Rhapsody mp3 store review

The sites of digital music days of yore just keep coming back to life. This week Rhapsody announced the opening of their mp3 store component of their site. Touting the compatibility of the downloads with iTunes and the iPod, we had to check it out. If you want to check it out too, it's best to do it now as Rhapsody is offering a $10 credit (has to be used by midnight on the 4th) to try it. And if you do that, you'll discover the shortcomings of the site. Our full video review is below, but the gist of it is, their download manager software to automatically place the songs into iTunes is PC only, and the user interface really brings nothing new to the table. Still, with their $10 credit promotion (and supporting TV ads) it looks like they've gotten one part of the iTunes equation right:

Animation-ish Review

Every once in a while, it's refreshing to see an application intended to let your creative side shine, without the focus on extra features, interface, or speed. Animation-ish gets out of the way, at let's your creativity run the show. The program is designed to allow you to quickly and easily create animations, whether they're simple three-cel loops (similar to the "squiggly look" of some cartoons) of creating more complex 30 frames per second animations with backgrounds etc. There's no need to go to training or buy a book (ahem, flash). You just dive in.

The only thing is, to really get the most out of it, you'll want to dive in with a graphics tablet. Here's the full video review:

You can download the free trial at: Animationish.com

El Gato turbo.264 review

One of our pet peeves here at TDL is the large amount of h.264 encoding we need to do to get our content on-air. So since January, we've been anxious to try El Gato's turbo.264. It's a standalone hardware encoder that plugs in to a USB port, and you're ready to go. Any skepticism disappeared when we saw the speedy results. Whatever is inside this thing should be standard on every pro machine from Apple. It saved us from buying a new tower just to boost encode speeds. Check it out:

Sims DJ iPod Game Review

Ryan's spinning the ones and twos (at least that was the plan) with a review of The Sims DJ for iPod. Will it make you the next star DJ? Well, no, but you'll learn about dance floor lighting, pouring drinks, and buying things. Enjoy the review: