beats

This week, Donald will just not_shut_up already, so Jasmine tries to impose a word cap on his ramblings (it fails). Items that are babbled upon include the overly bass-heavy Dr. Dre Beats Solo headphones, a potential Zii war between Nintendo and Creative, an itty-bitty $9 MP3 player, and a potential HD video player from Cowon. Also, Donald shoots Jasmine with lasers, and we drool over an ultraquiet vacuum with a built in iPod speaker.

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For a friend's birthday the other night, we all went down to his rehearsal space (he's in a band) and played music, often switching instruments to see what we could come up with. Not everyone there was a musician, but with drums, guitars, basses, a keyboard, percussion instruments, and microphones, everyone found a way to get in on the jam. To add to the fun later in the night, my friend also had a cord to connect an iPod or iPhone to the PA system which meant I could try out some of my music apps. Among the … Read more

SAN MATEO, Calif.--Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore hopes that America's next-generation power grid will be a lot like the Internet. Or at least that's the plan.

How close we get to that goal depends on what happens in the next five years, Gore said in a speech here on Thursday evening at blog VentureBeat's GreenBeat conference, where he outlined many of the challenges the United States faces in upgrading its power grid. Along the way, he made comparisons to how the advent of the so-called smart grid will enable the kind of solutions and business innovation that the Internet brought during the 1990s.

"The analogy to the Internet is quite an exact one. Not completely exact, but it's very relevant for lots of reasons. We are moving inexorably toward a widely distributed energy generation and storage model. We are still locked into the old centralized energy generation model," Gore said. "The rapid development of new generations of new smart storage systems are going to make a tremendous difference in connection with the smart grids." Those systems are designed to enable easier storage of unused electricity for peak times, when supplying it to large groups of customers can be difficult and more expensive.

Gore also foresees an entirely new set of devices and instruments to help utilities and consumers control and monitor usage--technology and business models that may not yet have been imagined. "(It's) much the same way the Internet made it possible to see this generation of Internet-ready devices that did not even exist before the Internet began to build out," Gore said.… Read more

A court has hit pause on the sale of Beatles tunes from the Web site BlueBeat.

Judge John Walter of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California late this week issued a temporary restraining order against BlueBeat after being petitioned Tuesday by the Capitol Records unit of music label EMI, which owns the Beatles' recordings.

The judge found BlueBeat's arguments "lacking in clarity" and wrote that the defendants failed to offer reliable evidence to support "their claim that they 'independently developed their own original sounds'."

As Matt Rosoff wrote this week … Read more

Last week, a music site called BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs as free streams and 25 cent downloads. The Beatles are known for not making their songs legally available on iTunes or any other online forum, so observers rightly asked "how are they doing this legally?"

EMI, the record label that owns The Beatles' recordings, has a simple response: they're not doing this legally. But here's where the story gets very strange.

BlueBeat is owned by a company called Media Rights Technologies, which specializes in digital rights management technology. DRM is supposed to be … Read more

For years, Will Wright has been just about the biggest name in video game development. It's hardly necessary to recite his resume, but just in case you haven't been paying attention, he's the creator of SimCity and its many direct spinoffs, The Sims franchise--which long ago surpassed 100 million units sold--and most, recently, Spore.

But last spring, not long after Spore's much-anticipated release, Wright announced he was leaving Electronic Arts, the game's publisher, for the greener pastures of a start-up called Stupid Fun Club. Though the new venture is backed by EA, it is … Read more

A new alliance between hip-hop impresario Dr. Dre, Interscope Chairman Jimmy Iovine, and computer maker Hewlett-Packard aims to save digital music.

No, this is not an attempt to fix the record industry's business woes. The goal is to lift the sound quality of the too-often tinny tunes squeaking out of our ear buds, and it's an ambitious plan nonetheless. HP will release premium-priced laptops, headsets, and software featuring the "Beats by Dr. Dre" brand sometime this fall, music industry sources with knowledge of the offering told CNET News.

In an interview last week, Iovine declined to … Read more

Michael Jackson, who along with four of his brothers recorded his first hit songs as a child, continues to be a chart topper a day after his death.

On Friday, Jackson's music was attracting huge audiences at Apple's iTunes and Amazon.com. On iTunes, the Web's largest music service, 8 out of the top-10-selling albums for download were from Jackson, with a compilation album, "The Essential Michael Jackson" in the No. 1 spot.

Jackson held the same number of top-10 positions among iTunes music videos. Jackson's "Thriller" music video, one of the … Read more

When we reviewed Altec Lansing's line of BackBeat earphones, we were pleasantly surprised that they sounded as good as they did for what they cost. Expounding on the bang-for-the-buck theme, Altec's now introduced the line-topping BackBeat Pro UHP606 for $99.99.

Altec says the earphones include "high-end armature technology, engineered to deliver an in-studio sound experience at a price level far below competing headphones costing several hundreds more."

The press release goes on to discuss how great this technology is and how it helps achieve professional "studio quality." In other words, Altec's setting … Read more