Music startup doubleTwist today launched a new application, available for Mac and PC, that wants to replace the proprietary world of Apple’s iTunes with one where you can download music and sync it to any player. Here’s how doubleTwist explains what they do: Our vision is simple: to create a unifying media platform that connects [...]

Techspansion has introduced AudialHub — an inexpensive Mac app designed to convert dozens of different audio formats (and the audio tracks from video files) to AAC, MP3, WMA, WAV and Apple Lossless formats, with the standard metadata tags in most formats converted and passed on to the finished file. Nearly every aspect of the decoding [...]

In a paper published in today’s issue of Science, a team at IBM’s research centre in San Jose, California, said they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs – or 3,500 films – and cost far less [...]

MessageLabs reports that spammers have introduced MP3 music files into their expanding toolbox of stock spam techniques, with 15 million emails identified in October 2007. We’ve been concerned for a couple years about the potential of audio spam. With the rise of speech-to-text based search in products like PodZinger, it’s only a matter of time [...]

Here’s a roundup of portable media news for Sept. 17th: EMusic offering MP3 audiobooks РeMusic is offering more than a thousand books for download, with many of them cheaper than on iTunes. For example, “The Audacity of Hope,” read by author Barack Obama, will cost $9.99 on eMusic compared with $18.95 on iTunes. This [...]

Microsoft has won a reversal of a $1.5 billion jury verdict against it for infringing on a patent for MP3 technology. Judge Rudi Brewster of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California threw out the damages, finding that a jury improperly ruled that Microsoft infringed on one of two pMP3 patents. One [...]

Audible has announced that it is shuttering its proprietary podcasting alternative, Audible Wordcast: Dear Audible Wordcast customer, Regretfully, as of September 1, 2007, the Audible Wordcast service will no longer be available for public use. In the coming 90 days, we’ll provide you with details regarding the process of shutting down or moving your podcasts [...]

PayPlay.FM announced today that it is offering its 1,300,000-track catalog in unprotected MP3 format at the price of 88 cents per song. The tracks are 192kpbs VBR encoded, offering higher quality sound reproduction. The move continues PayPlay’s strategy for uniform support of Mac and UNIX platforms, iPod, Zune and other portable players incompatible with Windows [...]

Amazon.com today announced it will launch a digital music store later this year offering millions of songs in the DRM-free MP3 format from more than 12,000 record labels, including EMI. Every song and album in the Amazon.com digital music store will be available exclusively in the MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) software. Amazon’s [...]

EMI is reported to be talking to online retailers about selling its entire digital music catalog in MP3 format without copy protection. The move would create a major split in the music industry. Earlier this week, Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. responded to Steve Jobs’ challenge to dump DRM by telling industry analysts [...]