There are thousands and thousands of iPhone applications, but you hardly have time to keep up with their pricing changes, let alone new releases. The FreeAppAlert web service will keep you updated. You can set up FreeAppAlert’s site to notify you via email, twitter, or RSS about the newest free iPhone apps, including those making the jump from behind a pay wall. If you don’t want to be bothered with notifications, you can browse the site by date when you’re in the mood to stock up on new apps. If you find a gem in the archives, make sure to throw a link in the comments to share the wealth. Visit - FreeAppAlert

While we all know that it is important to backup our computer files, how many of us ever really do it. Even with the best of intentions it often gets forgotten, that’s why the process needs to be automated. After experimenting with a few different types of backup software I have found the most reliable to be Microsoft SyncToy 2.0, and the good news is it’s completely free.

Schedule SyncToy 2.0

While you do not have to schedule SyncToy to use it, some users may find it helpful to schedule recurrent SyncToy runs. Perhaps you have a folder pair that takes a long time to sync and you want to run SyncToy in the middle of the night, for example. SyncToy does not provide a user interface to schedule folder pairs to run at designated times. However, there is a method to schedule tasks using the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Windows Vista

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, search for Task Scheduler.
2. Select Create Basic Task in the Actions pane on the right.
3. Add a Name and Description and select Next.
4. Choose when you want the task to start and select Next.
5. Choose date/times (if applicable) to run task and select Next.
6. Choose Start a Program option and select Next.
7. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe. (Programs, SyncToy)
8. Type "-R" in the Add Arguments textbox. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\ and that you want to run a folder pair named "My folder pair." Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: "C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe" -R "My folder pair." Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Windows XP

To schedule a task using the operating system:

1. From the Start menu, select All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Scheduled Tasks.
2. Select Add scheduled task to start the Scheduled Task Wizard. You will see a list of possible programs to run.
3. Select Browse and locate the SyncToyCmd.exe.
4. The wizard will next prompt you to enter how often you want to run the scheduled SyncToy (for example, daily, weekly, et cetera). Select a frequency.
5. The next page asks when to start the task. Select a start time.
6. The next page asks for the user name and password to run the program under. Enter your user name and password.
7. The final page contains an option to open the properties dialog when the wizard ends. Select this checkbox.
8. Modify the Run textbox to include the –R command line option. –R all by itself will run all folder pairs that are active for run all. If you want to run just a single folder pair, add –R “My Pair” to the end of the command line.Note: If the folder pair name contains a space, surround it with quotation marks, as the example above shows. For another example, assume that SyncToy is in the folder named C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0 and that you want to run a folder pair named "My folder pair." Enter the command line as follows, including the quotation marks: "C:\Program Files\SyncToy 2.0\SyncToyCmd.exe" -R "My folder pair." Note that there are two sets of quotation marks in this case: one is around the path to the SyncToy program file and the other surrounds the folder pair name.

Note: With this version of SyncToy, it is now possible to schedule execution of a folder pair in the following scenarios:

1. No one is currently logged into the machine.
2. A different user is logged into the machine.

Apologies for not posting much new music lately but here is a song that I have been really enjoying lately, Feel free to download it, the link is below.

Emerging in late 2006, Bird Automatic began to play shows and record homemade demos. Since then, they've sure been busy, touring with the likes of The Shout Out Louds, Art Brut and The 1990s! Bird Automatic's sound is a marriage of Light Electronica with elements of Post Rock and Indie-Pop.

 

Here's one of my new favourite tracks:- Jim Bianco, Belong  "I write songs. Sometimes about love, sometimes about sex, sometimes about stalkers, or music or folly or the Devil. I notice that most songs around are about love, which reminds me of another quote, by Frank Zappa:" “There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something, we'd all love one another.”

She is young, attractive and highly talented, how annoying...This is a great track from Gabriella Cilmi. "Sweet about me"

This is my favourite new track of the week, it has been on high rotation since I discovered it a few days ago.

 

Click the Download button to get it for free.

 

Lucky, the title of Nada Surf’s fifth album, is at once literal and ironic. Like the songs that singer- guitarist Matthew Caws, bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elliot crafted for their previous two albums, Let Go (2003) and The Weight Is A Gift (2005), Lucky is filled with images of restlessness, longing and the elusiveness of love. Yet the band counterbalances the lyrical bittersweetness with a musical buoyancy. Intimate songs become in-it-together anthems, thanks to the chiming guitars, propulsive rhythms, and the emotional candor in Caws’ vocals. A song like “Beautiful Beat” segues from a sparsely arranged, confessional first verse into a harmony-laden chorus and reaches multi-layered, canon-like proportions before the track fades out. If Caws is often suggesting that romance and resolution may still be an inch or two out of reach, he’s also proffering immediate musical solace. Turn up the volume, hit the repeat button, and your troubles, for a blissful three minutes or so, will disappear.
“I tend to be pretty hopeful about things further in the future, but can be relatively anxious about the next eight hours or so,” half-jokes Caws, “Unlike my friend John Flansburgh [They Might Be Giants], who says he's manic depressive without the depression, I think I'm manic depressive without the mania. Yet I'm ready to be cheerful at the drop of a reason.” That’s reflected in the seemingly contradictory minor-key joy in Caws’ melodies. As he explains, “My immediate family is not religious, but we went to church whenever we visited my grandmother in North Carolina at Christmas and Easter. I loved singing hymns and I liked the solemnity of the service and the feeling of release when the pipe organ was played as we walked out. I think I’m always looking for that same rapture in music.”
The three members of Nada Surf have played together now for a dozen years. They’ve survived overnight major-label success and the inevitable morning-after bleariness, persevering past obstacles that would have sunk a less resilient combo to become one of America’s most truly independent bands. Experience has only made their work richer, bringing gravity to the subject matter and lightness to its presentation. Keeping things honest – and often rapturous -- has become a modus operandi. Lorca, who first met Caws at their mutual grammar school, explains, “When Matthew and I decided we were going to start our own band and that we were going to sing, we set a couple of rules. One of them was that we would not sing in any affected sort of way, that we would sing the way we talked. Another is that we would write about things that were close to us and about our lives. “
Thus, on Lucky, “Ice on the Wing” references Caws’ family lore: his grandfather’s adventures as a fighter pilot and an ambulance driver in two world wars and his father’s rearing in (and escape/excommunication from) a British religious cult. “See These Bones” was inspired by a visit Caws made a few years back to the Crypt of the Capuchin Monks in Rome, who created a macabre but stirring environmental sculpture from the bones of their departed brethren. (Caws says, “It’s a chilling place. Seeing all those old bones up close really drives home that this is it – and you better make the most of your life. Ultimately, it’s uplifting. I left there in a bizarrely good mood.”) “The Fox” melds the personal and the political, the delusions in a relationship mirroring lies from the government. The image in the chorus – “On the grass at Beachy Head/On the cliff to which you’ve been led” – almost pilfers the scene in the Who’s Quadrophenia when protagonist Jimmy launches his scooter off the enormous grassy cliff on the Southern English coast: “We visited Beachy Head when I was a kid and I remember standing on the slope and sensing that if I took two or three more steps down the soft grass, I would just tumble off. I remember feeling like I was standing right next to death.”
For all the fatalism in the lyrics, there are hints of rapprochement, renewal, maybe even a happy ending. “Are You Lightning?” and “I Like What You Say,” for example, chronicle the beginnings of a long-awaited romance. On “Here Goes Something,” Caws, the father of a young son, deals with the sea-change of excitement and concern that parenthood brings: “Once you’ve brought someone into the world, even if you think that world is going down the tubes, you have no choice but to be hopeful and root for things to improve.”
The sessions for Nada Surf’s previous album had been a nomadic experience for the band, involving several studios, engineers and mixers. This time, the trio eased into the process with brainstorming sessions at Lorca’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn home that the band dubbed “the sitcom” because, Lorca says, “You’d never know who was going to pop in the door or what was going to happen next.”
“We got together in the loft,” Lorca continues, “and we just played. It was such a low-pressure atmosphere. Some days, instead of sticking to the game plan, we’d play acoustic and cook dinner. Other times, we’d just mess around, have a few laughs and a few drinks and play garage riffs over and over, whatever. One time Coralie Cle´ment was visiting from Paris and she put down a bunch of really creepy, super-high vocal tracks on “The Fox”. Another day we arranged ‘Beautiful Beat’ having lunch with [photographer] Peter Ellenby and his family, right before a photo shoot. We did that sort of thing for a few months off and on, and then it was time to go to the west coast and record.”
Once settled in Seattle’s Robert Lang Studios, John Goodmanson (Blonde Redhead, Sleater-Kinney), who had mixed part of The Weight Is A Gift, produced and mixed all of Lucky with due interference from the band. Other players kept popping in the door out there, too. Among the guests were Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard (“See These Bones”), Long Winters singer John Roderick (“Ice On The Wing”) and Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger (“See These Bones”). Ed Harcourt contributed piano parts from his home in London for “Weightless” and “Beautiful Beat” and Martin Wenk of Calexico recorded horns for “Ice On The Wing” in his hotel room while on tour. New York City collaborators included keyboardist Louie Lino and session whiz-about-town Joe McGinty. Lianne Smith, arguably the most gifted New York vocalist without an album to her name, swaps harmonies with Caws on “The Film Did Not Go Round,” written by NYC indie musician Greg Peterson – “kind of a bluegrass song,” explains Caws, “that I made spookier.” It’s of a piece with the band’s own material, sketching out in a few vulnerably rendered words the parting of lovers at an airport or maybe at the end of their lives: “Everyone’s got to leave their love sometime/If not now than at the end of your lifetime.”
Having survived and thrived, Nada Surf indeed has a lot to feel lucky about. After listening to this new album, though, it becomes clear that we are really the fortunate ones.

The Dirty Secrets are a Perth based four piece who have been touring extensively over the past 12 months and recording some fine rock tunes. 2005 saw The Dirty Secrets share stages and festivals with such bands as: Regurgitator, 67 Special, Wolfmother, Eskimoe Joe, End of Fashion and a swag of other fine Australian acts, while 2006 kicked off with a slot at Australia's biggest festival, the Big Day Out. Lighthouse is the new single and you can Download it here.

This song is from last tear, but it's still a family favourite. You can Download the song for free, or watch a live version of it below.

I received this song from the Triple J New Music Podcast a few weeks ago and since then it has been on high rotation on my Ipod.

The song is available as a Download. Or you can get this song from Amazon at - Tunng - Bullets

Review by Anthony Carew in The Age

When they met outside a pub in London in 2003, Sam Genders and Mike Lindsay didn't seem like a perfect musical match. Genders was a fresh-faced singer-songwriter from Matlock Bath, in Derbyshire. Lindsay was a sound engineer and electronics geek who made incidental audio for advertising and television.

The two began to collaborate on folktronic outfit Tunng. Lindsay had a "dark, dingy little basement studio", beneath a women's clothing shop accessible only through a changeroom door.

"We'd get together on Sundays, lock ourselves in there, and just try out ideas. We didn't have any view to it actually being an album, let alone a band."

Yet, after a year of Sunday sessions, their music - Genders' acoustic songs submerged in Lindsay's gentle electro flickers and buzz - started to pile up. At the behest of London electro record label Static Caravan, they fashioned it into an album.

It wasn't easy. Halfway through recording, Genders moved back to Derbyshire, making the weekend commute to continue the "basement tapes". During the week, Genders hardly thought about music, focusing on his day job, working with adults with learning disabilities. And, when the time came to play in public, he wasn't having it. "I didn't really want to play live," he says. "I was interested in pursuing a career and the whole area of working in the helping profession."

Neither Genders nor Lindsay had "thought of what kind of response (Tunng) would get, if any". Yet their debut album, Mother's Daughter and Other Songs, was released in 2005, when the folktronic movement was growing in London, though Tunng were unaware of its existence. "We were very lucky with the timing," Genders says. "It wasn't something we were aware of until after the record came out.

"We didn't know that there was this whole scene of things happening; people to play with, places to play."

With similar acts such as Adem, Four Tet and the Memory Band working in London, there were plenty of offers for shows.

But Genders never set foot on a stage.

Lindsay, who was much more enthusiastic about live performance, roped in other players and singers to replicate the songs he and Genders had painstakingly built together.

Among them were Becky Jacobs, sister and collaborator of madcap electro weenie Ben "Max Tundra" Jacobs; Ashley Bates, drummer for forgotten shoegazer pin-ups Chapterhouse; and Martin Smith, a clarinet player-cum-adhoc percussionist with a yen for using teeth, seashells, pebbles and rusty chains as instruments.

While the Tunng live band played with Scottish folkies James Yorkston and King Creosote, and toured with popular rock band Doves, Genders stayed home.

So, when the time came to make the second Tunng record, 2006's Comments of the Inner Chorus, Genders was both on the inside and on the outside, having written the songs but not played with the band.

Then Tunng took their first steps away from claustrophobic studio partnership towards socially functioning ensemble.

Genders packed up and moved back to London, starting his first tour the next day. The travelling that followed brought the members closer together, both musically and personally, and by the time Tunng made their third album, 2007's Good Arrows, they'd become a band.

And, on the record, they sound it, too. These are no longer the rough sketches and dense mixes of a studio-bound pair but fully formed songs played by many hands.

Genders' lyrics have grown darker and odder.

"Talking about darker things in a song can highlight the more beautiful, more positive aspects of the music, in a strange way," he says.

Gender has grown used to life on the road, his former career goals shelved indefinitely.

"I can't turn around in five years and say: 'I'd like to go to Australia now,' " he laughs.

"The chance is here, now, so I'm doing it while I've got the opportunity."

If you’re like me, you probably have already given up on commercial FM music stations and instead joined the Ipod revolution. The problem with this is that it does not matter if your music library has 5000, 10000 or even 30000 thousand songs in it, if you listen to it long enough it will begin to get repetitive and you will begin to crave new music. So how do you find new music, sure you could read the music reviews, or follow the iTunes suggestions, but these can be time consuming and often misleading. So why not follow the method I have been using lately. There are a number of Podcasts that deliver DRM free music to subscribers on a daily basis. Two of my favourites are:- Triple J - New Music Podcast KCRW's Today's Top Tune These two Podcasts are created by radio stations that take new music very seriously. The files are in the MP3 format. And all have a BitRate of at least 125kps. If you know of any other Music Podcasts, feel free to suggest them to me. Once you have started receiving music via these services the next tip is to move the music from your iTunes Podcast library to your iTunes Music library. This has taken quite a bit of research on my part but I have discovered a method to do this my modifying the files ID3 tags. It sounds complicated but it’s not really. mp3tag - Univeral Tag Editor is a great free program for doing this. 1. Locate the mp3 file or files you want to modify using “File – Add Directory”. 2. Highlight the file or files and right click on them 3. Select the “Extended Tags” option 4. Under Metadata you will see “ITUNESPODCAST=1” 5. Highlight this and delete it, you will be left with “ITUNESPODCAST=blank” 6. Make any other changes to the Artist and Song name tags that you feel appropriate. 7. Save your changes, the MP3 file is now ready to be added to your iTunes Music Library. If you have any feedback on this method please leave me a comment.