DemoGirl

Mixwit allows you to create a playlist of your favorite music and display it like an old skool mixtape.  It’s a bit like previously mentioned, Mixaloo, except this service is completely free.  You can do a music search right from the site and then fully customize the way your tape looks.  They have some retro skins to choose from but you can also upload your own artwork or use their template to create your own skin.  After you create your mix, you can send the link to friends or post it on your blog or social networking site.  Here’s my screencast tour of Mixwit:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m24s

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[via TechCrunch]

Songza is a music search site that I’ve reviewed in the past and actually used on and off for the past few months.  Honestly though, I’ve used it more off than on.  I think that’s going to change today because (finally) you can now create a Songza account and save your precious playlist.  Yes, Songza really made my day today.  Besides the obvious wonderfulness that is your very own Songza account, you can also post a song directly to Twitter without leaving Songza.  Here’s my screencast tour of Songza:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m52s

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[via Download Squad]

If you’ve ever spent any time reading tab (tablature) online, then you must know how completely annoying most of the available tab sites can be.  Huge ads, pop-ups, user comments all over the place – it’s just a mess.  I can speak from experience because I used to spend hours online reading tab and playing guitar and finally I just started printing it out so I didn’t have to look at all of the nonsense surrounding the content I was after.  Well, my prayers have been answered and when I find the time to start playing regularly again, I’ll be reading all of my tab in tabBasket.

TabBasket gives you a place to store all of your tab and it’s completely free of ads and nonsense.  All you need to do is copy the tab from one site and paste it into your tabBasket account and it will be displayed in a much more peaceful environment.  TabBasket also gives you access to lyrics and YouTube videos right from the page on which you’re viewing the tab.  If you have Guitar Pro/Power Tab files on your computer, you can upload them.  I really can’t say enough good things about tabBasket.  Seriously, if you read tab, please give it a look.  Here’s my screencast tour of tabBasket:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m37s

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[via KillerStartups]

If you ever feel like you’re about to freak out because you have some song stuck in your head but can’t seem to remember the name, then SongTapper may be just what you need. Yes, I know you can just enter in a few lines from the song into Google search and probably find your answer there. That is not nearly as fun as beating the rhythm of the song on your space bar and receiving your results without having to enter in one line of text. SongTapper allows you to do just that. The site design is nothing to write home about but there’s nothing to sign up for and it actually works. All you do is click on a link and then start tapping the rhythm of the song on your space bar. SongTapper will spit out some results and you can even listen to what your tapping sounded like. If SongTapper didn’t get your song right you can enter in the name and artist to help train it. Unfortunately, the reason a person would visit SongTapper is because they don’t know the name or artist so that step seems totally pointless to me. Other than that, it’s a fun way to find out the name of a song without doing a Google search and it actually got my songs right 3 out of 4 times.

Free Music Zilla allows you to quickly download music you’re listening to on Pandora, MySpace Music, iJigg, Last.fm, and more.  After you launch Free Music Zilla, just go to your site of choice and whatever songs are playing will cue up in the downloader.  There’s a time limit, so be sure and select the songs you want downloaded before time runs out.  Then just click download and within seconds, you’re all set.  Of course there are legal issues here, and I’m not sure what the future holds for Free Music Zilla but it is pretty cool to use at the moment.  Here’s my screencast tour of Free Music Zilla:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast1m32s

[via Lifehacker]

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Jango, the awesome site that allows you to make your own customized radio stations, has just added a Jukebox widget that can be placed on your MySpace profile or blog for all of your friends to enjoy. You can add whatever artists you want to your Jukebox and customize the skin and the name. The Jukebox has a moving strip of all of the artists you’ve included. When you click on an artists image, the music will play. It’s as simple as that. I’ve been using Jango religiously the past few weeks since I reviewed it (although I do still use previously mentioned BoomShuffle when I want to listen to a more specific playlist) and I really don’t have anything bad to say about it. The music selection has improved as well as their recommendations. Here’s my screencast tour of The Jango Jukebox:

Flash Screencast1m57s

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[via TechCrunch]

I feel like a lot of Internet radio/music players have been popping up lately.  There’s Jango, Deezer, Mixaloo, Songza, and now BoomShuffle.  As of right now BoomShuffle is pulling ahead of Jango, which was my favorite until about 4 hours ago.  BoomShuffle is like Internet radio that you have total control over, almost.  The biggest difference between BoomShuffle and something like Pandora, is that BoomShuffle allows you to create music mixes filled only with songs you choose.  They have a very extensive music library and you can create as many mixes as you want.  You do need to fill your mixes with at least 15 different tracks from at least 15 different artists otherwise you’ll only get a 30 second preview of your songs.  Oh no, they’re forcing me to create a huge playlist of music that I can listen to all day long.  Who cares?  I had no problem creating my mixes.  In fact, my first mix has over 40 songs in it and it only took me about 10 minutes to create it.  The catch is, however, that you don’t get to choose the order in which your songs will play.  You also can only skip over a few songs an hour – which is how they’re keeping themselves in the Internet radio category.  You can listen to other BoomShuffle members mixes and embed them on your website or blog.  They also have a pop-out player so you can navigate away from BoomShuffle without loosing your tunes.  Here’s my screencast tour of BoomShuffle:

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Songza is a music search engine that allows you to create playlists of your favorite songs.  You can search by artist or song and the results bring you various versions of whatever you’ve searched for.  These songs can be shared with friends and you can embed a small Songza player on your website or blog.  There’s also a link to related YouTube videos.  As of now there’s no way to sign up for Songza so you can’t save your playlist, but I still think it works great.

No, I’m not being sarcastic with the title to this post.  I love discovering new ways to listen to music online.  Right now my favorites are Jango, Pandora, and now Songza.  Here’s my screencast tour of Songza:

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Jango is a “Social Internet Radio” service that allows you to create custom radio stations filled with only the music you want to hear. You begin by choosing an artist that you like. That will create your station. From there, Jango will recommend related artists to you and you can add them to your player. You can block any songs that you don’t want to hear and rate songs so Jango will know what you want to hear more of. Whenever you’re playing music, Jango will show you other members that are playing similar music and you can instantly start listening to their stations and add them as friends. There are musician profiles and you can easily bookmark people, songs, and artists so you can find them again easily. I have to say, I’ve tried out a lot of Internet radio services and Jango really only recommended and played music that I liked. I’ve been using it all day and rarely had the desire to skip to another song. The only big feature I’d like to see is a way to pop out the player so I don’t have to stay on the Jango site in order to use it. It’s in private beta right now so hopefully that’s on the way.  Update:  The folks at Jango are hooking DemoGirl readers up with access to the private beta.  Follow this link to create your first station!  Here’s my screencast tour of Jango:

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Late last night I came across this article talking about a new site for live music lovers. Well, I’m glad that I decided to come back to it this morning because I would have been up all night trying it out. It’s called Songkick and it rocks. In a nutshell, Songkick is a place to search for and discover live music in your area. Not just any old live music though. Music that you love, and more importantly, music that you listen to on a daily basis. The key is Songkicker – a plug-in that tracks everything you listen to on iTunes, Winamp, and Windows Media Player. Whenever an artist you’re listening to is on tour, you’ll know. You can manage all of the artists that Songkicker is tracking, so if there’s someone you don’t want to see live, simply remove them. Songkick also lists all of the vendors selling tickets so you can compare prices. Here’s my screencast tour of Songkick:

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(source: TechCrunch)