Apple Inc

Until now, iTunes users could just download their favorite music from the online iTunes store. But very soon, Apple iTunes will employ Lala’s music streaming service which will allow the user to listen to the favorite music track before downloading it.

It is not yet announced if Apple will step into music clouding for the same. Music clouding refers to a service where all the required music is stored on Internet Servers. And when you want to listen to a song, you can directly listen to it on the web, anytime you feel like.

The users will be able to listen to the complete song once using Lala just before downloading it. Cost of the service? You can purchase the track and listen to it anytime on the web for just 10 cents.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,’’ said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple.

“There’s a big question in the industry about what will be the dominant way people will obtain music, whether it’s stored in the cloud or whether it will be on a hard drive,’’ said Larry Kenswil, an attorney at Loeb & Loeb in Los Angeles, who’s the former head of Universal Music Group’s digital unit.

The Apple and Lala union is a prizing move by Apple in the world of internet music. Apple is known to be a game changer when it enters into a new market. It will be interesting to see how other major players in the existing market react to this new development.

If you are one of those who do not believe in buying music and think music should be free you can still visit sites like Pandora and Last.fm, these sites will still continue to be entertaining with not-so-new but free music.

Times have changed now, I can count at least 10 music services which offer free unlimited music pleasure and few of them do not even require you to register to listen to free music.

With so many options it boils down to which service offers options and features which you like the most.

MixTape.me is one such service which offers free music with a different approach.

First off you don’t have to register to listen to music. You can simply browse through the database by searching for your favorite artist or song. If that’s too much work then simply browse through existing playlists created by the members and start listening to songs.

Creating your own playlist is as simple as it can get. Just drag and drop songs on “Quick Playlist” area or the existing playlists.

Once you create your playlist you can effortlessly share it on the internet by embedding it on the webpage, sharing the URL or just by e-mail. I created a test playlist for this review and I’ve added the playlist below using the embedded feature.

MixTape.me does a good job of pulling in information about the song that is being currently played. “LINER NOTES:” panel on the bottom right side of the window shows information like Playlist Info, Artist Bio, Lyrics, Video, etc.. all of this information is pulled in from different sites like Last.fm, Youtube, LyricsWiki, etc..

The site also links to Amazon, so, you can buy any song you like on MixTape.me.

Overall it’s a good site to listen to some great music instantly, but it is certainly not a threat to any of the existing music services and I don’t think that was the intention behind it.

Watch the video below to see the service in action or visit MixTape.me to experience it first hand.

Welcome to MixTape.me from MixTape.me on Vimeo.

The service is currently in beta so do expect to see errors or some functionality not workings as expected. In case you see something not working send an e-mail to support@mixtape.me to help the team fix it.

Some things get better with time and this little software I am going to talk about is just one of them. If you listen to a lot of songs on Windows Media Player or Winamp and also look for the song’s lyrics to hum along as the song plays, then this is a must have plugin for you.

LyricsPlugin is a straight forward, easy to use and extremely handy plugin which just needs to be installed and it does the rest for you.

Once this plugin is installed, just open Windows Media Player and start playing songs, this plugin will automatically look for song’s lyrics and pull them from the internet and show them to you as the song plays.

WICKED COOL, isn’t it?

Plugin comes for Winamp and Windows Media Player, you can download the appropriate plugin depending on which application you use the most to listen to songs. iTunes users will have to do without it as the plugin is not offered for iTunes.

If you don’t find the lyrics for the currently playing song, click on the edit button at the bottom of the page and add your lyrics and save it. This newly lyrics will not only be shown to you next time you play the same song but to anyone in the world using the same plugin.

You can edit the existing lyrics by clicking on edit, be nice, don’t edit anything unless required. The plugin also offers a configuration page where you can set preferences like, font size, color, alignment, etc..

It’s a great plugin a must use for music lovers. You should know your song don’t you?

Click here to download for Windows Media Player and here to for Winamp.

Visit LyricsPlugin.

On SoundCloud you can upload music, choose if it will be available publically or just for the chosen ones privately, use the distribute feature to embed music on blogs and sites or simply share it on Facebook,  choose if the file can be downloaded by the users, if Yes, then can it be downloaded in the original format or a modified format for Widgets, Podcast, etc..

That’s not all! SoundCloud team is working hard to push new features out for its users to make the most of it. It also offers an API for developers to build applications to work with SoundCloud. This is one of the best music sites I have seen in a long time.

I wish they could also come up with a way where artists can sell their own music. This would not only help the artists cut the middle man but also benefit users by offering cheap music. I am sure Kid Rock would love to sell his music here!

Click here to take a tour of the site. Did I mention we have VERY limited invites for SoundCloud? Leave a comment and get an invite.

Here is how the embeded player from SoundCloud looks. (Timed Comment feature ROCKS!)