HITB News

Napster's legally challenged song-swap service went dark last week and sentiment among many former users grew even darker.

Napster suspended file-sharing July 2 for a self-imposed shutdown as it battled technical glitches related to its latest upgrade, which is intended to help it comply with a court order barring it from offering copyrighted material on its service. No time for a resumption had yet been given as of Sunday.

Officials from Napster were unavailable for comment Monday.

37 Million people stream in and out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport every year. Now MP3.com will stream the best of its independent core of artists to those millions as they wait to board their flights.

Why is it a big deal for the company to step into the "elevator music" business? MP3.com artists don't make the MTV or radio rotation and so they need another mass venue to broadcast their tunes. Airports and train stations can offer them the exposure.

MP3Newswire.

NO SIGN OF NAPSTER REOPENING

Olympus seems to be pushing the unit more as a digital voice recorder than as a 64MB MP3 player, but the DM-1 is a player nonetheless. Targeted to on-the-go business people, the portable plays MP3 and WMA files and is headed for your local Staples and Office Maxx store.

MP3Newswire.

Lumenati Inc., a leader in defining and building innovative digital entertainment technologies formerly known as NetTV, today announced the availability of a robust new digital multimedia application, optimized for the rapidly growing broadband-enabled audience. Lumenati Basic,? now available for free download over the Internet, is a leading-edge digital entertainment management tool that puts into the hands of PC-users the power to conveniently find, manage, organize, and play compelling digital content when and how they want it.

Napster shut down its file trade service Monday in a move seen as the next step towards its migration to a pay service. The company did not say when it would come back online, but it did stress that the action was only temporary.

MP3Newswire.

Audiogalaxy's biggest feature is it allows you to queue a list of songs you want to download before you go to bed. When the songs become available as the night progresses they are automatically retrieved and usually by the time you wake up you have what you were looking for.

MP3Newswire

Some Aussies decided to have a little fun and pass word of a virus called MusicPanel that enters your system through MP3 files. Posted on three usenet sites, the warning was over the top and has met mostly with skepitism.

MP3Newswire.

All Napster users not using the latest security-laden version of the program were cut off by the company today. Get ready for Pay Napster.

MP3Newswire

It only took MP3pro two weeks to get over a half million downloads. No surprise here if you look at mp3PRO as just a refresh of the original. To most it is the same as upgrading to the latest version of Winamp.

MP3Newswire