Paul McCartney’s previous album, Memory Almost Full, may have been, in so many words, complete garbage, but you have to give credit to the man for his latest endeavor, a new album from his electronic-ish band The Fireman. The album Electric Arguments is available as a DRM-free download from the band’s official site. It’s in a bunch of formats, too, including MP3, FLAC and Apple Lossless; for a few dollars more they’ll even throw in a CD. (Sounds a lot like what Nine Inch Nails did several months ago, right?) And, if you’re not too sure that you want to spend $9 of your hard earned dollars on Mr. McCartney’s side project, you can listen to the entire album on the site via a Flash player.

Above all, it shows that “mainstream” musicians are finally getting it, that digital downloads aren’t inherently evil. DRM-free is a welcome bonus, too. It also makes AC/DC’s decision to release its album exclusively at Wal-Mart seem all the more weird. They didn’t even so much as release it on iTunes.

via Slashdot

First, I have this to say about it: if this device works as well as its website, I hope it’s banished to the innermost receses of the earth. Please, web designers: no more autoplaying music and pointless intro videos that show nothing. And especially no music that continues to start up 10 seconds after you stop it, again and again and again. Now, on to the product.

It’s an mp3 jukebox of a form factor that has never been tried: supremely awkward. Apparently composed of a rectangular prism intersecting with an oblique column, this gadget was not created with subtlety in mind. I believe the guts are found in the base, and the control interface uses only that silver disc and the buttons thereupon. Honestly, though, why would you get this? It’s ugly as sin and if you’re going to cough up for a nice central mp3 controller, why not go with a touchscreen, either wireless or embedded? No, this appears to be strictly for attention-seekers and interior designers making a “music room” or something. Feh!
[via Acquire]

The world has too many MP3 players – what? it does – and manufacturers need to move on rather than developing an “iPod killer” which is what Dell might be doing. According to the original rumor mill, Wall Street Journal, the MP3 player built around the entertainment software Zing is being shelved indefinitely. Maybe Dell suits came to their senses, threw in the towel, punched their time card, and finally realized no one wants a Dell MP3 player. Was that too harsh?

Did you hear the news? MySpace is thinking about creating its own portable media player! Reuters seems to think that such a player would be in competition with the iPod, which we all know is a lie: there’s the iPod WAY UP HERE, then everything else WAY DOWN THERE. If anything, the MySpace player would be in competition with Zune and Sansa—you know, the “other” portable media players.

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Amazon MP3 and iTunes—the only two online music stores that really matter—have another competitor to worry about now that Wal-Mart has re-launched its own music store. The “new and improved” (joke: how can something be both “new” and “improved”?) store sells DRM-free MP3s, most of which are encoded at 256kbps; some are only 192 kbps.

Individual songs start as low as 74 cents per song, which makes the new Wal-Mart store the least expensive one in town.

Wal-Mart is also giving away one free song per week. It’ll also toss in a free song for every CD you buy, either online or in the brick-and-mortar store. That little promotion starts next month.

Lastly, because the songs are merely MP3s they’ll work on any operating system—except, maybe, Red Hat 8!

My good friend Peter Ha isn’t sold on the Sandisk SlotMusic hoopla (see his post here). I think it’ll work, though. You have to approach it from the mindset of the casual consumer for it to make sense. Think of the player like a Walkman or a Discman and MicroSD cards as blank tapes or CDs. Then remember that entire albums used to be sold on tapes and CDs and that for many people, there’s a certain comfort in being able to drop a piece of media into a hardware player and have it just work.

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My word, actual innovation coming for a digital audio player. It’s certainly been a while.

It’s called the Twinned MP3 player, and its gimmick is that it’s actually two separate players joined at the hips, so to speak. Each half of the player is a fully functional player; both half contains the same playlist of music, a playlist that’s controlled by an online server. So when Person A adds a song to the online playlist it doesn’t become “official” until Person B syncs their player.

The idea here is that the two players will always have the same playlist, so, presumably, you and your friend will always be listening to the same music. Perhaps you and your special girl have a song that reminds you of some important event in your relationship—well now you’ll always have that song with you, together.

It’s designed by one Liberty Fearns, but the odds of it go into mass production? Eh.