We have mentioned the streaming audio service Pandora many times, and the Pandora One subscription service, too. I listen to Pandora One every day using the desktop app, and it has just received an update to version 2.0. It’s not a major update, but it does add a much-needed progress bar, so now you can tell where in a given song you are. You can also access your song history and see what you’ve been listening to for the past hour. Both the progress bar and history are accessed by clicking on the album cover in the main window.

(via Mashable)

Just last week, we were talking about Rhapsody’s music subscription service on the iPhone. Looks like the application is still pending, since I don’t see an approval yet and the company hasn’t mentioned a rejection. Now Napster is getting in the game by adding subscription access at http://m.napster.com. The wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy launched a new mobile site in the U.S. that works with any carrier. It looks pretty good on my Palm Pre, although I don’t have a Napster account to try it out. Tapping a song preview caused an error as well, so perhaps my Pre isn’t the best candidate for this service. From what I can see, iPhone owners can only use Napster’s mobile site to initiate a purchase — they can’t stream music through the browser and Napster’s iPhone app hasn’t been submitted yet.

Up to now, Napster’s music service for mobiles was available solely on certain handsets through AT&T, but now just about any U.S. phone with a browser can stream preview or purchase music from Napster’s catalog of over nine million tracks. Subscribers get five MP3 downloads per month as part of the base plan, although on some phones — the iPhone, in particular — these and other purchased songs are sent directly to a computer as Apple doesn’t allow for 3rd party song downloads. Best Buy is wisely leveraging the Napster brand with this news. Any contract phone purchase made at Best Buy this month will include a $15 Napster credit — good for three free months of music subscription and 15 included MP3 downloads.

Update: I received clarification from Napster indicating that you can only preview or purchase music from your handset. You can’t stream tracks to your phone through the new mobile site. Post is updated accordingly.

Those elves in the Google Labs are so busy that it is hard to keep up with them. That’s why something they released recently fell under the radar, and from the looks of it might be pretty darn cool. Google Listen is a podcatcher for the Android platform, but is also so much more. Imagine you searched for a topic of interest and immediately had a collection of web news, podcasts and more in the palm of your hand.

That is what Google Listen brings to Android — the ability to combine podcast listening along with other popular web audio content with just a few screen taps. Google Listen is limited to English content for now, and in addition to providing podcast handling (listening, queuing, subscribing), it can show a list of popular searches. You can find audio content on just about any topic of interest once you install Google Listen. You can find it in the Android Market, of course.

I opted to kill my XM satellite radio subscription last year in favor of using Pandora and my own MP3 library, but this new SkyDock from Sirius has me considering a return. All Things Digital points out that the SkyDock is among the first hardware accessories to take advantage of the iPhone 3.0 operating system and will cost $119.99 when it arrives this fall. The dock includes an integrated satellite radio receiver and plugs into your vehicle’s cigarette adapter. All iPhone and iPod Touch models are supported — provided they have the iPhone 3.0 software or better — and fit in the dock. While the device charges your iPhone or Touch, it also provides control over the satellite radio in either portrait or landscape modes.

Sirius says the dock works with your vehicle’s speakers through an included cable that routes music through your radio’s auxiliary input jack. Some older vehicles and radios don’t support such a jack, so you’ll want to double-check on that before buying. When I had XM, I used a wired cassette adapter, which would likely still work — I could plug the adapter in the iPhone headset jack and pipe tunes to the speakers. The supplemental iPhone application used to control the radio can also be used to tag songs for later download via iTunes. I’m still a die-hard Amazon MP3 store shopper, so while that’s not particularly appealing to me, it probably is to the instant gratification types out there.

The music player integrated into the Palm Pre is pretty good. I have a big music collection on the Pre and I enjoy listening to music whenever I can. The music player does have a few missing features that make using it more difficult than I’d like. That’s where the Palm Pre homebrew apps — currently numbering 160 titles — comes to the rescue. Music Player (Remix) is a solid music player that addresses the shortcomings of the Pre’s native player:

• The “Now Playing” screen has a scrollable progress bar showing the current play time and time remaining. To skip to any part of the song, just drag the bar to the desired location in the song.
• Did you ever find yourself several levels deep in the app and wanting an easy way to get back to the main menu? All you have to do is swipe the titlebar from right-to-left and you’re taken back to the main menu.
• Sometimes when listening to a song, it reminds you of another favorite song from that artist. On the “Now Playing” screen, click the artist name, song name, or progress bar to bring up a list of the artist’s albums and songs.
• When you have a huge song collection on your Pre, it takes a long time to scroll to a particular song, artist, or album. All you have to do is click the “ABC” button in the middle of the titlebar, and an alphabet list is displayed. Click on the desired letter and you’ll be taken instantly to that section of the song, artist, or album list.
• Ever want to know when your favorite artist was born, or how many albums they’ve sold in their career, or even what school they went to? When viewing the “Now Playing” screen, open up the app menu and select “Wikipedia” to bring up their wiki page
• The original Music Player app had a wonderful YouTube search option for both artist and song name; however searching for the song name can sometimes produce inaccurate results. Try searching for John Lennon’s “Woman” and most likely you’ll get a couple thousand results with “Woman” in the title. Now when you search for “song name”, it will search for “ArtistName SongName”

That “ABC” button is worth the price of admission for this app, which happens to be free. A big thumbs-up (or finger swipe) to the developer of this app.

Hands up — who wants a music subscription service on their Apple iPhone? OK, I just put both hands up and everyone in the Starbucks is wondering where the invisible mugger is behind me. The industry has long pondered Apple jumping into the music subscription market, but it hasn’t happened yet. So Rhapsody is attempting to make the leap, since Apple hasn’t.

The company just submitted an iPhone version of their music subscription service to Apple’s iTunes App Store and at first glance you might think it doesn’t stand a chance to get approved. But I see at least two reasons why it will get approved.

First of all, both Slacker and Pandora already have applications in the App Store. Like Rhapsody, these services offer streaming music direct to your handset. The main difference is that both Slacker and Pandora do so for free — Rhapsody offers their “to go” service for $14.95 a month. That might be considered an issue since Rhapsody would make money on the iPhone while Slacker and Pandora don’t. But that leads into the second reason why I think Rhapsody will find approval.

If you hear a song you like on Rhapsody and want to buy a licensed copy of it from your iPhone, Rhapsody offers a “Buy on iTunes” feature, which puts more cash in Apple’s coffers. I caught a quick glimpse of the link in this video demo of the Rhapsody iPhone application.

I didn’t see a purchase link to any other music store, so it looks like Rhapsody conceded their own MP3 music store to Apple’s in the software. Why do that? It offers the application a much better chance of getting approved and it opens up the tens of millions of iPhone owners to plunking down $14.99 a month for a Rhapsody music subscription. Sounds like a win-win to me.

I like to listen to music whenever I can — and to do so wirelessly is my favorite way. I am always looking for a good Bluetooth stereo headset that can be used for both listening to music and for hands-free phone calls. Samsung has just released a headset that does both, and it looks pretty good. The WEP870 headset consists of earbuds to provide a good listening experience, and is coupled with dual microphones for phone call use.

The WEP870 looks to be light and comfortable, and with the dual microphones for noise cancellation, it should be good for phone use. The audio fades when a phone call is received, and comes back when the call ends, according to Samsung. $90.

The massive development effort for the Palm Pre marches on with today finding 123 apps in the Homebrew Apps depository on PreCentral. There are literally new programs showing up every few hours, and I find myself checking for new ones several times a day. Today’s homebrew app of the day is one of my favorite apps– PrePod.

PrePod is a podcatcher for the Pre that will grab my favorite podcasts and serve them up for listening when I have free time. One of the handiest features is that PrePod bookmarks the podcasts, so I always pick up listening right where I left off in a given episode. The program is well done, and rivals paid podcatchers on other platforms. There is only one improvement I think the developers should add, and that’s my favorite podcast to the default page when the program is first installed.

There is a disadvantage to homebrew apps over the apps in the Pre App Catalog– the homebrew apps are not updated when Updates is run on the Pre. This means you have to keep an eye in the homebrew catalog for updates to programs you install, and manually get the newer versions.

A tip to make it easy to tell when new a new version of a homebrew app is available in the homebrew catalog, is to sort the catalog by Last Update. Just click the Last Update column header and the list will sort by that date. You can sort the catalog by any column for that matter. Once you determine there is a newer version, use the FileCoaster homebrew app to download and install it on the Pre. FileCoaster should be the first homebrew app you install on the Pre.

Two nights ago, I was pretty intent on getting at music on my Windows Home Server from anywhere but my home. While I was successful to some extent, I experienced failure as well. Using Firefly Media Server and the Fireplay add-in, I was able to stream music to any web browser — provided that browser supports Flash. That’s fine for my computers when I’m on the road, but it’s of no use when I simply want to use a handset. Neither my Apple iPhone nor my Palm Pre supports Flash yet, so I wasn’t happy with the solution in place.

I spent a good four hours researching my options between then and now. Many of you offered great suggestions and I hit those first: LogMeIn, Simplify Media, Orb, Webguide, and SqueezeCenter all got a look. I then kept sleuthing and found several other possibilities: LobsterTunes, icecast / ShoutCAST, Subsonic and more crossed my browser.

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Spotted in what looks like Best Buy’s inventory system, Gizmodo is showing the expected price point for Microsoft’s Zune HD handheld. It appears that the 16GB and 32GB models will cost $220 and $290, respectively. There’s no official pricing yet from Microsoft, so the prices could change, pending an announcement from Redmond. I tend to believe they’re spot on though, as PC World noticed these same prices on Amazon’s pre-order page.

Giz notes that these rumored prices compare favorably with Apple’s iPod Touch, which is generally considered the target competitor. A 16GB iPod Touch currently runs $299 while the 32GB model is $399. Considering the brand awareness that Apple has, I think Microsoft has to compete heavily on price — it’s not always about who offers the better technology or most features; marketing and branding is important, too.

But the ZuneHD actually does compete well on technology and features. Like the iPod Touch, it offers a comparable 480×272 multitouch display, but uses Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED), which offer vibrant colors while using less energy. It too includes Wi-Fi and a web browser and it ties in to the Zune Marketplace through the Xbox 360. Microsoft also included an HD Radio receiver and the ability to output high-definition 720p content to an HDTV through an optional dock. The only question remaining my mind — will the Zune HD eventually compete in terms of available applications or is it strictly a portable media player with a browser?

Now that we’re pretty sure on the pricing, does the Zune HD interest you more than it did before? Who’s buying?