DemoGirl

Stereo8 is an Internet radio station that puts the users in charge of the music.  It’s completely free to use and there’s no sign up needed in order to listen to music – only if you wish to add your own and vote for songs.

There are currently 5 stations available:  Hip hop/Rap, Pop/Hits, Video Games, Dance/Electronic, and Rock/Alternative.  Just choose the station you want to tune into and then vote on the songs that you think should be played next.  The more votes a song gets, the better chance it will have of being sent up to “upcoming” songs, which will guarantee that it plays (I think).

You can add your own music to Stereo8 and it will remain there until it’s played or for 48 hours, whichever happens first.

I really like the clean, no-nonsense approach of Stereo8.  As of now there doesn’t seem to be a way to create a personalized profile and add friends – and that’s what I like.  It’s just a place to listen to Internet radio and occasionally vote on what you want to hear.  It allows you to discover new music and share what you love. Check out the screencast below to see Stereo8 in action:

MixTape.me is a service that allows you to create playlists out of all of your favorite music as well as discover playlists that other MixTape.me users have created.  It’s completely Web-based and there’s no sign-up required in order to use it, although I recommend signing up to really get your hands dirty.

You can begin by creating a playlist, which is done with a simple mouse-click.  Name your playlist and then you can search for the songs you wish to add to the playlist.  You can drag and drop songs right into any playlist you like.  There is also a neat feature called a “quick playlist” which allows you to drag songs into sort of a temporary playlist.  This is useful if you don’t want to create a new playlist from scratch – and you have the option of saving it as a playlist later or clearing it and starting over.  You can also create links to songs, share the embed code and URL of playlists with friends, as well as email playlists for others to enjoy.

There’s also a social aspect to MixTape.me, and frankly, this is where I can see the service becoming quite addictive.  You can view profiles of other users, see their playlists, favor their playlists, follow them so you’ll know when they’ve added something new, and see the users they’re following.  You can drag and drop individual songs from other users playlists into one of your playlists.  Seriously, I could go on and on.

MixTape.me is a project of Adam Pash, Editor of one of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker.

To see MixTape.me in action, watch the screencast below (Best viewed in HD in full screen):

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If you’re one of the sad souls mourning the recent shutdown of Muxtape, then I think 8tracks may just brighten your day.  8tracks allows you to create and share virtual mixtapes.

8tracks doesn’t work exactly like Muxtape, but the idea is somewhat the same.  You can upload your own music to create a mix, listen to other users mixes, and share your mixes with friends.

You need to add at least 8 tracks to make a mix public and your mixes can’t have more than 2 songs by the same artist.  Other than that, it’s a great way to share your favorite mixes with friends and discover new music.  To see how 8tracks works, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m22s

[via GigaOm]

Bandsintown is a really cool site that shows you when your favorite band is going to be playing at a venue in or around your city.  It also recommends artists it thinks you’ll like and allows you to connect with other people in your city that are going to the same show.

When you sign up for Bandsintown, you’ll have to tell it some of your favorite artists and where you’re located.  From that information, it will create a “recommendation cloud” filled with your favorite artists along with ones it thinks you’ll like.  All of the artists that appear in your cloud are playing in or around your city in the near future.  You can add shows you’ll be attending to your calendar and see what other Bandsintown members are going.  There’s also a widget that you can put on your blog or website that displays the shows you’ll be attending, the shows your favorite artist is performing at, or the upcoming shows at a specific venue.

Thanks to Marshall for putting Bandsintown back under my radar!  To see how it works, watch the screencast below:

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Click Here To Watch Better Quality 2m28s

Jogli calls itself “the search engine for music” and I think that’s a bit of an understatement.  Jogli gives you access to over a half a billion songs and 12 million albums which you can play for free and create playlists to listen to later.  So yeah, it searches, but it also allows you to build a huge music library that you can access anytime you’re online.

When you initially search for an artist, like Radiohead, you’ll see all of the available albums which you can simply click on to start playing from start to finish, or you can select certain songs to create a playlist that you can customize.  You can add albums to your music library so you don’t need to search for them later.  From what I could tell, Jogli grabs the music from YouTube, so not all of your results are going to be perfect.  What’s great though, is that if you get a version of a song that’s not what you wanted, you can choose to “get alternatives for this song” and then select a better version.  On the homepage, you’ll see other users that you can click through to see some of their playlists, but as of now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add people as friends so you can easily see what they’re listening to.  I’m assuming that feature is on the way.  Here’s my screencast tour of Jogli:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 1m32s

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[via TechCrunch]

For me, music and emotions go hand in hand, and that’s why I think Muzicons is brilliant. With Muzicons, you can select a cute icon that best describes how you’re feeling. There are the common happy and sad faces and cute little mouse heads too. Then just upload an MP3 from your computer, select a Muzicons player, and choose a background color. The last step is to copy the code and paste it wherever you want your Muzicon to appear – most likely your blog or social networking site of choice. Whoever comes to your site can play the song and, hopefully by the type of emoticon you chose, know how you’re feeling. You don’t need an account to create Muzicons but if you sign up, you can save them for future posting. Muzicons are really adorable and I recommend that you create one right after watching the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 1m49s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via Mashable]

It’s Friday, and you know what that means! It’s time to show you some useful applications in the quickest amount of time – hence the name, quickcast. Today I’m featuring some Applications built on Adobe Air that I think are pretty useful, and fun. One to make reading your RSS Feeds more exciting, one to help you listen to Muxtapes on your desktop, and one that will allow you to take hideous photos of yourself sitting in your room.

Snackr pulls random items from your RSS Feed and streams them along your desktop in a ticker-like fashion. You can import your feeds or add them manually and you can read stories easily by clicking on them. It’s pretty much never ending so if you’re easily distracted, you may find yourself staring at Snackr instead of actually getting any work done. You can edit the settings of the ticker to have it sit on any side of your screen and you can easily minimize it if it’s getting in your way.

MuxMaster is an awesome compliment to Muxtapes, the service that allows you to make cool MP3 mixtapes to share with your friends. MuxMaster automatically provides you with 10 Muxtapes that you can browse through to discover new music. If you don’t like those, then you can select another random 10. If you know the name of a Muxtape you can enter it in and MuxMaster will load that along with other relevant Muxtapes.

Fotobooth is a fun application that allows you to instantly take photos with your webcam and add effects to them. Even better, fotobooth works with Flickr so you can instantly upload all of the photos you take to your Flickr account. Every time you snap a photo, it’s dropped onto the application and will stay there until you delete it.

To see these applications in action, watch the screencast below:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m40s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via freshAIRapps]

Blip is a social networking site for sharing, “what are you listening to?”. If you think it sounds a lot like Twitter, you’re exactly right. It works in almost the same way except instead of letting people know that you just drank a delicious milkshake, you can share the music you’re listening to. You can do a search by song or artist and Blip will pull music from SeeqPod that you can preview and then “blip” to your friends. You can also leave a message (150 characters or less) to go along with your song. You can also cross post to Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, and Tumblr – sort of. This is where I had an issue with Blip. When I chose a song and then typed a brief message explaining why I chose that song, it posted fine to Blip. When I jumped over to my Twitter profile, I noticed that it had not posted my message at all. This is exactly what it said, “listening to Uncle John’s Band – The Greatful Dead at www.fuzz.com/blip/us”. I was a little perturbed that what I posted to Blip was completely different than what appeared on my Twitter profile.

My final thoughts? Well, I think Blip is great for people who want a place to quickly share music with a group of friends and hear what their friends are listening to. Twitter isn’t for everyone and Blip is great for doing what it wants to do, share music. I won’t, however, be cross posting to any other sites using Blip unless this issue is fixed.  Update:  I was contacted by the guys at Blip about the Twitter posting catastrophe and they completely fixed the problem!  Now your message will show up on Twitter as it does on Blip.  Thanks guys! I currently use Songza to post songs I like to Twitter, and I think I’ll stick with them for that purpose. Here’s my screencast tour of Blip:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m26s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via Go2WEB20]

Chilirec is a service that records music from various Internet radio stations and allows you to create playlists to listen to from the Chilirec player. When you first get started, you need to select what Internet stations you want Chilirec to record from – there are currently 351 available. Chilirec will then begin to add music to your account from these stations. Music is added quickly and you can begin listening by dragging and dropping songs onto the Chilirec player. You can also do a search for music by artist, song, or genre. You can create playlists and download songs as MP3 files.

It would be nice if the Internet radio stations could be broken down by genre because browsing through 351 stations is a bit tedious. Other than that, I can’t really complain. I’ve been using Chilirec for about 2 hours and it’s already recorded almost 8,000 songs that I can listen to whenever I want. Here’s my screencast tour of Chilirec:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 3m31s

Want this screencast on your site?  Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via GO2WEB20]

So, first off, I’d like to ask my crummy old guitar teacher for my money back.  If I had know about the site I’m about to share with you, it would have saved me a lot of frustration going to lessons instructed by a grumpy, washed up musician (sorry, but he was mean).  Songsterr helps you learn how to play and sing songs, chord by chord.  The chords and lyrics are given to you and Songsterr plays them over and over until you decide you want to move on.  You can also set it on autopilot and it will play through the entire song.  In all seriousness, this won’t replace a human instructor (if you have a nice one) and there are only a handful of songs available on the site, one of them being a most hated of mine – Hey There Delilah.  If you don’t already know your fingering for the chords, you won’t have much luck learning anything here either.  But, this is a brand new service and the “coming soon” features sound very promising.  I recommend giving it a look if you haven’t picked up your guitar in a while and just want to learn a new song.

If learning a new language is your thing, you definitely should take a look at babbel.  Babbel gives you all the tools to learn how to speak Spanish, French, German, Italian, or English.  Everything is taken care of here, even the hardest for me – p-r-o-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-i-o-n.  You decide what types of words you feel like learning that day, and babbel will start your training.  It starts with a photo describing the word and a nice voice saying the word for you in the language you selected.  After you hear 6 words it moves on with the audio and photos separated.  You just match the audio with the correct photo and you can move onto step three – spelling.  Again, you’ll only see the photo and all you need to do is type in the first letter of the word (I think they should make you spell the whole word, but that’s just me).  Your lessons are stored and you’re encouraged to retest yourself in a few days.  There are a lot of language learning sites out there, but this is by far the best I’ve come across.