Hyperscore - Make your own ringtones with this Windows app.

Flash MP3 Player - This is a pretty slick Flash MP3. It looks all iPod-y, oooh.

Justin Frankel (Winamp & Ninjam creator, fellow Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan) has a new multitrack recording software coming out tomorrow: REAPER. I played around with an early beta and it was looking pretty good. His focus is on keeping lightweight and easy to use, which sounds great to me.

Sean from the Gaim team dropped a line to let me know that Gaim 2.0.0b1 has been released. This is the first release to include the sounds I contributed for it. In case you don't know, Gaim is an open source instant messenger that can communicate with all the major instant messengers (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, etc). It's a cool project and you should check it out.

Kid Beyond on Ableton Live - Quicktime movie of a beatboxer and how he uses Ableton Live. Pretty awesome. [via]

VSTunnel - a plugin that lets people collaborate over the net using VST plugins inside any sequencer.

ReBirth Museum - Propellerhead software's classic ReBirth program (303/808/909 emulator) is now free.

Audio Files GDS Indexer - Plugin to index tons of audio file formats in Google Desktop Search.

I've been trying out Pandora. It's a Flash-based music player (first 10 hours are free), you enter an artist or a song that you like and it tries to find similar music for you. The data is based off the Music Genome Project which is described this way:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Pandora's interesting and while the songs do tend to resemble each other in a superficial sort of way, after an hour of listening I can't say I've found anything I like. It seems "major key tonality, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and extensive vamping" doesn't really get to the heart of my musical taste.

Wordpress WYSIWYG editor preview - a demo of the post editor coming to Wordpress 1.6. Resizable, WYSIWYG, very slick. I hope it uploads images nicely.

iTunes 4.9 Overview - a good rundown of the new features of iTunes, including the new podcasting support.

Justin Frankel (the creator of Winamp) has a new project called Ninjam. He announced it here today and it's extremely cool. Ninjam allows two or more people to jam through the net with real audio (no MIDI goofiness like past internet jamming software). It's like Skype for musicians, though the music is delayed a few measures to keep everything in sync. You plug your instruments in, the software provides a beat. Then you find out what a crappy guitar player you are.

I had a chance to play around on Ninjam with Justin last night and it worked great. No masterpieces were made -- though I got to lay down my brand new crappy guitar tapping skills -- but the potential is amazing. And while we we were messing around with guitar and bass, I assume there's no reason you can't feed any audio source into there. So it could be keyboards, could be vocals, or it could be copies of Ableton Live jamming together.

I'm told a GUI is being worked on and a release is coming soon. I can't wait.

I'm always interested in the software people use to help their creativity, so I thought I should write up one of my favorites that gets very little attention. It's Keynote by Tranglos software and it's an open-source Windows-based tabbed notebook. Check out some screenshots here. Keynote sits in my system tray and I can hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12 at any time to call it up and start writing. Escape sends it back to the tray. Inside of Keynote, my first tab is a Notepad that I use for writing anything or saving temporary scraps of information. Then I have other tabs such as a "music" tab where I can enter potential song titles or ideas. It's a tree view so all I have to do when I have an idea is hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12, select the music tab, hit enter to create a new tree node, type my idea + enter and I'm done. I can also enter data in that node as well, such as lyrics or chords or whatever I'd like.

I've tried a lot of these programs and even though there have ben no updates to Keynote since late 2003, I haven't found anything that's as fast, feature-rich and simple to use. I'd recommend to anyone looking to capture their ideas or is just an information packrat.

craptracker II - a web-based old-school music tracker. I spent many hours staring at Scream Tracker when I was a teenager.

The Winamp iPod plugin - lets you use Winamp instead of iTunes with your iPod.

BitTorrent 4.0 is out. Looks like interface and performance tweaks mostly. I'm using TorrentFlux & BitTornado these days.

Tweakbench - Triforce - a VST instrument that emulates NES sounds. [via]

Exeem is out but it has spyware in it (Cydoor), so I ain't installing it. I'll give Exeem lite a shot instead. Zeropaid has a review up here and makes it sound like it's just another spyware infested, junk-filled Kazaa. Booooring.

MoonEdit - a multi-platform collaborative text editor, seems like it'd be useful for a lot of creative things.