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The December CTP includes Windows Media Center, which updates the look and feel of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Additional information about the new features and functionality of Windows Media Center in Windows Vista will be shared at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Jan. 5–8 in Las Vegas.

Technorati Tags : CES, Windows, Vista

[via: Scobelizer]

• Collapse/Expand Tracks - every track has an upward-pointing triangle at the bottom of the label area on the left side of the track. Click it once to collapse the track to a very small size, and click it again to expand it back to its previous size.
• Multiple clips per track - in Audacity 1.3, you can split a single track into multiple clips. You can move these clips around between different tracks, making it easy to construct complex compositions out of hundreds of smaller audio samples.
• Selection Bar - In Audacity 1.2, the current selection is contained in a status bar at the bottom of the window. In Audacity 1.3, this is replaced by a fully functional Selection Bar, which displays and controls the current selection (your choice of Start and End, or Start and Length), and the current audio position. The selection bar is fully editable - just click in any field and type to change the current selection precisely. In addition, many formatting options allow you to view times in different units, such as samples, CD frames, or NTSC video frames.
• Improved Label Tracks - Label Tracks are much improved, with support for overlapping labels, and support for modifying both the left and right edge of the label region just by clicking and dragging.
• QuickTime and Audio Units on Mac OS X - Audacity can now import any audio file supported by Apple's QuickTime technology. This includes .MOV and .MP4 (AAC) files. Encrypted audio files (such as those from the iTunes Music Store) cannot be imported directly into Audacity - Apple does not allow this to be done easily because it would be too easy to circumvent the encryption this way.
• Better performance with large projects - 1.3 now uses a hierarchical directory structure that results in better performance on large projects (tens of hours worth of audio across many tracks)
• Project integrity check on open - When you open an Audacity project in version 1.3, it checks to make sure that all data files are present.
• Transcription toolbar - A new toolbar for creating transcriptions of speech in Label Tracks. Includes features that enable you to change the playback speed, create labels automatically based on onsets, and more. To enable this feature, go to the Interface tab of the Preferences.
• Upload via FTP - Audacity 1.3 has an experimental new dialog for uploading files to a server via FTP. Currently it is just a simple FTP client; in the future we will integrate this feature into Audacity more so you can publish a project directly to a site as a Podcast, for example.
• Batch / CleanSpeech - Audacity has a new feature that allows you to process a bunch of files, for example normalizing and converting to MP3. The CleanSpeech mode provides a simplified interface for some standard adjustments typically made on speech recordings. You can access these features in the Batch tab of the Preferences dialog.
• Cut lines - When this feature is enabled (in the Interface tab of the Preferences), cutting audio in the middle of a clip does not remove it permanently - at any time in the future, just click on the cut line to restore it.

Audacity is currently at 1.3.0b. The stable version is 1.2.4.

This also a great Audacity Wiki that has lots of helpful links, tips and tricks for using the software.

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Looks like Bloglines is moving to better servers. Sure hope so as I've noticed several people jumping ship to other services. I for one have noticed old posts suddenly coming up new again. It's rude to regift especially this time of year :)

From Bloglines:

We're not going to beat around the bush about this. Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately. Why? In short, Bloglines has been busting at the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

All of us here at Bloglines have been foregoing sleep and social lives over the past several months to keep Bloglines running and preparing for our move to a new access center (with bigger britches and a very elastic waistline).

So hang tight because there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The move will happen soon; we'll keep you posted.

- The Bloglines Team

Technorati Tags : bloglines, feeds, rss

Feedburner has announced a new service called FeedFlare. You can use it to add items to the bottom of your feed as shown in this image. They also intend to open up the API so others can do interesting things with it. Looks like an interesting way of giving end users thing that their rss reader might not. Wordpress bloggers can show the number of comments on an item. Currently available options: # Email this: Send a link to your item to someone via email.

# Email author: Allow subscribers to email you directly. (If there is no email address in your feed, this will be hidden.)

# Technorati Cosmos: Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this will be hidden.)

# Del.icio.us tags: Lists del.icio.us tags for an item. (If there are no tags, this will be hidden.)

# Save to del.icio.us: Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.

# Count comments: Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).

# Creative Commons: Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed (or to individual content items).

I suppose if someone were to read your blog entry soon after you post it wouldn't tell them much in the way of links and number of comments. That could be a draw back but than again if an article is worth linking to it will be done no matter how many others are doing it already.

Technorati Tags : feedburner, rss, links