Streaming Music

Remember portable MP3 players like the classic iPod? Seems like forever ago that they were all the rage, and I don't think I've seen a real one in the wild for a good 5 years now. These devices died out so quickly as a direct result of the onset of smartphones, which allow us ...more

For $100 each year (unless you used Faisal's workaround to save yourself twenty bucks), Amazon Prime membership gives you access to all the best that Amazon has to offer. From free 2-day shipping to Prime Instant Video, there's a lot to like about the service. Today, the onli ...more

While I love Spotify, I don't like it devouring my data plan when streaming music away from a Wi-Fi network. If you have the foresight or time to download Spotify tracks for offline playback later, great. For those of you who like to listen to your music more randomly like I d ...more

Piracy, it can be argued, is the scourge of the internet. But when it comes to music, sometimes it's best to give a listen to a track or album before deciding to spend your hard-earned money on fully supporting it. Unfortunately, there are few good ways to do this without exp ...more

T-Mobile continues to make waves in the U.S. wireless market behind CEO John Legere's UnCarrier program. At the latest installment in a series of industry-challenging announcements, Uncarrier 5.0 unveiled Test Drive. The new program is set to allow would-be customers to try ou ...more

Google Play Music has teamed up with TripAdvisor to make planning your next vacation a little more fun, and they're throwing in a nice deal for good measure. Google is offering new subscribers a free two-month trial of its music streaming service when you install the TripAdvi ...more

In direct competition with Pandora, iTunes Radio, and Spotify, Samsung has just launched Milk Music—a strangely named, yet completely free music streaming service for Android. Currently exclusive to Samsung owners (unless you're rooted), Milk Music is similar to much of its c ...more

When streaming services like Spotify or Pandora compete for customers, the main differentiating factor is the size of their libraries. While these and comparable services usually run somewhere around $10 per month, a completely free alternative may actually have the most expan ...more

Smartphones generally have limited storage, but counter this issue with an always-on internet connection. This led to the proliferation of cloud storage services, which allow us to store and access our large media libraries remotely. The problem here is that most cloud storag ...more

When it comes to streaming services, Google Play Music is one of the best options for both Android and iOS. Perhaps its single greatest feature is the fact that you can upload as many as 50,000 of your own songs to Google's servers, then stream your library to any device witho ...more

It's always a pain to make sure you have enough storage on your smartphone. Pictures and videos occupy a lot of space, so your music library has to take a back seat—otherwise, you might see that pesky "Storage Full" notification at any time. If you have a large music library, ...more

Spotify's massive song catalog can be streamed in decent quality on iPhone or Android without any tinkering. But if you're an audiophile, you've probably noticed that the sound quality can fluctuate from time to time. You're not wrong — Spotify has the default music quality s ...more

Thanks to their partnership with Tidal, over 30 million Sprint customers can access Hi-Fi audio on the go. And the Jay-Z-owned music service isn't limited to just Sprint customers — for $19.99/month, anyone can listen to lossless audio from their favorite artists. But streamin ...more

Trying to figure out which music streaming service to subscribe to can be a difficult task when the playing field is so crowded. Each has its benefits, as well as downsides, so finding the right one for your needs and wants can take a lot of overwhelming research. But we've do ...more

Last week Amazon set their sights on the mobile app market, launching their Appstore for Android. This week they're attacking Android devices once again, but that's not all—they're getting into the online storage biz. On Monday, they launched Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Clo ...more

There is no SD card support on the Nexus 7, so managing internal storage can be tricky. There are ways to free up space, but the biggest space hog on my tablet is music, and that's not something I'm willing to delete just yet. I could add more storage space with a USB drive, ...more

While both Rdio and Beats Music look to be developing support for Chromecast, Spotify has kept their distance from the Google dongle, focusing instead on "several prevailing priorities." As an avid Spotify user, I (like many others) was disappointed to hear the news, as casti ...more

AllCast, from renowned developer Koushik Dutta (better known as Koush), allows users to stream personal media, such as movies, photos, and music from mobile devices to Chromecast and other streaming devices. We've covered the application in the past, but it had only been avai ...more

Up until now, the closest thing we've had to Spotify casting is Projectify, which streams music videos from YouTube and other video sites to Chromecast using music from your Spotify playlists. Although this was not the most convenient way to cast music, since it seemed that S ...more

Thanks to its longevity and familiarity among web designers, Flash is still alive and thriving, but HTML5 is catching up since it can render faster in web browsers, can be customized by developers on a per platform basis, doesn't need a plugin to run, and is less vulnerable th ...more

It's been a great week for Chromecast owners. First, Google released the development kit, allowing devs to install the casting code into their apps. Then, CyanogenMod dev Koush updated his AllCast app to support the Chromecast. That means you can shoot personal movies, music, ...more

One of the highest rated posts on Spotify's own community forum is titled "Add support for Google Chromecast," a clear indicator of not only how much this feature is desired, but also of Spotify's lack of care for it. Remaining consistent with statements made in the past, Spot ...more

Koushik Dutta, the developer behind the Android app AllCast, has made the leap over to the realm of personal computers with his latest offering. AllCast Receiver for the Chrome browser, much like its Android counterpart that turns older devices into media servers, allows you ...more

The Chromecast may be slowly weaving its way into the smartphone ecosystem, but the amount of supported Android apps that are available for the streaming media player are still severely limited. Google Play Music is one of the native apps for the Chromecast, allowing you to s ...more

A single movie download can consume a good ten percent of the storage on your Nexus 7 tablet, unless you went all crazy and opted for the 32GB model. Even then you're bound to run out of space fast, especially if you're like me and have tons of media files you want readily acc ...more

When Apple‘s iTunes was introduced back in 2001, it rekindled my interest and purchasing of music. I was so excited by the program that I immediately started converting all my rather large collection of CDs into MP3 tracks. I then sold off my CDs and remaining vinyl albums, an ...more

Back in 2018, Spotify began testing a new mobile feature that has grown very tiresome: three to eight-second looping videos that take over the entire screen. Known as Canvases, they effectively hide the cover art and lyrics of the current song — and they're still very much aro ...more

Despite the rise of music streaming, the experience of immersing oneself in the artwork and lyrics of old school albums is alive again, as sales of vinyl records and CDs have outpaced digital downloads for the first time since 2011. Now, the latest album from Amsterdam-based N ...more

For well over a year, Spotify's most requested feature was to add Chromecast support. While they left the request unanswered, it seemed that Spotify just didn't want anything to do with the $35 streaming stick. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, Google and Spotify announced ...more

Hip-hop artist Drake once rapped that "goin' online...ain't part of (his) day," but that's not stopping him from promoting his new double album, Scorpion, via augmented reality on Snapchat. Using Snapchat's Shoppable AR platform, the experience puts users into Drake's hoodie, ...more

All you paying Spotify users are about to get another exclusive privilege besides getting out of all those annoying "Ever wonder what it would be like to have Spotify premium?" ads. The Sweden-based company is looking to lower the royalty fees they have to pay to major record ...more

In an attempt to get more people to subscribe to Apple Music, the Music app was completely revamped in the iOS 8.4 update for iPad and iPhone to include new tabs for New, For You, and Connect. But if you don't plan to use Apple's streaming music service, and don't care to fol ...more

The Billboard Charts have been a measurement of commercial success for pop songs since roughly the time that radios became a household item. In its modern form, Billboard ranks the sales and performance of all singles with its "Hot 100" chart, as well as many other genre-speci ...more

While most smartphones have the ability to receive FM signals via a tuner, mobile carriers prevent users from taking advantage of this hardware — probably in an effort to get their customers to spend more money on data. NextRadio is an app that allows users to listen to the r ...more

When you think about it, YouTube may actually have one of the largest music collections on the planet. This is why, at $10 per month, Google's new YouTube Music Key subscription is a solid value for many users, especially with its inclusion of Google Play Music. But a new And ...more

Brand loyalty is one of the main factors behind our decision to choose a particular mobile device, but it doesn't have to be the entire equation. Educated consumers know that certain devices simply fit their budget and usage better than others, which means you can't always let ...more

A growing trend for many artists (most recently Kanye West) is to offer exclusive or experimental tracks on music streaming sites like SoundCloud or YouTube before releasing them anywhere else. On rare occasions, some of these great songs never make their way onto an official ...more

When you're on the road, the last thing you need to be doing is fumbling around with your phone. But with online radio services like Spotify and Google Play Music, you almost have to use your phone to play music through your stereo, because the in-dash head units on most cars ...more

The mystery surrounding Overture, an app that showed up in the Magic Leap World app store along with the latest Lumin software release, has been cleared up. When I first discovered Overture earlier this week, before the official update announcement, I tried using it. And whil ...more

OnePlus is known for pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible for a mid-range price. One of the best things about OnePlus phones is that their battery life is fantastic in general, but to achieve this, Oxygen OS will disable or delay notifications by default once ...more

Say you're on a train to work, but you forgot your headphones. You'd normally listen to music to pass the time, but given the circumstances, your choices are to sit silently like a considerate adult, or to blare songs out of your phone's main speaker like a jerk. Thankfully, t ...more

YouTube won't let you play videos in the background on Android without paying for YouTube Red, so if it's your primary source for streaming music, and you don't want to shell out $9.99/month, you'll just have to take matters into your own hands. The simplest solution to this p ...more

We recently showed you how to recover your Shazam history from Siri, which is a lot less intuitive than finding the songs you've tagged directly in the Shazam app. But with a subscription to Rdio or Spotify, there's no need to even locate your history. You can Shazam songs and ...more

There are a few different types of Apple iPhone and iPad users: general household users who largely consume media—e.g. surfing the web, watching movies, listening to music. Other iPhone and iPad owners use their device(s) to produce stuff—written documents, edited movies, blog ...more

Officially, in order to use AirPlay to stream music from your iOS device, you would need either an Apple TV, AirPort Express, or an AirPlay-enabled receiver or set of speakers. Despite what Apple wants you to think, there is another way to stream music without any of those Air ...more

Google just announced a new and improved Chromecast at an event in San Francisco this morning, and debuted a new "Chromecast Audio" for streaming music directly to any speaker. I'm sure you rushed off to the Google Store to buy one of these promising and powerful devices, but ...more

In the wake of Apple Music making its debut on Android devices, Google has finally released its highly anticipated YouTube Music app. With these two tech heavyweights throwing their hats into the ring, the streaming music world is about to get rocked. This new standalone YouT ...more

Has this ever happened to you: You're singing a song in your head and want to look it up on Apple Music but you just can't think of its name or even who recorded it? In iOS 12, if you can sing it, you can search for it, as the update lets you find songs in Apple Music by lyric ...more

With the holidays over, a lot of people with shiny new Google Homes are getting their first chance to explore the new Google Assistant. Before the Google Home's release, the Assistant was only available for the Google Pixel and Pixel XL, or in a text-based form with Google All ...more

Soon all Android users will be able to use Samsung's cool Soundcamp app to write and record music. The announcement was made at the Samsung Developer Conference 2016, stating that the app, which was released last year for Samsung devices only, will become available to all phon ...more