Nice -- didn't realize Mono on embedded was even happening ... very cool.

Quoted: The Sansa Connect is running Linux as its operating system, and the whole application stack is built on Mono, running on an ARM processor.

Angry but often insightful post on piracy vs. DRM-infected "legitimacy".

Quoted: Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest ...

Interesting ...

Obscenely expensive but very sweet looking music system -- core interface is a 17" touch screen. Reminds me of Kaleidescape for DVDs, and about as ridiculously priced.

Whoa! Nokia is buying Loudeye. I built big chunks of the media platform (and various other things at Loudeye, my old job), so really -- NOKIA <3 ME!

Updating a previous Dot -- installation failed twice. Finally, I gave up and tried to start WMP 10 ... well, it turns out that the install got far enough to have replaced it. My library was gone, but that's not a big deal for me since all the metadata is in the files. The library import is also now asynchronous, which is quite nice (although no progress indicator, lame).

The player works beyond that, and wow -- what an improvement. Even while importing files in the background, it's _way_ faster than WMP 10 while still being quite reasonable on memory usage (which is why I use WMP to begin with).

The new library views are way more useful, way faster, and much more visually appealing (as is the player chrome). And being able to change the sorting at various levels (e.g. resorting the album view by artist) is totally sweet. I basically always listen to albums straight through, so the draggable cover art is tremendously useful for me.

Still lots of bugs, Urge doesn't work at all, but overall it's looking very good. Once the wrinkles are ironed out, this will be a player I use because I want to, not just because it's light on memory usage ...

URGE beta on Wednesday, which apparently means WMP11 beta on Wednesday.

Quoted: For years, MTV Networks Inc. sat on the sidelines while Apple Computer Inc., RealNetworks Inc. and others racked up sales of music downloads. Now the cable network group that helped popularize music videos two decades ago is entering the online music fray with URGE, a new service that makes its public beta debut on Wednesday.

Interesting ... cross platform support is nice, 32kbps is not so nice.

Quoted: Yes, Napster is free again. Launching this morning, the new Napster offers more than 2 million tracks for streaming on its ad-supported Web site

Loudeye has been acquired by Muze.

Quoted: Muze Acquisition Creates One-Stop Shop for Provisioning All Media on All Devices. - NEW YORK, N.Y., and LA JOLLA, Calif., May 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Muze Inc., an Enterprise Partners portfolio company, has acquired the U.S.-based services and operations of Loudeye Corp. (Nasdaq: LOUD - News), in an asset purchase valued at $11.0 million in cash.