First, we hear Silverlight is headed for Nokia handsets. And today, Flash Lite and Silverlight are confirmed for Windows Mobile. Woo! It’s good to see these media-rich technologies land on portable devices. Though, there’s still no confirmation of Flash for the iPhone. But it’s inevitable… Right?

Honestly, I’m not particular about which specific technologies land on these handsets as long as they let me listen Pandora or Slacker - my XM lineup would be nice too. In the interim, my (jailbroken) iPhone streams iRadio and my Nokia N95 is utilizing Internet Radio.

The stars have clearly aligned for me with Slacker. Yesterday I spoke with Jonathan Sasse at the company for an update on Slacker happenings. During which conversation I discovered that Slacker is actually now available on my Squeezebox now. And finally, today my Slacker portable player arrived in the mail. Hooray!

I’ll save some of the details from my conversation with Jonathan for another post, except to say that Slacker will start shipping its hardware to retail chains in the next couple of weeks. No word yet on which stores or exact timing, but it sounds like we could see players on shelves by summer.

As for my own Slacker player, I’ll work on a full review for ZNF as soon as possible. I unboxed today and will start playing tonight.

In the meantime, I’m thoroughly enjoying Slacker on my Squeezebox. I signed in to my Slacker account on the SqueezeNetwork and my custom stations were instantly available on my living-room stereo. CNET’s John Falcone also commented on the ease of managing Internet radio accounts via the Squeezebox in his glowing review of the Squeezebox Duet. While he doesn’t go into detail on each of the radio services, I can attest to the fact that managing both Slacker and Pandora is remarkably straightforward.

One other note: My living-room stereo for the moment consists of a SurroundXi portable speaker system plugged into the Squeezebox. The SurroundXi is a review unit designed to work primarily with iPods, but I’m finding it quite suitable for my needs. It’s also the perfect size right now given that we’ve moved all of our furniture to prepare for the wood flooring we’re having installed tomorrow. I can carry my entire stereo system (Squeezebox plus SurroundXi) in one trip up to the bedroom when the contractors arrive.

We have multiple iPods in my house (like Dave) and have registered those iPods to multiple computers over time. So when I got my iPod Shuffle last year, I thought I’d make life easy by setting up a folder in iTunes on our one desktop computer acting as a home media server. I can add and remove songs from that one folder, sync my Shuffle, and voila! I have a brand new workout mix.

Unfortunately yesterday I couldn’t find my Shuffle before my run on the treadmill, so I grabbed my old iPod Mini. The Mini still works great, but it had none of my new favorite workout tunes. I knew I could sync the Mini to the folder I’d dedicated to the Shuffle to grab my newer stuff, but that would mean erasing all of the existing music on the Mini. Worse, the computer that was originally registered to the Mini - holding all of my purchased iTunes music and uploaded CDs - is long gone. Essentially my Mini has been carrying music with no back-up.

In the end, I decided most of my purchased iTunes music had likely been added to our household music library on the dedicated media server computer. There was a decent chance that some of my uploaded CDs weren’t in the library, but if necessary, I still had those CDs packed away somewhere and could find and re-upload them. (Not that that will ever happen…)

Bottom line: I gave up worrying about losing the music on my Mini and synced it to the music I had set aside for my Shuffle. (more…)

Follow the digital music space and available March 11th at 1PM EST? If so, I highly recommend tuning into a free webcast by Michael Gartenberg and David Card of Jupiter Research:

Will digital music ever save the industry? Are downloaded singles replacing CD sales? Who are today’s customers, and how is that likely to change over time? What is the role of ad-supported services, and of P2P networks? Will there be a showdown between iPods and music phones? iPods and anybody? How do you compete with, or thrive alongside Apple?

Mark your calendars! Maybe I’ll get lucky later this week and have an iPhone that syncs with Exchange, preventing yet another missed appointment.

This time we’ve got real, as opposed to potential, Amazon news… They’ve released a Linux MP3 Download Manager for their DRM-free music service. Ubuntu 7.10, Debian 4, Fedora 8, and OpenSUSE 10.3 systems are covered. While you don’t necessarily need the software app to download individual tunes from Amazon, the Downloader provides an efficient interface and supports downloading entire albums. As you can see from the screengrabs, I’ve gone ahead and installed it on Ubuntu and purchased the new Nine Inch Nails “album” (36 tracks) for $5. (more…)

If you’ve ever used the myFairTunes or QTFairTunes programs to strip DRM from Apple’s FairPlay or Windows Media encoding, then you’re probably familiar with the Hymn Project. Last week, they received a cease and desist letter demanding that all download links be removed from the site. From their forum:

Until further notice, no links are to be posted anywhere on the site to programs that can strip DRM from any of Apple’s music or videos. Any user who does so will get the link removed and a warning from us. Any further infraction will get you banned permanently. The site will remain open for now and we won’t have a problem as long as we abide by the C&D.

The DRM-removal tools were used by many people on iTunes track to listen to those songs on unsupported players, mobile phones, and other non-Apple devices. One of the site’s administrators speculates that the reason Apple made this move after so much time was possibly related to Requiem, a new program in development, that utilizes file decryption rather of than re-recording music from memory while it is being played (see DoubleTwist).

Check out more of Brent’s reflections on tech, gadgets, software and media at Brent Evans Geek Tonic.

I officially entered old age last week (though that might be a slight exaggeration…). But on the bright side I got a lot of great birthday greetings and gadget gifts.

Messages came in over Facebook, via text, voicemail, e-cards, and (my favorite) via a Flip video - from my old office colleagues wishing me a happy birthday, and it was a perfect snapshot of what goes on in that den of iniquity every day.

As far as presents go, I got an Eye-Fi (Dave digs it and something I’ll write about when I get it out of the box), a digital photo frame (not one I’ve reviewed yet, so I’ll let you know), and the new Slacker portable device! The Slacker radio isn’t actually here yet, but it should be arriving any day. Dave thinks the Slacker business model has a rough road ahead, but if the player works as well as it’s supposed to, I’ll definitely be one one of the ones pulling for their success.

More to come as the presents are fully unwrapped.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a large collection of MP3 music files on your hard drive(s). Some of my MP3s were acquired from places like iTunes and Amazon, while others were ripped from my CD collection. The end result is a pile of MP3s - some with album art, many without.

At home I listen to music via SageTV’s HTPC application and on the road I use an iPod - and it’s always helpful to have album art embedded into the file itself instead of having an additional photo file. MP3 files with embedded album art are just more portable.

For example, if you have a large MP3 collection that you want to transfer to the PS3, you’d want to have album art for each track since the PS3 can only sort one level deep for any media. If you embed album art into your media before transferring to the PS3, you can then group your collection by Artist and consequently view all albums by that artist with pictures for each track showing which album it belongs to. It’s the only decent way to currently use music in the XMB until Sony allows folder structures (and support for folder.jpg type album art on import)

When you have a large audio collection, manually adding album art to MP3s can be very tedious. So, my solution is to automate this process using MP3Tag.

Head on over to Brent Evans Geek Tonic for steps in automatically updating an MP3 collection with album art.