset, pad and flexographic printing are widely used. These involve large-scale processes used to label a huge quantity of CDs carrying the same pattern, or in the instance where exact matches of shades are required.

A number of CD labeling software programs available in the market enable you to use only a specific brand of paper. Using some innovative labelers like the Audio Label CD labeler, you can print your CD with any kind of paper. Similarly, there are CD label makers present in the industry which arrange the text of the label in such a way that it fits into the space you want, so the text never goes ‘off track’. This is particularly useful when you want to add a large track list and you can have the pleasure of admiring a neat label every time you use the machine.

Clip art is a rage with many businesses, and CD label makers are increasingly adding the art gallery in CD label machines. Users can quickly browse through the given images and insert the choicest figures and impressions on the labels.

Before placing your order with a commercial CD label maker, find out about his equipment and the technology he uses. Ask for some past references and ensure his shipment time. If you are ordering labels from some overseas suppliers you will have to calculate the costs involved in imports plus the time consumed in the delivery of your CD labels.

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Bruce Springsteen, an influential American singer-songwriter and guitarist, was born in 1949 in a small New-Jersean town. He made up his mind to be a musician at 7, having seen Elvis Presley’s concert on TV. His parents were rather poor, and Bruce’s mother had to take a loan to buy him a good guitar. That is why the main themes of Springsteen’s music are people living from hand to mouth and politics. Bruce strated making performances in 1965, in 1972 he gathered the E Street Band, though for a couple of years it was not called so. Springsteen and the E Street Band worked together for many years, though parted in 1989. Bruce Springsteen is best known for his albums Born To Run and Born In The U.S.A.. He has multiple Grammies and an Oscar for the Philadelphia soundtrack. He is also the inventor of lo-fi music that became the cult genre now among indie-rockers. In the ealry 2000s Springteen reunited with the E Street Band. In 2007 the artist recorded Magic, his long waited and first in about 5 years album with the E Street Band.

Magic: magically good
Magic contains 10 brand new songs by Springsteen and one alredy heard, Long Walk Home. The first single from the album, Radio Nowehere, is a very touching composition with deep lyrics. Girls In Their Summer Clothes is a very good rocky song with the E Street Band having done their best. A very beautiful work is for sure Gypsy Byker, it has an upbeat romantic melody reminding of travelling at high speeds on the American highways. Magic, the title track of the album, can boast of a wonderful arrangement and meditative melody, creating magical atmosphere thanks to the rythmical tinkling of the tambourine. The final track on Magic, Devil’s Arcade, is the only one that deals with politics. It has a very strong lyrics and powerful images that are sure to leave no one calm. This song gives a perfect insight in Springsteen’s origination and his political views. Moreover, after listening it leaves everyone with a clear own view on these questions even if you are far from it all.

New masterpiece of the American rock-idol
Magic is the less politically oriented album by Springsteen in the last decade. The several previous albums (both with the E Street Band and without) were dedicated to the protests against George W. Bush as a candidate at the presidential elections, the Iraq War and the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The reason of such change is not commented by the musician. May be he just got tired of politics. Moreover, Magic was recorded in an extremely amusing way - during two months the E Street Band recorded on weekends, while Springsteen and his producer Brendan O’Brien worked over the vocals and made the dubbing on weekdays. It can be said about the result that this album is also the most guitar accentuated of all Springsteen’s creativity. And as for the sound, there are more romantic and pop moments on Magic that were not typical of Bruce recently, though were very usual on his very first records. Anyway, it is an extremely good rock record by Springsteen and his friends from the E Street Band that has great moments and for sure features some of the best songs Bruce has ever written.

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There is a huge selection of gear to choose from when wanting to record music. Sound quality is very important when recording music so the recording musician can select the right equipment for getting the best sound. To do so however, to get the best quality in creating and recording music you need to know a few details regarding various recording gear.
To start, someone who is looking to record music professionally should have some short of multi-track recorder. You can either have an analog multi-track recorder that takes a tape or a digital multi-track recorder that has a digital tape; digital tapes similar to zip drivers. Nevertheless, the analog tape recorders are usually the cheapest recorders out there as well. The recently popular multi-track recorder is the one that uses a hard drive. This type of multi-tracker recorder is based on a computer hard drive that you can save your music and channel configuration on. Depending on the make of the digital multi-track recorder the size of the hard drive varies and so does the amount of information that you can save on. In addition, some hard drives can also be upgraded and to have more memory.
Before you start recording you need to get the sound to the recorder from the source. A microphone is a basic and most common way to do so. A microphones utility depends on a few factors but in general microphones are categorized based on quality and consistency. Quality of sound is one thing but the second one is consistency which is also important. Consistency has to do with the perception of sound as well as for the eventual usage of the sound. Moving on to other things you will need to record music, is to have a way to listen to what is being recorded in the studio. These types of studio speakers are referred to s studio monitors or reference monitors. These speakers are specially designed for music production and are very accurate. They are made to give out highly detailed overall sound without focusing on a particular frequency.
After the multi-track recorder, a microphone and a monitor you will also need a mixer. A mixer is an audio device that can either be digital or an actual piece of electronic equipment. What a mixer does is mixes signals. It mixes the audio inputs into viable audible sound wave entities that can be manipulated in way that can be altered around for the best levels. A mixer works great in bringing all your studio components together and allows the recording professional to control the audio levels as well as connect other instruments and studio components. A mixer supports audio mixing consoles that allow you to alter the tone dynamics of more than one audio signal at the same time. Aside from the above the recording professional will also need a variety of cables, connectors and other kinds of recording equipment. It is not hard to start your own studio. These days it can be achieved very easy and at a low budget.

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If you’ve been looking around for an mp3 player, chances are you’re very confused with all the different specifications and the vast array of models out there. You’ve read that you can get your entire music collection on to one mp3 player and that’s true - but not every mp3 player. You have also been told that you can throw them around, go jogging with them, climb a mountain with one and all this is true - but again, not every mp3 player will withstand this treatment.

Basically, if you want to get physical with your mp3 player then you need one with no moving parts. In this case, the iPod is not what you want. You would be looking for a machine which saves it’s music to memory. Some of the most popular mp3 players which fall into this category are in the Creative MuVo range.

There are basically three types of mp3 player. Hard drive based, memory based and mp3 CD player based. The hard drive mp3 players allow you to store thousands of tunes whilst the memory based version sacrifices music volume for freedom of movement. You can even get waterproof mp3 players! The mp3 CD players read the mp3 music from a CD which you have pre-burned.

So now you have enough information to know what type of mp3 player you should be looking for. Now what about capacity? How much music can you get on the various players out there? Let’s take a look ….

If you want your music to sound good you want to be using at least CD quality mp3s. One minute of CD quality mp3 takes up around 1Mb. The memory based mp3 players have a top limit of around 500Mb meaning you can get roughly 120 average length tunes on there. But the top end hard drive versions go up to as much as 60Gb which is a whole lot of music - an anorak’s dream

Another consideration is battery life. The hard drive mp3 players plough through the batteries at a rate of knots since the disk has to physically turn. The memory based option uses a lot less battery power. Many of the memory based mp3 players use the AAA size battery which is very convenient since you don’t need a re-charger and you don’t need to search for hard to find battery types. You’ll find that most hard drive versions use lithium-ion rechargeable batteries and if you use your mp3 player a lot, your re-charger will be in regular use. Many people simply leave the power lead plugged in when they are at home.

An important factor in your decision should be the size of the unit. If you want to use your player at the gym or while you’re out jogging then you’ll want the smallest player possible. There are some really tiny models on the market these days. You will usually have to sacrifice some storage with a very small mp3 players but you can usually get enough music on there to have a good long workout.

If you want to use your mp3 player more at home then size will not be such a great consideration. The iPod is still a very compact unit and most people will be able to fit their entire collection on there. Of course the iPod is not your only option and there are many excellent manufacturers out there. Just be careful of some of the cheap imports you see on ebay, often there is no support for these players.

As a replacement for the home hi fi system, the mp3 player is becoming more and more popular. High fidelity purists obviously will never be swayed but to most of us the quality of the mp3 is perfectly adequate for our everyday listening purposes.

In fact many modern players coming on to the market have been designed with both portability and versatility in mind. What better way to entertain your dinner party guests than to have your mp3 player randomly selecting music from over ten thousand of your favourite tracks? No more fumbling around in your CD rack trying to find the disk that lost its cover

Now you know what to look for, go get yourself a player and join the digital music revolution.

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An online marketing and technology solutions company is offering Internet users a new, easy way to listen to music on their computers.

Centale Inc. recently launched its Music on Demand program, a patent-pending algorithmic search online application that allows you to use Microsoft’s Windows Media Player as an instantaneous connection to search the Internet for millions of audio and video files and listen to or view them without having to take the time to download any files.

It has a high-tech look and performance and switch-skin technology that will appeal to the millions of people listening to and purchasing music via the Internet, said Patrick T. Parker, chief executive officer and chairman of the publicly traded company (OTC BB: CNTL).

The application has been approved by Microsoft as an official plug-in "power toy/utility" for the Windows Media Player.

"We believe our acceptance by Microsoft as an official plug-in validates our technology," Parker said. "It will provide a substantial distribution channel for our Music on Demand and bring listening pleasure to millions of people worldwide."

According to Nielsen//Net-

Ratings, more than 200 million Americans use the Internet. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are more than 500 million desktops in the U.S. Fifty-six percent of Internet users watch video clips or listen to audio clips; 34 percent listen to music at a Web site; and 25 percent download music files.

It is reported that 2.2 million people subscribe to digital music services, compared to 1.5 million estimated by IFPI’s Digital Music Report published in January. The industry expects this trend to continue as the crackdown on illegal digital music services increases.

In addition to its Music on Demand program, Centale’s product line includes the Catalyst EV direct-to-desktop marketing tool, customized browsers, instant messenger applications and screensavers.

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If you are the one who loves music and also own a computer then Mp3 has transformed the way you listen music. If you are new to PC audio and you are wondering about the whole hype then you should know what exactly MP3 is and why it is so popular.

To save music to a computer without compression requires huge amount of memory, one minute of uncompressed CD audio occupies about 10 megabytes of hard drive space. MP3 was designed to save a space while retaining the sound quality and it does the job very well and compresses music to one tenth or less of the original file size and offers near CD quality sound. To do this, Mp3 discards some parts of the audio signal that it finds that listeners won’t miss. For many people, a slight degradation results in the reasonable trade off for the hard drive space that they gain. After the invention of MP3, a computer user can store lots of songs in one place and listen to them in any of the order they wish.

<b> Mp3 gets into the competition </b>
Today, Mp3 is no longer the only game in the town and when it comes to compressing audio for storage on your computer there are many codec s available such as AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) and WMA (Windows Media Audio).

Both of these new alternatives are perceptual coding schemes like the MP3 and they discard the audio information that they consider is least important to the sound quality. Many people even claim that these newer codec’s are superior to the Mp3.

The market today is full of portable MP3 players almost all of which are compatible with MP3. Most of them can also play WMA, some can handle AAC files. These players also decode and play back all files directly from their original file format but some other come with other software that transcodes files into a separate format.  But in any of the case, the quality of sound that reaches your ears depends upon various other things and the most important one is the codec you used to save the music to your hard drive in the first place.

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New Music Billboard allows the public to listen to music for free from their favorite Indie Artist.  Traditional Billboards cover mostly mainstream music, but New Music Billboards features new and up and coming Singers and Bands.

New Music Billboards features music that runs along side more mainstream or commercial music and has frequently used the term Indie music. Small labels or individuals marketing their own music often participate in the Indie Music scene.  It is important to uncover unknown bands because there is so much music talent out there who simply lack ample marketing.
During the 1990s, Indie music became widespread and answered an increasingly larger market of people who were looking for alternatives to the mainstream music institutions.  In the same way that “alternative” was used before it became an actual genre of mainstream music, Indie is sometimes used in place of “underground” as a term to describe music. 

There are many places online where you can download Indie music for free. One of the better resources is our site at  New Music Billboard.com

Becoming involved in the Indie music scene typically, and sometimes still does, require one to move to a city or town where there’s an active Indie music scene. Traditionally, hooking up with other artists and fans was a way to build your career as a new artist. 

Seasoned musicians and new artists now have the opportunity to record and publish their music from the comfort of their own studio.  Income can be made from building a fan base and by selling merchandise, concert tickets and traditional CDs.
Some Indie groups are now picked up by Indie record labels or even major record labels.  A good resource to find Indie Music Labels is New Music Label.com

While Indie music is still considered off from mainstream music scene, it is a place where new artists can build a fan base and begin many of the marketing components that they are going to need to be success in the longer term.

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Consumers have moved rapidly to adopting digital formats for consuming entertainment-related content. The most obvious example of this is music and video downloads, with Apple’s iTunes and YouTube as leading examples. Apple has sold more than one billion songs via its iTunes music store and it continues to demonstrate a spectacular rate of growth. Over 30,000,000 individuals have purchased an iPod portable music device, and tens of millions of other consumers use one of dozens of other portable devices to listen to music. Other platforms for listening to music are equally successful, and in the case of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player even more dominant with over 90,000,000 systems running the software globally. Real Networks Rhapsody, and Yahoo! Music represent other major entrants in this space. In addition to those companies selling licensed music downloads for a fee, peer-to-peer networks such as Limewire and Morpheus claim to have tens of millions of users sharing music and other files on a continual basis.

As consumers have become comfortable purchasing (and stealing) music online, they are now beginning to download other digital forms of entertainment, including music videos, short-subject films, television shows, and even full-length Hollywood pictures. Traditional media companies have recognized the opportunity to establish new revenue streams and leverage old assets by enabling consumers to download television programming for a fee, and the adoption rate appears to match the early days of music downloading. The increasing penetration of broadband connections (over 50 million homes in the US), advances in software that enables high-quality downloads, and content companies recognizing an enormous opportunity to distribute directly and inexpensively to consumers has created a tidal shift in the number of digital media assets available for download to computers, handheld devices, and even cell phones.

Companies such as YouTube are at the forefront of the intersection of video entertainment and the fragmentation of media due to the empowerment of the consumer. Hundreds of millions of videos are downloaded weekly from YouTube (as well as dozens of competitors), and a significant portion of those videos are not “professionally” produced. More importantly, new talent in various entertainment fields are being discovered through these distribution platforms and forever changing how entertainment is conceived, produced, distributed, and valued.

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These days, Dolby is a household name. The infamous "DD" symbol can be found on almost every piece of modern audio equipment out there. This includes gaming consoles, HDTVs, home theaters, both home and car stereos, cinemas, and personal computers.

It all started in 1949 when a man named Ray Dolby went to work for Ampex Corporation part-time while still in high school. He worked on an assortment of ventures in correlation with audio instrumentation. He continued to work for Ampex while attending college at Stanford University. During this period, he branched off to unite with a small team of Ampex engineers who were determined to invent the world’s first video tape recorder. Dolby centered in on the electronic aspects of the project. The team succeeded with their introduction of this new technology in 1956. Ampex then sold its first video tape recorder for $50,000.

Dolby graduated from Stanford in 1957 and was awarded the Marshall Fellowship at Cambridge University, England. He studied at Cambridge for 6 years, earning a Ph.D. in physics. In 1965, Ray Dolby started his own company, Dolby Laboratories, Inc. His first product from this new and innovative company was identified as Dolby A-type Enoise reduction. It significantly reduced the amount of background noise or hissing sounds found in professional tape recording without jeopardizing the original content of the material being recorded. This was the beginning of the many advances Dolby would make in the complex world of audio compression and expansion.

Ray Dolby developed an ingenious method of noise reduction by separating soft signals from loud ones, then simply not processing those loud signals. He then split up the spectrum into several bands to avoid clashing or pumping, therefore generating white noise. This method would become integrated in numerous aspects of society’s rapidly growing fascination with electronic entertainment. Early on, consumers weren’t satisfied with the ‘flat’ mono sound ordinary radios and cassette players emitted. Everyone wanted to hear music in stereo.

This new sound also found its way into movie theaters. Dolby sound made its debut in the original recording of Star Wars, and continues to revolutionize the audience’s experience even today. The sound is both more spectacular and more natural at the same time.  Because of this technology, even video games are more realistic; the sounds are more powerful as they are not only heard, but also felt. The sound is so tangible it is as if fantasy has in fact become reality. More people are staying home instead of going to movie theaters since Dolby surround sound was introduced into the home theater system.

Recent advancements include Dolby 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, and 9.1 (that’s right, nine full-range channels), Dolby Digital Surround EX, Dolby SR, Dolby TrueHD, and countless others. It is obvious that Dolby is the reigning “King of Sound” and most likely will be for generations to come.

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