SONGBEAT
Posted by admin on December 1, 2008
If you’re like me, you like to have some background music while you’re programming, designing, invoicing, etc. In my case, background music helps me tune out distractions — whether I’m in a cubicle at work or in my basement office at home.
That’s why I’m always interested in fidning out about new ways to a) find and b) listen to music. My music, that is. The latest tool to help me find suitable music at a moment‘s notice is called SONGBEAT.
The free download (currently for Windows only) is a search tool and a player all in one. Download and install SONGBEAT, and the rest is quite intuitive. You can search for music by song title, author, album, etc. The search was quite impressive. Searching for tunes from one of my 60’s idols, Donovan (as in Donovan Leitch), returned a variety of results, including Terri Reid, who did a cover version of Superlungs My Supergirl.
Additionally, you can download songs that SONGBEAT finds for you.
With Songbeat, its not only possible to listen to the results of your search directly from the internet (no need to download before listening) – its also possible, after downloading, to organize and play them in the integrated media player in the Library.
Not bad, eh? Other gems that are hidden in this seemingly simple and quite user-friendly tool are the Mixtape function, the Station (or cassette recorder) function and several other tools (such as transferring to your iPod with one click).
The one thing that wasn’t entirely clear to me — but I’m sure I will find out as time progresses — was the benefit of the $29.99 upgrade. There is some talk about “unlimited downloads” and being able to “download 25 times for free,” but other than that, there was very little persuasive upgrade information available on the web site.
Addendum: Perhaps it’s just me and my Windows XP OS, but after a while, I encountered a bunch of errors when I tried to search for stations.
After dismissing all the debug information and shutting down SONGBEAT, the music was still playing, and only closing the SONGBEAT process, by way of Task Manager, finally made it all go away.
Filed Under: Just For Fun
