Twitter unveiled a music service Thursday that uses activity on the microblog to help users share and discover new music.

The songs shared via the service are currently sourced from Spotify, iTunes or Rdio; other music service providers could be added later, Twitter said in a blog post announcing the service on Thursday.

Read TechHive’s Hands on with Twitter Music

Those who want to try the service can log in to the Web app on music.twitter.com. By default, Twitter will play previews from iTunes when users explore music in the app. Spotify and Rdio subscribers can log into their accounts to listen to full tracks that are available in the catalogs, it added.

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LAS VEGAS?Staying on task at International CES can be something of a challenge. There?s the swirling mass of tech reporters, the company representatives vying for your attention, and the onslaught of gadgets, flashing lights, and noise. And all of this is set to the soundtrack of Las Vegas?s ubiquitous slot machines, a choir of cacophonous beeping and blinking that will echo around your brain until you can think of nothing else but the clink, clink, clink of coins splashing around the?

I seem to have lost my train of thought.

Focus@Will is ready to come to the aid of the easily distracted masses. The company is in Las Vegas this week to show off its new music service aimed at helping people stay focused whenever they?re studying, working, or reading.

Here?s how Sariah Sizemore, a quality assurance engineer for Focus@Will, explained it to me: Most people are able to maintain their focus for 20, maybe 30 minutes, before their attention begins to wane. Focus@Will?s service plays music that keeps your mind from wandering. At about 20 minutes, as your brain gets used to the music and starts to tune things out?a process Focus@Will calls ?habituation??adaptive audio techniques kick in to help maximize your concentration. The graph below illustrates that process.

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Up to now, Google has been the poor boy of online music, but that's about to change. It rolled out a scan and match feature on Wednesday for Google Music users that gives the search giant a leg up on Amazon’s Cloud Player service and Apple’s iTunes Match. Here are some things you should know about Google’s matching service.

What is it?

Google’s service scans a user’s computer, giving them online access to the songs it finds, provided Google can match those songs on its servers. If the songs cannot be found, they will be uploaded to a user’s online locker.

The service saves you the time of manually uploading your music to Google Music by scanning the files in your library and comparing them to songs in the Google Music library.

If your song is in the Google Music library, Google will copy it to your cloud account. If it isn't in Google's library of approximately 13 million songs, Google will upload to your cloud account. (In comparison, Amazon and Apple claim to have about 20 million songs in their respective libraries.)

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Online file sync and storage service Dropbox has acquired Audiogalaxy, a peer-to-peer file sharing utility turned online music streaming service. The move suggests some form of media streaming is coming to Dropbox, based on the acquisition announcement from Audiogalaxy. “We are excited about the opportunity to join the amazing folks at Dropbox and bring great new experiences to 100M+ Dropbox users,” the Seattle-based streaming service said on its blog. Financial details were not revealed.

It's not clear what the Audiogalaxy team will be doing once it joins Dropbox. The company's current service allows you to stream your music collection from a mobile device via remote connection to your own computer at home. That's very different from services such as Google Music, which require you to upload your music collection to a remote server and then access it from anywhere via your mobile device.

Audiogalaxy's mention of “great new experiences” for Dropbox users suggests the company was purchased specifically for its media streaming expertise. Dropbox doesn't advertise it very much, but the service already offers limited media streaming. You can, for example, stream music tracks one at a time, as well as stream video using Dropbox's mobile apps. For complete access to playlists and albums you need to use a third-party media player connected to Dropbox.

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There are Linux distributions out there for pretty much every taste and purpose, but every once in a while I'll come across one that seems especially intriguing.

That happened this week with the release of ZevenOS 5.0, a Linux distro that's based on the lightweight Xubuntu but adds a multimedia focus.

“I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 5.0,” reads the Tuesday announcement on the project site. “ZevenOS still is the best Linux distribution with a BeOS touch.”

Media-oriented apps

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Thomas-Rasset's case, which began in 2007, has been a convoluted one--complete with retrials, judicial orders, and a host of different decisions. Tuesday's award to the record labels comes from the 2007 ruling in which a federal jury ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs she was found to have pirated.

The presiding judge acknowledged errors in the instructions given to the jury in that case, so that decision was thrown out. Unhappy, the recording industry pushed for and got a retrial in 2009. The end result was much more favorable for the labels, with a jury awarding a whopping $80,000 per song -- a $1.92 million judgment.

The court found that award excessive, and reduced it to $54,000. The labels opted for a new trial on damages, and that jury found Thomas-Rasset liable for $1.5 million in damages. Again, the court reduced it to $54,000, citing the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

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[TECH HIVE: iOS App Face-Off: Spotify Radio vs. Pandora]

Previously, only paid subscribers were able to use Spotify’s mobile apps. On Android and iOS, however, non-paying users will be able to use an ad-supported version of the radio feature. But Spotify freeloaders will not be able to access Spotify’s other mobile features such as downloading playlists to your mobile device.

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The Torrent Freak blog reveals that, despite the RIAA’s public support of the ill-advised SOPA and PIPA bills last winter, the music industry trade group never actually believed that either piece of legislation would have put a dent in music piracy.

Torrent Freak got its hands on a leaked presentation (PDF) given by RIAA Deputy General Counsel Vicky Sheckler last April. Among the bullet points in Sheckler’s report is the notion that while SOPA and PIPA were “intended to defer [copyright] infringements [by] foreign sites by obligating/encouraging intermediaries to take action,” they were “not likely to have been an effective tool for music.”

The internal report shows that the US music industry has been taking it in the shorts for some time – shipments declined from $12.3 billion in 2005 to just $7 billion last year – but the boogieman isn’t who you think it is.

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Sony hopes it can offer Apple's iPod Touch sterner competition with the announcement of a new Walkman model powered by the latest version of Google's Android operating system.

The Walkman 3.5 inch F800 is not the first media players to use Android -- the "Z" series started this trend for Sony back in May and Samsung has a similar product -- but the version included on those models was 2.3. The F800 which replaces these will use 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Three capacities are offered, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB, promising 4.5 hours of video playback and 20 for music. Inside, the F800 features a 1GHz dual-core CPU.

Do music players need Android to work well for their intended task? Not really but it allows the device to access apps on Google's Play Store via the Wi-Fi connection.

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Spotify's mobile products were originally available only subscribers who paid for its premium service, which left users of the free service stuck with listening to Spotify only on their desktops.

But now Spotify will offer its radio streaming service to all users. Free Spotify users will have to listen to ad-supported radio, while paid users will get an ad-free experience. The new feature is an iOS-only affair for now; a Spotify spokesperson said the company doesn't have immediate plans to extend the radio service to other mobile platforms such as Android or Windows Phone.

Free Mobile Radio

Spotify's new service is similar to what it already offers on the desktop and mimics competing services from Pandora and Slacker. Spotify's radio feature lets you create a “station” (basically an automated playlist) based on a particular artist, song, or genre. You can also base your Spotify stations on one of your playlists or on a friend's. You don't get to pick the songs in your personalized station, but you can skip over songs you don't like (although you can't go backwards through the track list).

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At the time, Cook suggested Apple had yet to decide on Ping's fate, but now All Things D reports that Ping will be shut down with the next major release of iTunes--presumably iTunes 11. The social network is still operational in iTunes 10.6.3, the latest version of Apple's multimedia software, and in iOS 5. But Ping in the developer beta of iOS 6 is currently non-functional; it's not clear if that's a sign of Ping's imminent demise or if Ping will start working in iOS 6 at a later date.

Ping was supposed to be Apple's big push into social with a music-based network built into iTunes on the desktop and iOS devices. Ping allowed you to follow updates from your favorite artists, broadcast your iTunes purchases to friends, share samples of songs you like, and find concert information about artists you follow. Apple described Ping as "Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes."

Ping gained more than one million users less than 48 hours after launching, but users soon balked at the service's commercial nature. Apple's social network was more about discovering music to purchase on iTunes than creating digital communities around artists or finding users with like-minded musical tastes. Ping also lacked basic social networking features like a way to broadcast status updates or post interesting third-party content such as a Rolling Stone interview with your favorite band.

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The Internet is like a fancy Hollywood party with lots of swag: You can get tons of stuff for free, but not all of it is good. Still, some of the Web services, apps, and downloads out there are great, and don’t require you to pay a cent. Our 17th annual roundup of free stuff includes dozens of no-cost services, apps, and programs that are worth your time. To help you find the most valuable freebies, we’ve categorized them based on which types of people they’ll help most. Enjoy the free life!

(To read the related story about each category of free stuff, click the appropriate heading below, or use the contents box to the right. You can also consult our alphabetical list of all of the downloads, apps, and Web services described in our Best Free Stuff package.)

Free Tools for the Tech-Savvy Businessperson

Any.DO Website | Download (Android)

AnyMeeting Website

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That was a long time ago. These days, iTunes is simultaneously Apple’s most important and problematic product. It’s a music and video player. It’s a store, the gateway to buying music, videos, ringtones, and iOS apps. And of course, it’s a syncing system, connecting to Apple devices from iPhone to iPod to Apple TV.

Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul.

I use iTunes every day to listen to music on my Mac at work, and it works just fine. It’s not perfect, but it’s good. My issues are not with the core feature of iTunes, the music player. My issues are with all the other junk that has been grafted on since then.

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The Symposium on Laptop Ensembles and Orchestras, which is being held April 15-17 at Louisiana State University, will showcase group performances by musicians using laptops and smartphones, instead of violas and violins.

The event will also feature a novel performance by seven different university laptop orchestras at once, coordinating their efforts via Internet video and audio. Its conductor, Carnegie Mellon University associate professor Roger Dannenberg, said in a statement that "the speed of light is a limitation for us, so I won't be able to control the beat. But I can give cues for the orchestras to play with different textures or sounds."

The idea behind the laptop orchestra concept is to explore various ways of interacting with electronic devices to produce music. Performers might move their fingers across a mousepad to create one effect and tap their smartphone's touchscreen to make another.

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Today was the second day of the music part of South by Southwest here in Austin, but the tech fun hasn’t really stopped. On its final day, the Accelerator start-up competition looked at music-related apps and services, which gave me a chance to see a another cool product that I think might catch on—Rexly.

The app replaces the music player on the iPhone, then pulls in feeds from all the other services you or your music-suggesting friends might be using. It also integrates with Twitter and Facebook so you can find out about new music, or tell people what you’re listening to, via these social channels.

The Rexly app has been around since last year, and today you can only hear full versions of live recordings or YouTube versions. But in the coming weeks, Rexly founder and CEO Joel Resnicow tells me, you’ll be able to listen to full versions of Spotify songs as well.

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New and Improved

The new Rdio interface is a big change from the previous, relatively placid interface. Here are the important details:

- You can now reorganize your music in playlists using drag-and-drop. You can also drag and drop your music onto other people's playlists.

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Tens of thousands of Europeans rallied this weekend to protest ACTA, an anti-piracy treaty many fear will impede freedom on the Internet. Similar concerns have been voiced about the recently tabled and much-maligned SOPA and PIPA bills in the U.S.

At issue: The downloading of copyrighted content that hasn't been paid for has been a widespread practice since peer-to-peer file sharing appeared around a decade ago, and well-funded organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America want it stopped.

But are the strong-arm tactics necessary?

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Geeks, technologists and the Internet as a whole raised their voices in protest harmony until Congress got the message that voters were not going to tolerate SOPA/PIPA breaking the Internet. "But big content remains tone deaf to this chorus of Internet users," the EFF stated. And like the RIAA which chooses to attack as opposed to innovate and move the music industry away from a broken business model, Capitol Records tried and failed in court to shut down ReDigi -- a truly unique and legal new way for users to sell their pre-owned digital music.

ReDigi is an eMarketplace launched in October and billed as "The World's One and Only Verified, Pre-owned Storage and Online Marketplace for Digital Music." It allows music lovers to recycle and resell their digital music, currently 32 cents for every song you sell. It also offers users the chance to securely purchase music for cheap, 79 - 89 cents on average. It's not about file sharing, but a legal alternative by verifying the iTunes music was lawfully purchased by the person wanting to resell it before that user's "one and only copy" is uploaded to the cloud for storage. ReDigi then sets up a legal sale between buyer and seller. While that might sound too good to be true to those of us with a gazillion songs eating hard drive space, or impossible, former MIT faculty and prolific technologist Larry Rudolph stated [PDF], "Being a group of computer geeks when someone tells us something can't be done, we immediately set a course to figure out how to do it."

As you might expect, Capitol Records thought the sky was falling and quickly had a copyright infringement cow. Capitol filed a preliminary injunction to shut down ReDigi, demanding ReDigi remove all Capitol-owned music and suing for damages of up to $150,000 per track. ReDigi won the first round as District Judge Richard J. Sullivan refused Capitol's preliminary injunction request. "This is a fascinating issue," Judge Sullivan stated. "It raises a lot of technological and statutory issues." The legal battle is far from over, but it's good news to see ReDigi win a major first round victory.

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Did you wait until the last minute again this year? If you need to find a present fast, just gift an iPhone or iPad app. There's an app for everyone on the Apple App Store. Of course, you don't want to give someone a cheap 99-cent app.

So here are some ideas for quality -- and pricey -- apps:

Golfshot: Golf GPS ($30)

For the iPhone-toting golf lover, this app is a must-have.

Golfshot GPS (also available for Android) acts as a GPS rangefinder that's pretty darn accurate (although not as accurate as a $300 laser rangefinder). Golfers can keep their scores on the app and even find out why their round blew up.

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Spotify is holding a press conference in New York today where it says it will reveal a "new direction" for the streaming music service. What could Spotify announce for its 10-million-member service? The tech press, myself included, has been befuddled by the question for the past week.

App-ification of Spotify:

Both Wired and All Things D reported Spotify will announce it's opening up its library of music to third party developers who will tap into Spotify's music library and incorporate it into applications. That means Wednesday's announcement might include a revamp of the Spotify API, some sort of new commercial terms for building and selling apps that tap into Spotify's music library, or perhaps a full-blown new Spotify app store.

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The coversation then shifts to the new Google Music store, fresh out of beta. You can still upload 20,000 of your own tracks, but now you can buy music for around $0.99 per track. Does the world need another "buy songs for a buck" music store? Not really, but Google does bring a few unique features to the table and Android users should probably have a default music service they can rely on being integrated into the OS.

Follow us on twitter: Jason Cross, Melissa Perenson, Ginny Mies, and Carlos Rodela.

Download the podcast (43:16).

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Google Music is no longer in beta and is now open to the public--and you'll still be able to upload and stream up to 20,000 songs for free. Google revealed an updated version of its music cloud service, app, Web player, and store, Google Music, this afternoon at Mr. Brainwash's studio in Hollywood.

The new version of the Web Music player and Android Music app are available now in the Android Market. The store launches today and will roll out to Android devices over the next few days. Both the new version of the Web Music player and the Android Music app will be available today as well.

When Google launched Google Music Beta, users could upload up to 20,000 songs to the cloud and stream for free. Here's the good news: Google Music is still free and purchased content doesn't count against that 20,000 limit. The other good news for audiophiles? All songs will be 320Kbps high quality MP3s.

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While Google didn’t explicitly state what the event was about, the invites imply that it is music related (complete with a “Spinal Tap” reference). More than likely, Google is releasing the final version of its Google Music cloud service, which was launched in beta at Google I/O this past May. Earlier this week, Venezuelan site TecnoDroidVe stumbled upon some screen shots of the Google Music Store, which will supposedly feature song previews, a free song of the day and music discovery features. According to these screenshots, you’ll get recommendations based on artists you’ve searched for previously.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google has secured deals with three out of the Big Four record labels: Sony Music Entertainmant, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, and EMI Music. Warner Music Group is the odd label out.

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iTunes Match is different from Amazon's, Google's, and other cloud music services, because it doesn't require users to upload all of their music. Instead, iTunes Match makes the user's library available through iTunes as DRM-free, 256Kbps AAC files, regardless of where the songs originally came from. The only songs that get uploaded are songs that iTunes doesn't already have. As you can imagine, this is ideal for someone who has a huge music library and who doesn't want to spend hours uploading said library to the cloud.

Apple's iCloud service backs up users' purchased iTunes songs for free, so iTunes Match only makes sense for people who have acquired their music from outside of Apple's ecosystem--legitimately or, ahem, otherwise.

But though iTunes Match debuted Monday, it's not quite ready for primetime.

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Google has "refused" to remove MP3 Music Download Pro, a popular app for downloading copyrighted music from the Android Market, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA told PC Magazine that it sent Google a takedown notice for the app in August, and Google refused to take action. Other similar apps, such as Easy MP3 Downloader and MP3 Music Download Super, are also available through the Android Market.

MP3 Music Download Pro sniffs out songs from the Web's dark corners and makes them available for streaming or download. It is currently the forth most popular Android app, according to Google's Android Market. The sources of the music, scattered throughout countless domains, are hidden unless the user decides to share the download link with other people. The app doesn't indicate that downloading songs from these sources is illegal.

Google has apparently decided that MP3 Music Download Pro and similar apps will stay. But in the past, Google has ejected apps similar apps from the Android Market, including Music Junk, Music Wizard, and Music Zilla.

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