So you’re Android phone’s built-in speaker to listen to music while you eat your breakfast, and as you head out the door you pop in some headphones so you can keep the music going during your commute to work. There’s just one problem: You forgot that the volume was cranked all the way up while you were using the speaker, and now that you’re using your headphones, your ears are bleeding.

OK, maybe not bleeding, but it turns out there’s an easy way to avoid this situation — without remembering to turn down the volume manually. Hearing Saver is a free (and open source) app which will automatically adjust your volume when you plug in headphones or when you take them out.

The app is pretty simple. When you run it, you just set the appropriate volumes for when the headphones are plugged in or unplugged, and choose whether you want to mute the ringer and notifications. That’s it.

The developer says he’s also considering another version that would work when you pair your phone or tablet with a Bluetooth headset or speakers.

Google Music launched today, and while the service is obviously aimed square at the company’s own products, it happens to play nice with other devices as well. Since the Google Music Web app is intended to work nicely in Google Chrome you can bet it’ll work in other Webkit-based browsers as well — including Mobile Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

There’s not even any wizardry required — just point your browser to music.google.com/music/ and sign in. You’ll need to request a beta invite first, of course, but early reports indicate that they’re fairly easy to come by in the U.S. The experience isn’t ideal, and you’ll probably notice a bit of lag when scrolling through your library (once you’ve uploaded some songs, obviously).

CNET points out that iOS multitasking is supported as well, so you can keep listening to your Google Music in the background while you perform other tasks on your device.

NPR has released an update for the NPR Music app which lets you stream audio to an Apple TV if you’re using an iPhone oriPod touch running iOS 4.3 with AirPlay support. But the bigger news this week is that NPR Music 2.7 supports live event coverage, with live video streams of concerts from the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas starting today.

You’ll need a newer iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4.2 or newer to use the live streaming feature.

NPR Music 2.7 also lets you view artist and song info for some of the streaming music stations included in the app. You’ll need iOS 4.2 and up to use this feature as well.

The NPR Music app is available as a free download from the App Store.

Say you’re walking down a city street with an iPhone in hand. You can fire up dozens of apps that will let you find a sandwich shop, historic marker, coupon, or other item. And now you can also listen to people tell stories tied to the place where you’re standing, thanks to a new app called Broadcastr.

The app lets anyone create an audio recording for a location and share it with the world. Then when other users are wandering by, they can fire up Broadcastr on their phone and listen to your story. Right now there aren’t all that many recordings for the Philadelphia area, where I tried out the app, but I found a few amusing anecdotes from users, a public radio story from my local NPR member station, and what sounded like an ad for a local hospital.

I worry a bit that as the audio landscape gets more crowded we’ll start to find more ads and fewer engaging stories. But right now Broadcastr is a lot of fun to play around with, especially if you’re a public radio junkie looking for people telling their own stories in their own voices.

You don’t have to limit yourself to listening to audio recordings in your area. You can also zoom out on the map to find recordings from around the globe. And you can sort by category, with recording about crime, college, childhood, or citizen journalism — and that’s just in the “C” section. There’s also a featured section, which will help you find some of the best recordings.

Broadcastr currently offers a free app for the iPhone, with an Android app coming soon. You can also access Broadcastr’s interactive web site from a desktop web browser.

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You know what probably would have been a no-brainer for Microsoft? Building a Windows Media Center remote control app into Windows Phone 7, allowing you to use your phone to control audio and video playback on your PC. But Microsoft doesn’t really seem to be paying much attention to Windows Media Center these days, so I’m not really surprised the company didn’t bother baking it into the new mobile OS. Fortunately third party developers are there to pick up the torch.

Remotive is one of the first remote control apps I’ve seen for Windows Phone 7, and it’s designed to let you control Windows Media Center on a PC running Windows 7 or Vista. Just download and install the Remotive Server on your PC, pay $1.99 to grab the Remotive App for Windows Phone 7 from the Marketplace, and you should be good to go.

Right now it looks like the app simply controls playback of your music library. You can browse the library by album or artist and play or pause media. Future updates should ad search and volume control functions. There’s no word at the moment on whether the developer plans to add video support.

If you don’t feel like spending $1.99, there is a free trial available, but it will only list the first 50 albums or artists in your collection.

via Windows Phone Thoughts

Virtual Recorder is a voice recorder with a rather ugly user interface, but a very attractive set of features. Basically, hit the red button to start a recording and the blue stop button to finish. You can play the most recent recording by hitting the green play/pause button, and find earlier recordings using the yellow “open” button.

Scan to download

But once you get through the basic functions, the fun begins. There’ s a digital pitch-shifting dial at the top of the screen which you can use to make yourself sound like a mouse or a monster, depending on the direction you drag it in. Reducing the pitch by a few seconds also serves to slow down playback, which could come in handy if you’re trying to transcribe an interview.

The app also lets you hit a reverse button to start playing the recording backwards — just in case you want to see if you hid any interesting messages in your note to yourself.

Virtual Recorder also offers a recording preamp, an auto limiter, and a volume meter you can use to monitor your recording volume.

From the Open dialog, you can long-press on any file to delete or rename the recording. You can also send files over email, export them as ringtones, or use the FreeMP3Droid app to convert files from PCM/WAV to MP3.

Virtual Recorder is available as a free, ad-supported download from the Android Market. If you want to eliminate the ads, you can buy the “donate” version for $2.73.

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SoundCloud is an audio sharing service that works sort of like YouTube for audio. You can upload and share audio clips and discovery sounds shared by other users, including music performances, speeches, bird calls… whatever. A few weeks ago the company launched an iOS app that lets you record, share, and discover audio on a mobile device. Now SoundCloud is also available for Android.

Scan to download

Unfortunately, as Mashable points out, the Android app seems to lack some of the features available for iPhone users. There’s no automatic geolocation feature. You can’t add comments. And you can’t easily share recordings with your Facebook and Twitter friends. The Android app also has a five minute limit on recordings.

That said, it looks like SoundCloud expects to offer more features in future releases, so there’s still hope that the Android app can catch up to its iPhone sibling.

The SoundCloud app for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

SoundCloud is sort of a YouTube for audio, making it easy for anyone to record, upload, and share music, spoken word, or other audio with the world. Once your file is online, you can share the link with anyone or embed an audio widget on a web site.

SoundCloud also offers a mobile app for the iPhone which lets you search for audio from other users or listen to audio files that have been shared with you. Today the company released SoundCloud 1.5 for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, which adds support for recording audio from a mobile device.

That means you can record your band practice, a voice memo, or just about anything else, and upload it to the SoundCloud web site as soon as you hit the save button. You can set tracks as public or private, and you can share any public track with Facebook or Twitter with a click of the button.

SoundCloud is available as a free download from the App Store. With a free account there are limits on how much audio you can upload, how many people you can share tracks with, and how many times they can be downloaded, but SoundCloud also offers paid accounts with additional features.

via TechCrunch

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