Free Online Music

People always love good music and love it more when "musica gratis en internet" i.e., free online music. But good music is pricey, and it is not affordable for all to buy songs off the music stores at almost a dollar for each song. With the advent of high speed internet connection, music is available as easily on the internet as on our local stores minus the expensive cost and the hard effort to find. Due to the numerous facilities offered by the internet music has become much cheaper and people find the music of their choice in a much shorter time.
"Musica gratis en internet" is available in various forms. They are as follows.

Free online radio: These are 24 hour radio channels. The websites present a variety of ads. One can listen to the music free of cost as long as they can keep up to those. The music quality depends on both the transmitting station as well as the bandwidth of the person listening to it. Normally the songs are offered at 56 kbps and 128 kbps quality but better quality may be available. Many radio stations also offer to listen to specific songs from a list of their collections.

Music search engines: Some search engines are built dedicated to music on the internet only. These keep a track of all the most popular categories of songs.

Free web music stores: There are many free music stores available on the internet. These websites also depend on ads for support to keep the stores going and as long as the listener visits the ads they have free access to the music store. Almost all popular music is available at these websites. The quality of the music is much better than the online radios and the songs are mostly available in mp3 format though other formats are not unexpected.

Blog sites: Another thing that has become popular with the popularising of internet is "blogging". Many independent musicians and music lovers post free music on their blog regularly.

Reference:Saarthak Choudhury

Musica Popular Brasileira - A Concise History

MPB, which stands for Musica Popular Brasileira, and translates from Portuguese as "Brazilian Popular Music," represents the broad body of work began by one of the most creative generations of musicians 20th century music has seen. Some of the classic representatives of the movement, which arose out of Brazil in the late 1960s and is often referred to as Tropicalia, are Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Ze, Jorge Ben Jor, Maria Bethania, Os Mutantes, Rita Lee, and Chico Buarque.

The music made by these and other such artists does not constitute a specific genre so much a shared spirit of experimentation, especially with the integration of American and British popular music influence (Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, et al) into Brazilian styles such as bossa nova and samba. This experimentation resulted in a wide variety of musical expression, from the psychedelic music of Os Mutantes, the samba-funk of Jorge Ben Jor, and the highly versatile work of Caetano Veloso who incorporated folk, rock, pop, psychedelica, and even disco into his albums. Veloso continues to release vital albums to this day, in fact, and is considered by many to be the iconic example of an MPB artist.

More recent MPB artists of note include Marisa Monte, Otto, Lenine, Chico Cesar, Bebel Gilberto, Moreno Veloso, MoMo, and Carlinhos Brown. Also worth noting are the contributions of American experimental/No Wave musician Arto Lindsay as producer of recording artists such as Caetano Veloso and Marisa Monte.
In the 1990s, English-speaking audiences began to become aware of MPB thanks to the "Brazil Classics" series of records released by David Byrne on his Luaka Bop label, particularly the albums "Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropical" (1989), and a volume dedicated to the idiosyncratic pop-composer and Avant-Tropicalist Tom Ze ("Brazil Classics 4: The Best of Tom Ze," 1990).

Many current American musicians have professed to have been influenced by Tropicalia, including Beck, Devendra Banhart, andDan Wallace (two songs by whom are available for free download here:www.danwallacemusic.com/download).


Reference:C. Vincent Powell

How To Use Technology To Accelerate Your Piano Learning

Some people might get turned off by technology when it comes to learning to play the piano. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technology can help you play faster and better in all areas of music.

o Perfect Your Pitch Pro - Perfect Your Pitch Pro is a simple but powerful game that you can play on your computer. It is for all levels. You will start off with the notes A, B, C, and D and are played various notes in which you must decide what was just played, using a multiple choice answer board. You get 10 points if you answer correctly first time, 6 points if it takes 2 guesses, 3 points if it takes 3 guesses, and 0 points if it takes 4 guesses. You can only progress from level to level if you score enough points. As you progress, the game gets gradually more difficult. You'll be amazed at how quickly, just by playing this game, you'll train your ear via self-correction without much effort and eventually you'll clock the game and be able to recognize all 36 notes on the chromatic scale (across the 3 center octaves).

o Jayde Musica Pro - learning to read music can be boring and monotonous. Jayde Musica Pro helps to bring the fun back to learning to read music. Watch as musical notes fly across the screen and do your best to identify them! This game goes from beginner to advanced levels, complete with high scores. You will find this to be the easiest, most effective way to learn how to read music. You will be amazed at how quickly you will enjoy using Jayde Musica.

o KeyCellerator - Keycellerator is fantastic for learning how to read music to an intermediate level. KeyCellerator takes over from where Jayde Musica leaves off so that you can take your music reading to a new level, while having incredible amounts of fun in the process! Soon you'll be sight reading even the most complex chord shapes with the same ease that you read a book. Who would have ever thought what a brilliant all round musician you'd be?

These are some of the tools that can help you learn to play piano faster and better. Use any or all of them whenever you have a chance. You'll see yourself ahead of those who don't.

Reference:Alex Nguyen

Piano Lessons - Games to Keep it Fun While You Learn

My wife is a piano teacher and has been for quite some time. Her students are mostly children, though some of them are much older (such as myself), so she tries to make learning to play the piano as fun as possible. Her main focus is trying to incorporate into her piano lessons games that will keep her students in practice and still keep them excited.

Learning the piano isn't like it used to be in the old days. To be honest, the idea of sitting in a room with nothing but a metronome, a song book, and a piano sounds terribly boring. But with the computer age in full swing there are more and more "piano lessons" games and software packages offering ways to improve your skills while keeping you entertained and having fun.

My favorite games, and the ones we share with our students right from the start, are the ones where you can try and beat your own high-score. I've never been a big fan of competition; it becomes too easy to give up because someone else is consistently doing better than you, but trying to beat my own best record really got me practicing. Nothing pushes a student to keep going like beating their old score and knowing that they can beat the new one too with just a little more playing.

There are two games that I call my favorites.

• Jayde Musica Pro - This game is awesome for those of us who think reading music is complicated and boring. When talking about piano lessons, games like this just make it too easy. Notes fly across the screen and you do your best to identify them. The more you identify the higher your score (and within no time you know ALL the notes like the back of your hand!)
•  
• Chordinator - A multiple choice game that leads you along through the complicated mess of Chord notation. This game is great and, once again, lets your beat your own personal best.

I used to have some serious problems reading sheet music and it seemed that no matter how often my wife would remind me of what meant what, I still couldn't seem to remember it. The problem was that I spent too much time beating myself up for not understanding and that took all the fun out of it for me. The above games really fixed that.

Of course, now that I can read the sheet music all I really have to do is work on my timing. I looked all around the internet for a "metronome trainer" or something like it and finally found it in an online course called Rocket Piano. I was surprised to find that Rocket Piano offered Jayde Musica Pro and Chordinator. I told my wife about it right away and now we recommend the Rocket Piano course to all of our students so that they can practice at home. They've all said the same thing...it's so much fun! These piano lessons games are the absolute best, whether you're a student or even a teacher.

Calgary based Infinite Simplicity provides Web Design and Online Marketing services to entrepreneurs and small to medium business. Establish a presence, boost current traffic, dominate Google. Web Design made simple.

Reference:Raymond Remi Rheault

Gadget World Review - Apple iMac

We already had a review on this year's iPhone 3Gs, and iTouch, but what about their big brother iMac? Read up to see what Apple has in store for us with its 2009 iMac! Let's say you decided to get an iMac and show off to your friends. If you were to go to the store with these thoughts in mind, you might get very surprised, and even spend a little more time looking for the new iMac where the old one used to be.

To everyone's disbelief, Apple hasn't changed the appearance of the new iMac at all. It's still the same white case with a silver touch, plain white wired keyboard, and same old wired mighty mouse! What did change - is the price. A $300 price reduction has been at the top of Apples priority lists. Better hardware at a cheaper price. We've been looking at this exterior since August 2007, but how about we get a closer look at what comes at the heart of this new price.

A look inside the mighty iMac

This year's iMac comes in 4 different models, which can be customized a little to your liking right at the store. Starting at $1199 iMac has a 20" screen, 2.66Ghz Intel's Core 2 Duo (last year's iMac came with 2.4Ghz kick to it), 2GB of ram, 320GB Hard Drive, and nVidia 9400M video card. It is definitely cheapest at $1200, but doesn't really have the VALUE tag attached to it.

Next in line, and probably best positioned, is the 24" iMac with the same 2.66Ghz chip and nVidia 9400M video card, but with 4GB of RAM, and hard disk space at 640GB. This model is priced at $1499. At $200 more expensive than the 20" model, it surely screams "value!" with double the ram and twice the hard disk space and most importantly 24" masterpiece. The drawback is that $1500 is not exactly on everyone's budget, and $1200 is not exactly a value pick here. But let's see how well the top models fair.

Next in line is also a 24" iMac, with 2.93Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, 640GB HD, and nVidia GeForce GT 120 (256MB), priced at $1799. Slightly better CPU and video card do not exactly justify a $300 price increase in today's market.

At the top of the food chain however is 24" 3.06 GHz, 4GB RAM, and 1TB HD iMac. It comes with either GeForce GT130 (512MB) or ATI RADEON 4850HD (512MB) [+$50] but probably for people who know what they are doing. If you need a machine optimized for graphics or gaming, iMac would do the job well, however if you require an upgrade to 8GB of RAM, it will cost you another $1000. Otherwise stick to the $1500, 24"! Its nVidia 9400M is more than capable of handling current apps and games!
Final Words on iMac

So. If you wanted to buy an iMac last year and didn't, this year it's the same thing but a little faster and $300 cheaper. But watch out, keyboard comes without a Num Keypad (they will however include it for free if you buy an iMac at Apple store). Best value is the $1500 model, comes with a huge screen and a powerful hardware. The only drawback is the glare that comes off this glossy screen, and can get really annoying in well lit places! Apple could have at least tried to make it a little dull. Maybe next year they will come up with a better design, for now enjoy better price and beefier system.

 Reference:Alexei Budco

Apple iMac - 21.5 and 27 - Inch iMac - Better Picture and Superior Graphics

The new Apple iMac 21.5-inch, 1920-by-1080 display has 17 percent more pixels than the previous 20-inch iMac. The new Apple iMac 27-inch, 2560-by-1440 display features a whopping 78 percent more pixels than the 21.5-inch Apple iMac desktop computer. And what's more, a 1000:1 contrast ratio assures you more vibrant colors and blacker blacks; all that in a widescreen display with a 16:9 aspect ratio - the same as an HD TV.

With quad-core processors and superior graphics, the new iMac is the fastest and most powerful iMac up till now. The new fastest ever Apple iMac comes with high-performance graphics that make games run smoother, load photos quicker, and make applications work better. If you want even faster graphics, there is also an option to choose an iMac with a more advanced ATI graphics processor.

The 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac models offer fast Intel Core 2 Duo processors up to 3.33GHz. The 27-inch iMac features Quad-core power with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 processor or 2.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor. The new iMac has 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory standard, with room in its four SO-DIMM slots for up to 16GB, so you can run more applications at the same time. And with a Serial ATA hard drive up to 2TB, feel free to add up more photos, videos, and music.

The new iMac is quicker at importing photos and performing basic editing tasks such as red-eye removal and to erase small blemishes in iPhoto. If you're a photo fanatic who is keen on the power and precision of more professional applications, the 2.8GHz quad-core iMac gives you up to 2x quicker performance with Aperture.

London iMac Repair - Innovative IT, based in Central London, provides professional, same day  iMac G4 Repair , iMac G5 Repair and Intel based iMac Repair in London, UK for all Apple iMac desktop models.

Reference:Stephen Dingwall

How to Manage V-Cards With Your Blackberry

The BlackBerry is perfect for sharing contact information, having very useful devices that allow the user to manage contact names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and even vCards. A vCard (Virtual business card) is a contact information from your BlackBerry's Address book, that you send someone as an attachment to your e-mail, very much alike the e-mail professional signature. If the receiver also has a BlackBerry device, he will be informed that he has the option of saving the information from the received vCard.

Sending the vCard is very simple: 

- Select Messages from your BlackBerry Home screen, press the trackwheel, then select Compose mail from the menu and select the recipients of your e-mail.

- Scroll the track-wheel and select the contact you want to send your vCard, then press the trackwheel, type the subject and the message to the recipient, then press the track-wheel again, choose the Attach Address from the menu, pick the contact info you want to attach to the e-mail. 

- Press the track-wheel and select Send from the menu.

If you just received a vCard and you would like to save it in your BlacBerry, this is how you do it: 

- Select Messages from the Home screen and press the track-wheel, select the message that containing the vCard and press Enter 

- Select the attachment that appears and choose View attachment 

- Press the track-wheel and choose Add to address book. Now the vCard is saved to your BlackBerry's Address book and you can search for it anytime you want.

Reference: Adrian Alexa