The Mind of Dr. Mac

If you’ve been reading my Dr. Mac column in the Houston Chronicle for a while you’ve probably noticed that I love music. I love listening to music, and though I’m not particularly talented at it, I love playing music. So this week I have a few music-oriented goodies (namely Chords for iTunes, Chordmaster, Bloom, and iToner) that I’d like to share with you.

To read the rest of the column: click here.

To watch the video of me demonstrating Chords for iTunes: click here.

I love free stuff and I love free music stuff most of all. So I was tickled to discover (via a tweet by my Senior Agent-in-Charge Pat Fauquet) that the nice folks promoting the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago August 7-9 are offering music lovers a free sampler with songs by 15 of the artists playing the festival this year.

If you want these 15 free songs for your very own, just click here: Get 15 Free Songs on iTunes.

*Sorry, but this deal is only available for U.S. fans.

As much as I love shopping at the Apple iTunes store, I like buying music at Amazon MP3 even more. For one thing, songs purchased from Amazon MP3 can be played on any MP3-capable device. Of course they can be played on iPods, but they can also be played on Zunes, Zens, RAZRs, BlackBerrys, and any other music playing device that supports MP3 files (which is almost all of them ever produced).

Another thing I really like is that Amazon MP3 files are free of digital rights management (DRM) software, so you can burn your songs to CDs, play them on all your computers, and transfer them to all your devices with no embedded limitations.

Finally, all songs are encoded at 256 kbps, which means better audio quality than songs purchased from the iTunes Store.

That’s why I think Amazon MP3 rocks.

Now, at the risk of turning this blog into “Dr. Mac’s Discounts & Deals,” check out this awesome deal from Amazon MP3. 

Amazon MP3, Amazon’s music download store, is pleased to announce a cross-promotion with our CD and Electronics stores where purchases of $25 or more of qualifying CD’s or Electronic items from Amazon.com gets customers a $5 credit at Amazon MP3. This promotional offer is only applicable to U.S.-based customers with a U.S. billing address and is valid from now through December 25, 2008. 

Click here for complete details.

I’ve had my iPhone since time immemorial (or at least since June 29, 2007). And I’ve been testing iPhone apps since the day they first became available (which was July 11, 2008). The bottom line is that I’ve tried literally hundreds of iPhone apps over the last few months and only a handful have lasted longer than a week or two on my iPhone. So here’s a mini-review of Shazam, one of that handful of free iPhone Apps still on my iPhone, and one of the few I love enough to recommend it to you without hesitation. (more…)