Latest Gear Live Videos
The Matrix lobby scene re-cut with an a capella soundtrack
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Movies, Videos,
I submit to you, the lobby scene from The Matrix. The original score has been stripped away, and replaced by an a capella re-enactment, including gun sound effects. Enjoy.
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Turntable.fm is the hottest music service that you aren’t using
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Music,
Turntable.fm is climbing the charts. According to a story from Betabeat, the Facebook phenom has hit 140,000 active users after just one month. Not a bad showing for a semi-closed beta with a spotty security record.
The popular service effectively combines (free) music-streaming, chat rooms, and voting, all through a Facebook portal. It's similar to Web apps such as Pandora. Turntable.fm allows you to discover new music and create your own custom playlists, only that playlist isn't just for you—you'll share it with other Facebook users in real time.
Add to the exchange a note of gameplay. After you create your DJ avatar, you can create your own room or enter someone else's (if you get overwhelmed there's a randomizer) and interact with other avatars through a chat feature. Each room supports up to five DJs. Take a seat on the stage to share your playlist, created from your own uploads or from the Turntable.fm library.
Click to continue reading Turntable.fm is the hottest music service that you aren’t using
We’re giving away 10 Slacker Premium Radio 1-year subscriptions!
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Announcements, Features, Internet, Music,
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Here at Gear Live, we love us some Slacker. If you don’t know, Slacker is a fantastic streaming music service. It has millions of songs in its catalogue, and real DJs actually control their channels, which means you get a great mix of songs that go well together, rather than something put together by an algorithm. While Slacker is free, they also have a couple of upgraded services - Slacker Radio Plus, and the newly released Slacker Premium Radio. This typically costs $10 a month:
- Play songs, artists, albums on-demand
- Custom playlists
- Unlimited Skips
- Unlimited Song Requests
- No Audio or Banner Ads
- Complete Lyrics
- Over 2 Million Songs
- Cache stations to smartphones for offline listening
- ABC News and headline news updates for any station
- "Peek Ahead" artist and album previews
We said this would be big, so here’s what we're gonna do - we are going to give away 10 one-year subscriptions to Slacker Premium Radio. How do you enter? Easy:
- Follow the Gear Live Twitter account
- On Twitter, post this tweet about our contest: “Hey @gearlive hook me up with @SlackerRadio Premium! http://gear.lv/slackerpremium” (Click here to tweet this now)
Want a bonus entry? Subscribe to Gear Live on YouTube! We will select ten random entrants on July 1 - good luck!
Orange Sound Charge shirt charges your phone using sound waves
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Accessories, Smartphones, Wearables,
Phones can run out of juice at the worst times. Orange, a French telecom giant, has been working on a shirt that can convert sound waves into electrical energy.
The shirt, dubbed Sound Charge, is a charging dock for mobile phones. According to the press release, the shirt works by "reversing the use of a product called piezoelectric film".
Piezoelectricity produces electricity from pressure. The shirt uses an "A4 panel of the modified film" to absorb sound waves which are then converted into an electrical charge "via the compression of interlaced quartz crystals." That charge is then fed to a reservoir battery which transfers the charge to the phone.
The shirt was developed in time for the Glastonbury festival this week. Orange will be conducting live tests of the shirt during the musical performances to help determine which bands "are the best to charge to".
Click to continue reading Orange Sound Charge shirt charges your phone using sound waves
Google Doodle lets you play guitar, honors Les Paul 96th birthday
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Music,
Google's Thursday homepage doodle is celebrating what would have been the 96th birthday of musician Les Paul with a playable guitar logo.
For the next 24 hours, the logo on Google.com will be replaced with the strings of a guitar that will play a tune as you strum them with your mouse. In the U.S., users can click the black "compose" button and record a 30-second track. Clicking the button again will display a link to share the song you've just created.
Google said it was inspired to include the record button because Paul, in addition to his guitar work, also "experimented in his garage with innovative recording techniques like multitracking and tape delay," Alexander Chen, a designer (and musician) with Google's Creative Lab, wrote in a blog post.
The doodle, meanwhile, was created by Google engineers Kristopher Hom and Joey Hurst as well as doodle team lead Ryan Germick. They used a combination of JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas (used in modern browsers to draw the guitar strings), CSS, Flash (for sound), and tools like the Google Font API, goo.gl and App Engine, Chen said.
Click to continue reading Google Doodle lets you play guitar, honors Les Paul 96th birthday
Feature Breakdown: Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music Beta
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Features, Google, Music,
The biggest player in digital music has finally vaporized its content. Starting this fall, you'll be able to store your digital music library on Apple's internet servers. We've already seen Amazon and Google's attempts at a Web-based music service, with the former's Cloud Player and the latter's Google Music Beta, but with iTunes' dominance in digital music, Apple's iCloud could eclipse both of them. Apple's offering differs from those of Amazon and Google in some big ways, though. Here's a rundown of the three services' differences and similarities.
A central difference of Apple's iCloud versus the others is that it's not just for music: It takes over all the former MobileMe's functions—email, contacts, calendar—along with backing up and syncing iOS device photos, app data, and iWork documents. Thus ends the stormy story of the MobileMe service, which even Steve Jobs noted at WWDC was "not our finest hour." This comparison, though will concern itself primarily with the music aspect of iCloud, iTunes in the Cloud. This piece is available as a beta by downloading iTunes 10.3.
A huge difference of iCloud's music capabilities is that you can't play songs from within a Web browser (at least as far as we have seen so far) as you can with both Amazon and Google's offerings. You'll either need an iOS device or iTunes running on a computer. True, this does include Windows PCs running iTunes, but forget any non-Apple tablets or phones. This lack of Web access is just less flexible. Nor can you stream music from its online storage—the music must be fully downloaded to play.
Click to continue reading Feature Breakdown: Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Player, Google Music Beta
iCloud: Can Apple make the cloud mainstream?
I've long since stopped kvetching over the number of things Apple chief executive Steve Jobs can attach an "i" to and call his own. The maverick CEO's track record is just too darn good. Now that we know that Apple's iCloud is a real thing, there's no sense in wondering how Jobs can have the gall to rebrand cloud computing. I'd rather focus on what Apple will do with the cl...er... iCloud now that Apple has adopted it as its own.
Is Apple new to the cloud? If you accept that at the most fundamental level, cloud computing is simply a matter of thin clients (hardware or software) accessing Internet-based services and intelligence, then the answer is no. Consider Apple's reliance on streaming services for Apple TV's TV show and movie rentals, or the way genius playlists work.
iCloud, which Apple will officially unveil at next week's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), will be more, and streaming content is only the beginning. Obviously, we expect some sort of cloud-based, access-anywhere music library. Apple may even cave and offer a subscription-based music service. These plans will only succeed if Apple has done what Google failed to do with Google Music Beta: convince the major labels to let consumers store and access purchased (and rented) music from central servers.
I think music labels fear this not only because they worry about losing further control of the digital bits that make up their vast song libraries, but because no one will ever buy more than one copy of a song again, and if they get subscription access, they're done buying music—period.
Click to continue reading iCloud: Can Apple make the cloud mainstream?
Lauren Alaina and Scotty McCreery: Are They a Couple?
Posted by K.C. Morgan Categories: Music, Television, Dating, Photos, Rumors,
“Me and Lauren have been together since day one, and we’re gonna stay together,” Scotty McCreery cried after he won the title of American Idol. This was just moments after it was announced that he’d won; moments after runner-up Lauren Alaina grabbed his head and planted a kiss on him.
“He might be my boyfriend… ask him,” she said of Scotty in a later interview.
So, someone did. But McCreery maintains that he’s “still single.” According to his version, he and Lauren have “gotten really close, but I don’t know about the more than friends stuff.”
Their finale performance songs (McCreery’s “I Love You This Big” and Alaina’s “Like My Mother Does”) are available on iTunes.
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American Idol 10: Winner!
Posted by K.C. Morgan Categories: Music, Prime Time, Reality, FOX, American Idol, Video,
American Idol’s 10th finale opened with all due pomp and circumstance. Ryan Seacrest wore a tuxedo, but black tie was optional for everyone else. More than 122 million votes, a record number, were counted to determine whether Lauren Alaina or Scotty McCreery would become the next American Idol.
The year’s Top 13 performed “Born This Way” to open the night’s festivities, each dressed in white like angels. If only they sounded like angels. To call the number bad would be too nice. But the show would improve vastly from here...
Click to continue reading American Idol 10: Winner!
Glee: Season 2 Ends with New York Dreams
Posted by K.C. Morgan Categories: Comedy, Music, Prime Time, FOX, Gossip, Video,
In the year’s most highly-anticipated episode of Glee, the New Directions traveled from Lima, Ohio to the grand city of New York, New York.
The opening started with Times Square, larger than life with its lights and billboards. In the midst of it all stood Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) in her adorable striped coat. “I made it,” she breathed. And that’s how it all began.
Click to continue reading Glee: Season 2 Ends with New York Dreams
