I could have downloaded these tracks illegally and been free to listen to the music as I wanted, but because I had actually bought the tracks I couldn’t. Rob Fayer at gamesindustry.biz, makes a similar complaint, calling DRM “hated and broken”. The point of DRM is to curb piracy but it punishes the paying customer while having no discernible effect on piracy.

Of course, there are programs to convert DRM protected files to MP3, but that also puts you in a legal grey area (more likely an illegal area). Fayer argues that as long as paid-for products are more annoying to use than the pirated versions, customers are almost being driven towards piracy. I think people would be more likely to download music legally if it was DRM free.

The recent legal fight between RealNetworks and movie studios highlights how out of touch the “creative industry” is; a world without RealDVD is not one without people ripping DVDs or downloading illegal BitTorrents. Copy protection doesn’t stop people copying, so it should be obvious another solution is needed.

iTunes does now offer some of its music DRM free, at a premium, and Napster also offers unprotected files. I hope this is the beginning of the end: shouldn’t we be trusted to use the things we buy legally? For now, I’ll stick to buying CDs and DRM free music.

Having searched around for programs that convert iTunes playlist files to the more common M3U format, I haven’t found a solution that works. The nearest thing to a solution, assuming you associate Mixxx with your iTunes library, is to open iTunes and the playlist you want, and select all the tracks, then drag them into a newly created playlist in Mixxx. The problem with this is that although you aren’t copying the files, for some reason you will lose the playlist order, and Mixxx will automatically put them in alphabetical order. I can’t get around this!

However, as Mixxx doesn’t automatically play tracks – you have to cue and start each one yourself – it’s not a big disadvantage, but it is annoying that you have to remember the order yourself, or make it up as you go along. I had thought I could drag iTunes playlists into WinAmp, and then export them to Mixxx, but even that doesn’t work.

More annoyingly, Mixxx doesn’t let you drag and reorder playlists – although this is a problem highlighted in their development Wiki, so hopefully it will be addressed soon. Until then, or until iTunes exports more friendly playlist file formats, I’m afraid importing playlists from iTunes will continue to be a pain. For now, you’ll have to make new playlists.

As always, we welcome your comments – maybe you have a solution to this problem?

Don’t get me wrong here: Myna is nothing like as advanced as Adobe Audition or GarageBand. But for audio editing newbies like me, it’s the perfect tool for some quick audio mixdowns that can add the finishing touch to a video, a photo slideshow or any other personal creation.

Even if you’ve never used an audio editing tool before, you’ll immediately feel at ease when launching Myna. The program’s interface follows the traditional design of audio editors, with a library of pre-made clips at the bottom, and a top working area with a timeline that features ten different tracks. All you have to do is select the appropriate clip and drop it on the timeline.

You can also drag them around for adjusting or trimming, copy and paste them via the context menu, and even record your own sound samples with a microphone. Myna includes not only a wide variety of audio samples you can use for free in your creations, but also a bunch of special effects such as fades, reverb, flanger, pitch and more. After saving you mix – which requires a free user account on the Aviary website -  you can save it right away and also share it online with your friends on several different social networks

Want to learn more about Myna? Check out this video from Alan at Aviary, and see how powerful this awesome tool can be.

1. The soundtrack of your sweet 16
Feeling nostalgic? Find those good old songs that used to play in pubs and clubs when you were just a teenager. It’s as easy as using the ‘year’ tag.

2. They don’t make good rock ‘n roll anymore
I agree. So if you’re sick of reggaeton, pseudo-disco and other musical atrocities, use the ‘genre’ tag to find those classic hits that still give you the goosebumps. There are more than 100 genres to try out!

3. I want to have all the versions of my favorite song
If you want to listen to all the versions they’ve made of your favorite song, there’s a Spotify tag for that! Simply type in ‘title:’ followed by the song title and you’re done.

Here are some alternative ways to get aural satisfaction from the internet:

The daddy of social music sites, and despite being sold to an evil corporation it’s still pretty cool. Last.fm has a large user community, recommendations based on your listening history and concert listings. It records your iTunes activity, and builds a profile of your tastes, and you can listen to Last.fm radio stations based on genre, similar artists or the stations of other users. There’s  less control than Spotify, but you will hear new music you might like.

Similar in some respects to Last.fm, in that you can listen to generated radio stations based on genre. You can also build and save playlists. Deezer’s interface is really intuitive, and not a million miles away from iTunes, so you’ll feel right at home. It even has an equalizer! They have a good sized library, but Spotify seems bigger.

This is very different. The Hype Machine collects music that is being blogged about. You can play all the music in their site, and if you have an account and “love” tracks, you can build a playlist of music and artists you like. It’s fantastic for hearing brand new music, and keeping up with what’s hot! It features Last.fm synchronization too, so you can scrobble all the cool new tracks you’re listening to.

This internet jukebox lets you search and listen to music, using YouTube.com and imeem as its library. With a songza account you can build a playlist, but other than that it’s pretty basic. As it uses YouTube as a source, the library is huge, although the quality varies a lot.

Similar to Last.fm, imeem has lots of social features, like twittering tracks you like, and sharing and creating playlists. Personally I think Last.fm is a nicer site, but it’s probably just a matter of personal taste!

This barely scratches the surface of web based listening. What are you favorites?

The funny thing is that I’m not the only one that has noticed this increase. The whole OnSoftware editorial team was also complaining about it, so we decided to conduct a small research project: listen to music on Spotify for a whole hour and count all the ads you get. As a result, Jon, Nick and me got seven ads each, while Tom had six and James, four. Not that bad for just 60 minutes of music. It seems that the more often you use Spotify, the more ads you get: James is almost new to the program and he only had four, while the rest of us, Spotify veterans, obtained higher scores.

And what are Spotify ads about? Well, most of them explain new features in the application or encourage you to upgrade to the Premium version. Others are about MP3 download services, or new albums and artists you can find on the program. Some of them are in English, which I find a bit out of place since we’re in Spain. And the vast majority are quite poor in quality, but there’s no way you can skip them: if you turn the volume down so as to not hear them, they’ll be paused until you turn the volume up again.

I used to love Spotify and recommended it to all of my friends. Now I’m not so sure about it. On the one hand, it’s a simple program that offers an incredible amount of music, just a click away; on the other hand, the Free version has become so ad-ridden that it’s a bit too annoying to use. Sorry, but I’m back to Winamp now.

I had this problem with a couple of music albums and I spent some time looking for the right app to deal with it. The problem was that one of the albums was recorded in the studio, while the other was recorded live; this means I needed a program that could split MP3 files not only based on silence between tracks, but also on some other kind of technology that enabled me to split a concert – where there’s never a moment of silence. Luckily I think I found just the perfect app: mp3splt.

mp3splt is an open-source tool that analyzes the selected MP3 or OGG file and lets you choose between different ways to cut it into smaller bits: set the ’splitpoints’ manually, use a cue file, detect silent breaks between tracks or query online CD databases for information about the album, so that the program knows where to cut.

Here’s my pick of software that will replace most of Nero’s functions, for free.

Ripping and Burning: When it comes to CD burning, if you want to make an MP3 or normal CD, stick to iTunes! It’s fantastically intuitive, quick and easy – as long as you don’t want to edit anything. Want to create a DVD? Give ImgBurn a go. You can rip discs, create “images” for DVD, HD DVD and Blu-Ray and more, and unlike iTunes it will read and create audio CDs from any file format you are likely to see. What it won’t do is create fancy DVD menus, but hey, it’s free!

Audio Editing: Nero 9 allows you to edit music files, and mix them too. The best free audio editing app is without a doubt Audacity. It’s a really flexible program, that accepts pretty much any format, and allows you to combine tracks, alter their pitch, tempo and much more. Imore. I wrote a guide to making a CD mix here – once you’re done, you can burn it to a disc using iTunes or ImgBurn! It’s also a great app if you want to import live audio from vinyl or cassette – it has automatic hiss and crackle removal if you want (I prefer that authentic dirty sound myself).

Spotify is serious search for Spotify on Mac on the Apple downloads website and no results were found although I’m not sure how much can be read into this.

A promotional video launched by Spotify shows that users will also be able to listen to music offline by downloading playlists onto their iPhone. This is great news for those who live in areas where network coverage is poor. However, the bad news is that initially, it’s only going to be available to premium users but this could finally be the driver that Spotify has been looking for to encourage users to convert from the free ad-supported version.

The likelihood is that Apple will approve the app. After all, Spotify is growing hugely and its success will only drive iPhone sales even further and these should offset any losses iTunes makes. And by blocking it from the store, it’s only going to make iPhone users want it more and no doubt, eventually someone would create a hack for it anyway.

One other strange thing worth noting about this news is that Spotify mobile was first demoed on Android and yet it’s being released on iPhone first. Depending on the success of the iPhone version, an Android release will surely follow shortly. US users will have to wait the longest unfortunately – Spotify hasn’t even launched there yet and isn’t expected to until the end of this year.

SweetFM switches seamlessly between Last.fm and iTunes. If you get bored of listening to either application at any point, you can just switch in a click. You can configure hotkeys to control most tasks and even use your Apple Remote – useful for parties or just kicking back and relaxing.

But there’s more to it than that. SweetFM extends Last.fm functionality with things such as tag-station shuffle. Just enter an artist name with some Amazon.com when playing major artists.

One other thing worth bearing in mind about SweetFM is that if you want to export tracks to iTunes, it will automatically check for duplicates although this obviously relies on your music being tagged correctly. There’s lots more to SweetFM than this too including CSS skin design support, Skype moods integration and handy Growl notifications.

There’s little to fault with SweetFM and considering it’s now completely open source and free, the time has never been better to try this sweet app.