Getting custom ringtones on the iPhone has always been a process that requires some amount of hardwork. Sure there are jailbreak and third party apps that will you help get custom ringtones on the iPhone for free rather than buying from iTunes.

But the catch is that these softwares either cost a bit or require a jailbreak which can be risky for your precious iPhone.

There has to be a easier way right? Thankfully there is a easy, fast and most importantly legal way to get custom ringtones on your iPhone in less than a minute.

Well am referring to a service called Audiko, that allows you to put ringtones on any mobile device and not only the iPhone.

Audiko is a simple service which helps you to make a ringtone of your favorite song! Audiko is an amazing service. It allows you to upload any song, cut up to 40 seconds of it, and put it right into your iTunes Ringtones folder for quick and easy syncing.

Best of all Audiko is a free service and doesn’t require any registration..

Let’s get started with the process..

• To start off visit Audiko.net and search for the song whose ringtone you are looking for.

• And choose an appropriate search result…
• Click "Download Ringtone for iPhone"

• Once you’ve saved the ringtone to a folder on your computer, double click the file to add the file to your iTunes Ringtones library.

• Now whenever you sync your iPhone next you will find the ringtone in your iPhone’s Settings >> Sounds >> Ringtones menu.

What’s more Audiko even allows you to upload a song and cut any part of it (up to 40 seconds).

You can also enter the URL for any YouTube video and Audiko automatically extracts the sound. Just like when uploading a song, you can cut any part of the audio.

Adding custom ringtones on your iPhone could’ve never been easier. No more SSH, no more jailbreaking, and no more useless utilities.

Screw those guys who said iTunes is the best music library manager out there. MediaMonkey is very much renowned for being the best media manager available today. This one’s for you music lovers!!

A lot of people have strongly rated MediaMonkey as the best music manager out there and its been downloaded nearly 3 million times on Download.com. Its got all the features that you’d expect to find in such softwares, but it is the advanced feature set that puts it light years ahead of the competition..

Here are some of the features of MediaMonkey

• Organize music and edit tags in your audio library with a powerful, intuitive interface.
• Automatically lookup and tag Album Art and other metadata.
• Manage 50,000+ files in your music collection without bogging down.
• Manage all genres of audio: Rock, Classical, Audiobooks, Comedy, Podcasts, etc.

• Play MP3s and other audio formats, and never again worry about varying volume.
• Record CDs and convert MP3s, M4A, OGG, FLAC and WMA files etc. into other formats.
• Create playlists and let Auto-DJ & Party Mode take care of your party.
• Sync iPhones, iPods, & MP3 players, converting & leveling tracks on-the-fly.

MediaMonkey has tons of options for all of the power users out there who have to have things their own way! You can configure everything from dozens of keyboard shortcuts/hotkeys, plug-ins, automatic podcast downloading, CD ripping, and lots more…. As a power user you can’t be asking for more!!

Here are some screenshots of MediaMonkey in action..

Here are some of the stuff you are gonna miss out on, if you don’t upgrade to the Gold Version..

• File Monitor automatically updates your Library to reflect changes on your hard drive.
• Auto-conversion converts tracks on the fly as they are synced so that all of your tracks can play on your iPod or other device.
• Advanced Auto-Playlists quickly generate a mix to suit your mood. Specify the criteria, and the mix is created.
• Sleep Timer gradually fades your music over a set period of time, and optionally turns off your PC before bedtime.
• Virtual CD catalogs your CD’s without creating duplicate entries for tracks that exist on both your hard drive and CD’s.
• Burn CD’s and DVD’s at full speed.

“If you’ve been looking for a free program that can be a kind of one-stop-shop of audio, doing everything that you might possibly want to do with your library of audio files (and doing it well) – MediaMonkey just might be that program.”

Nothing beats MediaMonkey when it comes music management, not even iTunes..

The Giveaway

Well during the birthday celebrations of DailyApps we have 10 Gold Licenses (Valued at 19.95$ each) of MediaMonkey to giveaway to you guys. All you have to do is drop a comment below providing both your name and email address so that we can get in touch with you later.

We will be selecting the winners randomly using a random number generator. Here’s how we are going to give out the licenses for the giveaway of xplorer².

• 2 Winner will be picked from Comment Number 1 through 5
• 4 Winners will be picked from Comment Number 6 through 20
• 4 Winners will be picked from Comment Numbers 20 through how many ever comments are there.

You can leave your entries till 28th July 11:00 PM Eastern Time…

Today Last.fm decided to take wraps off its new design they’ve been working on since May. I was not a part of the beta but still at first glance the new design looks little different from the one we saw during the beta period. Looking through the Last.fm forums I found that the beta design was much criticized and the design that we see now is after tons of user feedback.

I was a Last.fm user for quite some time before I stopped using it for unknown reasons. In the past Last.fm always had a confusing navigational structure that for some reason never got you to what you wanted. Looks like Last.fm team has worked hard to resolve the navigational issues that plagued the old design and the new design is marked improvement over the older one.

Take a look at the screenshots yourself and you will see why the new design is much cleaner and more functional than the old design..

The New Design

The Beta Design

The Old Design

Surely the new design is more clean and functional than the original Last.fm. But so far the new design has evoked nothing but reactions favoring the extreme negative.

Some users have gone to the lengths of calling the new design as Myspace clones and they have expressed their dissatisfaction over it. Here are few opinions about the new design…

MidwinterSun said,

the main problem here is that the new site is just a mess. The old last.fm had identity. It was different. And what do we got now? A parody of web 2.0!

Last.fm used to be about the music we listen. So when I visit someone’s profile, I see what their tastes in music are. This was the reason I liked last.fm – the musical revolution, right?

It was different. Now it’s like every other site on the web.

Ant17 said,

This, however, sucks. I can’t believe one of my favourite and most used sites is about to go straight to the trash bin. If you want to make a site look like a new vulgar, post-modern tacky iPod which is completely user-unfriendly, then there are plenty of pointless social gathering sites to visit.

There is absolutely no need to destroy one of the best working and most appealing sites that’s been praised for years, without any option of a decline. Quite simply, horrible service and a now horrible site.

A lot of people have asked Last.fm an option to switch back to the old design.. If you don’t like the new design voice your opinion in this forum thread, hopefully Last.fm will listen to its audience.

Also give a try to this Userstyle that gives Last.fm some new features while preserving the identity of the old design.

And to conclude, I actually like the new design, but I feel that Last.fm has lost much of its identity its built up over the years with this design. Maybe an extended beta would have been a better option..

What is your opinion about the new design? Which one do you like?

Screenshots Credits – ReadWriteWeb

photo credit: RossinaBossioB

Music sharing has been of the most common file sharing activities on the internet. There are many ways you could find the music you were looking for by using tools like Limewire, BitTorrent etc.. But most times nothing beats a Google search does it? Yes you heard that right.. Google may as well be your best friend if you are looking to find music freely on the Internet.

Just follow the instructions below, and you will be on your way to find the music that you otherwise won’t find on P2P networks. The hack simply involves the major search engines revealing their vast indexes to you so that you can find what you are looking for.

I’m going to give some modified special search strings that will help you find hidden stuff from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

How to Accomplish the Hack

Click on the links below for your favorite search engine. Modify the details according to your liking (for example replace Linkin Park with Radiohead or just the song name). Change the “wma/mp3″ tag to other format such as “ogg” if you wish to download the music in other not so popular formats.

• Google

“parent directory” mp3 OR wma OR ogg OR wav Linkin Park -html -htm -download -links

• Yahoo Search

“parent directory” AND (Linkin AND Park) AND (mp3 OR wma OR ogg) AND NOT(”download”) AND NOT(”links”)

• MSN Search

“parent directory” AND (Linkin AND Park) AND (mp3 OR wma OR ogg) AND NOT(”download”) AND NOT(”links”)

Using the major search engines should help you find any kind of music you are looking for, but there other alternative music only search engines also available that deserve a mention. Check out Alltheweb Audio (mp3), mp3realm and espew

So that was it. I hope this guide will help you find the music you have been looking for quite some time now.. Have a musical day ahead. Do drop in a comment with the song/artist/band that you found with this hack!

Special Credit to Blog Anything

The much hyped Qtrax (read as disgusting) that released yesterday to much fanfare, had one of the most disastrous launches a product or a service could have probably asked for. The people behind Qtrax thought that it was Ok for a web company to lie to its user base. When I first read about Qtrax, my first thought was “hey this could probably take everyone by storm”. I put up a note on my To-Do list and made it a point to check them out once they launched.

But things didn’t work out the way they would have probably planned. Here’s a list of things that went wrong for them.. 

• They never had any deals signed with any of the Big 4 labels.
• Once the Site came alive, the download link to the software was disabled causing lot of anger for the people who were waiting to get their hands on the software.
• The 25million songs for free was just a catchphrase aptly described as vaporware, even after launch you have nothing that you could download and listen.

Seeing all the negative press surrounding their launch, I’d be surprised if they are able to pick themselves up after all this bungled up launch. If they can come back with a good return, this will be forgotten about. Right now they have got a lot more press than they probably would have had with another boring “another start-up launches yay!” post….. People’s memories are short about stuff like this (again assuming they come back with grace). Otherwise they are probably heading for the deadpool, unless they can pull of something magical.

Well for me they are just dead, and I expect something more promising in the near future. So shall we award Qtrax with the award for being the startup to end up in deadpool in the first week of its launch.

If this is what you have been waiting to read ever since the day iPhone launched, then today is your day. MobileScrobbler allows you to scrobble your recently played tracks on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and it does it with style.

MobileScrobbler can be installed through Installer.app. It is also available in the Community Sources repository under the Multimedia category.

Using MobileScrobbler is very simple, something that you have come to expect of iPhone. Just open the App after installing it and enter your Last.fm username and password, and Tap Start Scrobbling.

MobileScrobbler will now login to the Last.fm site, and display a music note icon in the status bar letting you know the application is still running in the background.

After logging in, press the Home button on your device and tap the iPod icon and listen to music. Any tracks you play should automatically show up on your Last.fm profile page after you’ve listened to more than half of the track.

To stop submitting tracks, open MobileScrobbler from your home screen and tap “Stop Scrobbling”. The music note in the status bar will disappear and you will be logged out of Last.fm.

To see how many tracks have been scrobbled or queued for this session, as well as the most recent status message from AudioScrobbler, click the “Session Statistics” button.

For More details on MobileScrobbler visit http://dev.c99.org/MobileScrobbler/

Its been a only few days since Microsoft released Zune 2, the portable music player that everyone hates. I really liked the hype that Microsoft built up for Zune 2 and believe me it does look like a solid Music Player and manages to beat its chief Rival Apple iPod in a quite a few places.

Leave all that apart, I am now going to tell you how you can use your Zune as just another flash drive using the USB port. Please note that this is a registry hack, so make sure you backup your registry before proceeding..

• Make sure your Zune is not plugged in and your Zune software isn’t running
• Open up Regedit by going to the start menu and selecting “run”. Type regedt32 and hit “OK”
• Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet002\Enum\USB\
• Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune.
• Change the following values:
• EnableLegacySupport to 1
• PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
• ShowInShell to 1
• Plug in your Zune, and make sure the Zune Software starts up.
• Hopefully at this point you can open up “My Computer” and browse your device, though it does NOT show up as a drive letter.

This hack seems to be working for quite a lot of people so please let us know in the comments section, if this works for you..

Via Zunerama

Microsoft has just announced the availability of Zune Originals . Users who order from the Zune Originals site will be able to customize their Zune with Laser Engraving on the back of their Zunes.

A series of 27 artworks from the “Artist” series will cover the entire Zune. Alternatively, a series of 20 artworks from the “Tattoo” series will allow for up-to 3 lines of text. Finally, without images, you are allowed a maximum of 5 lines of text. All this right behind the back of your Zune. This offer is free for everyone who orders from the Zune Originals site and is available for all the new models of Zune.

What is disappointing is that people who have already ordered for their Zune will not be able to customize their Zune. Well here is how the ordering process looks like :

Step 1 : Pick the Zune Model(4GB,8GB,80GB) that you would like to Buy.

Step 2 : Select the color for your Zune

Step 3 : Pick the Type of Engraving that you would like to dress up your Zune with.

Step 4  : Choose the Art that you like the most and type in the description.

Step 5 : You’re done. Preview your all new Zune

Looks like Microsoft is finally innovating Zune and positioning it as a serious competitor to Apple’s iPod that is not so sexy to look at when compared to Apple’s iPod. Gizmodo has a brief summary on why Zune might be better than Apple iPod. 

The New Zune looks too good and has pretty good features too. If you are looking to buy a personal Music player this holidays, go buy a Zune.

Via istartedsomething

Here are a few comments from the Slashdot page that was published on the day Apple iPod was launched by our favorite CEO Steve Jobs,

 . No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

…until Apple releases their new line of pastel contact lenses: The iEye! [ducks]

"Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I’d want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards."
Damn straight! For four hundred smackaroos, I expect something at least as big and heavy as a brick! 

Well reading at those comments at that time, who would have thought Apple iPod would be the product that was responsible for one of the biggest corporate comebacks in the entire world. Well here is the video where a Historic journey first began, redefining how we look at Apple in the current world, redefining how we look at music. 

Well a lot of has changed since the 1st gen iPod but even today the iPod has strong marketshare worldwide and I am sure it will continue to be the market leader for many more years. I just can’t wait for Apple to showcase all its new toys like the iPhone and the iPod Touch..

Come on guys its time to congratulate Steve today. Drop in your comments and tell us how you think the Apple iPod has redefined portable music.

He Writes “As part of Windows Updates on my laptop today, I installed an optional update called “Driver Update for Zune USB.” It actually installed a pre-release version of the Zune 2.0 software with a version number of 2.1.0522.00. Has anyone else gotten this update? I have it running now, and so far, all it does is list music in my library. When I connect my Zune, the software sees its name and knows it’s connected but will not sync. Just curious if this is Microsoft pushing out a beta, or some kind of accident.”

He further adds that its not a complete software, it connects to the Zune but apparently does not sync. Also it does not connect to the Zune Marketplace. Well JJRules was kind enough to post some screenshots of the new Zune Software, and here they are :

Well, I must say the new UI looks very slick indeed, much better than the all black UI the previous version of the software had. I wonder when Microsoft plans to release the new Zune Software, but I think it is around the corner because the new Zune Player is out too.