Symphony review: A so-so social media manager that does wonders with pictures

Sometimes it seems there are more social network managers than social networks to manage. With big names such as HootSuite, Nimble, and Sprout Social, just to name a few, the field is getting crowded. Symphony brings better picture handling to the table. And that’s about it.

Symphony is a social media manager for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that focuses on image updates.  All the usual features you’d expect to find are here: a post scheduler, a unified inbox, a social feed reader, and even auto-posting from blogs. Everything it does, Symphony does rather standard-issue. This changes when it comes to images.

We all know the importance of visuals in social media feeds, and Symphony makes it very easy to create image updates. The Crosspost tool—where you compose updates—lets you easily add images from your computer, Dropbox, or the Web. The built-in image search makes sure you only find public domain or creative commons images, and the built-in Aviary image editor lets you touch up any image to perfection. When posting links, Symphony can extract images from them with one click, creating image-oriented updates that jump out. The automatic link shortener wraps everything up in a neat package.

Creating image-based updates has never been easier than with the Crosspost tool.

Unfortunately, this is Symphony’s only real selling point. Symphony comes in three price plans, with the seven-day free trial showing only the cheapest of the three. To start using Symphony, you must log in with your Facebook account. Once you do, don’t try to add Facebook Pages you manage under different accounts. This creates a whole different user for you, and you cannot manage two Facebook accounts under one user. You can bypass this with team collaboration—but that option’s not available in Symphony’s cheapest $14/month plan.

The Symphony homepage shows all your accounts and activities at a glance.

If you own a blog, or love to share posts from others’ blogs, all plans include blog syndication. Add a blog to Symphony (must include RSS or Atom feed URL), and automatically send any new posts to any of your connected social accounts. These posts are also available to you when composing updates; click the RSS icon to choose a post from your blog to share, and make it pop by using Symphony’s image tools.

Symphony’s more expensive plans also include a reader, where you can follow your social feeds and create custom feeds for keywords. You can also add your Instagram account to follow it from Symphony. When you see an image or link you’d like to share on any network, drag and drop it into any of your other feeds. For example, if you see a photo on Instagram you’d like to share on Twitter, all you have to do is drag and drop. An adequate unified inbox lets you view your messages, wall posts, etc. under one roof. You can’t reply, retweet, or comment on these, but you can Crosspost them as your own updates.

Dragging and dropping updates is a nice gimmick, but not something you’ll use all the time.

Symphony brings some nice ideas to the table, and I would gladly use its image posting options in my job every day. The rest of the system, however, is just not good enough, especially when ones such as HootSuite are available for free. Symphony might not be the most expensive option out there, but it’s not the best one either. To be worth $14, $29, or $99 per month, Symphony needs to offer a better product, and not just a really cool feature wrapped in a less-than-ideal package. When that happens, it will definitely be worth the money.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Nero 2014 Platinum review: Burning and media creation suite gets easier to use

Nero 2014 Platinum $130.00 Nero is still one of the most capable of the burning suites, and it fills most users' needs in the creative department (video editing and production, slideshows, etc.), but most improvements in version...

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The ever-competent Nero disc-burning and multimedia creation suite takes on almost easy-to-use status in its latest incarnation, Nero 2014. Considering that the platinum version of 2014 burns all manner of optical discs, converts video for nearly all devices, plays Blu-ray movies, and provides about 90% or the media creation and editing features of more expensive suites, it's also a bargain at $130 (with a 15-day free trial).

The new look of most of Nero 2014's modules is clean and easy, and it introduces drag-and-drop features that were formerly missing.

Under-the-hood improvements in version 2014 include faster encoding, streaming video to TVs, and support for 4K video. But the big changes are in usability. Other modules have adopted the modern look of the included Nero MediaHome app, which is a very good media librarian and player for video, audio, and photos.

The modules that have fully adopted the new look are Nero Video, a very competent video editing program with near pro-level abilities including Blu-ray and 3D disc authoring; Nero Recode, a program for transcoding video to a number of formats and devices that's up there with the best standalones; and the Nero Blu-ray Player for BD (plain and 3D) playback.

Alas, both Nero Burning ROM (the original disc-burning Nero program that started it all) and Nero Express (the lite version of Burning ROM) still suffer under the clunky old interface. Nero claims users are resistant to change. Me? I'd rather see the new look.

The new launch application for Nero looks good in Windows 8 Metro, but runs only full-screen and is less easy to work from on the desktop.

There always seems to be one what-were-they-thinking element in Nero suites. In this case, it's the nod towards Windows 8 in the form of the new launch center. It looks Windows 8-ish and works well, but it only runs full screen or minimized. As everything else in Nero runs in desktop mode, the approach makes little sense. Note that the Nero BackItUp program is no longer included, but there is a very large collection of pre-fab artistic content such as templates, backgrounds, video FX, etc.

In my hands-on with the suite, Nero 2014 seemed less buggy than the first release of Nero 12. That's a good start, but you should also know that the company is usually very quick with the bug fixes, should you run into any.

Nero remains at the top of the heap when it comes to disc creation, and it has more than enough video, photo, and audio creative abilities to satisfy the average user. It should definitely be on your short shopping list of budget suites, along with Cyberlink's Media Suite 11 and Roxio's Easy Media Creator NXT 2.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Buffer review: Time your social media posts to a tee

Buffer Buffer is a neatly organized service that makes it easy to keep multiple social media accounts up to date. I'm not convinced that it knows better than you about when you should post your content, but I'm...

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Buffer automates the timing of your social media posts. It sports a sophisticated interface, and options for including several social networks, notably Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Its free service works well for personal feed, and its $10-per-month Awesome level service adds the features a business needs.

From the first post you queue up, Buffer's friendly interface tries to make you feel welcome.

To use Buffer, you sign in using a Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn account, or you can create a dedicated Buffer account if you choose. Once you're signed in, you can add the social networks you didn't use to sign in, as well as an App.net account and any Facebook pages and LinkedIn Groups that you manage.

Buffer lets you compose tweets and status updates—which can be posted across multiple networks at once—and helps you decide when to post them. You can post them immediately, or choose the "Add to Buffer" option, which lets Buffer decide when to post it.

Scheduling a tweet on Buffer isn't much more complicated than just posting to Twitter.

You can create multiple posts—enough to populate your social media for a week, or more—and add them to your Buffer queue, and the app will post them for you when it deems appropriate. It selects a time based on when it believes most retweets and clicks happen. Buffer analyzes overall usage of Twitter as a whole, not just your account. Buffer has partnership with a service called Tweriod, which looks specifically at your account and suggests times for you to post.

Buffer couldn't tell whether my posts were time-sensitive or not, and so it often suggested waiting several hours to post items that needed more immediate attention. It suggested reasonable times for less timely items, though. If you're not happy with Buffer's time suggestions, you can easily override it. Buffer offers an easy-to-use, timezone-specific scheduler that lets you determine when to publish your posts.

If you like to post at a certain time every day, Buffer's Schedule tab can make that easier.

Buffer also offers a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that lets you share content from any Web page. It adds a small (maybe too small—it took a while to identify it) icon to your browser that allows you to share a link via Buffer, directly from the Web page itself. It even suggests text to go along with the link (which you can change) and gives you the option of posting it now or adding it to your Buffer.

The Awesome level of service ($10 per month) includes unlimited posts, support for up to 12 social profiles, and the ability to have more than one person use the account.

Buffer's analytics can be useful, but they're not instantaneous. Checking them too soon might make you feel really unpopular.

Buffer's analytics can help determine whether its decisions on when to post your content are working. And its analytics strike a nice balance between home and small business users, offering enough information to be helpful—such as how many clicks, retweets, and mentions you get, as well as the potential reach of your posts—without overwhelming you.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can sign up for this Web-based service.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: Corel Painter X3 makes natural media more accessible

Corel Painter X3 $429.00 Corel Painter X3 remains a compelling tool for creating traditional-looking artwork with a computer, especially now that it's easier to navigate.

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Corel Painter faces a problem similar to that of Microsoft Office: When you're already at the top of your field, it's hard to see the path to improvement. Just like Office is the go-to suite for everyday productivity tasks, Corel Painter is the go-to application for serious artists looking to create natural-looking paintings and concept sketches using a computer. That gives Corel the enviable problem of trying to get artists to upgrade from a program that's already more than good enough...a problem the company tackles ably in Painter X3.

Painter's Start screen tries to be both inviting and inspiring.

Corel's solution: Keep the powerful tools, but make everything more accessible. Almost every change and addition in the new Corel X3 is meant to lower the learning curve, make features easier to discover, or make common drawing tasks simpler than they used to be.

Take, for example, the all-new brush search engine: Previous versions of Corel came packed to the gills with impressive brushes, including my personal favorites, Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil. While established users could appreciate having dozens and dozens of brushes to choose from, novice users could find the sprawling brush selection menu daunting. The new search engine tackles this by avoiding the menu altogether: Simply type "pencil," and get a list of all of the pencil brushes Corel Painter offers, no matter where they are located in the brush menu.

Thanks to the new brush search engine, you no longer have to dig through the menu to find the brush you want.

Even once you find a brush with a name that sounds like what you need ("Real 6B Soft Pencil"), you'd still want to see what it actually looks like on paper. This is where another new feature comes in handy: Stroke preview. Simply hover over the brush's name, and a small pop-up shows you what you can expect once you put the brush to your canvas. The preview shows just a single, isolated stroke, so you will still need to learn how to read it, but it can help.

Corel's cloning feature makes it easy to create paintings based on photos.

Many artists base their paintings on reference images, and Painter X3 makes it relatively easy to inject such images into your workspace. Reference images float in their own mini-windows which you can drag around and even take outside the main Corel Painter window. You can zoom and pan them, and it is easy to quickly sample colors from them.

For budding artists who need more of a helping hand, the newly enhanced cloning workflow can come in handy. You can now place a reference image next to your work, and see a cloning crosshairs moving around on the source image as you work on your painting, letting you easily see what exactly you're cloning. At its simplest, this lets you render a photo into a painting using just a handful of strokes.

The new perspective feature is handy mainly for artists who already know what they're doing.

Another new addition to X3 are perspective guides, which make it easier to draw street scenes, rooms, and other images with a sense of depth and perspective. This feature could be made more accessible in future versions: It currently ships with just four presets bearing names that assume you know what you're doing, such as "Point Standard Horizon" and "Point Worms-Eye View."

All in all, Painter X3 is an iterative release, with no major groundbreaking features...but really, Corel Painter doesn't need such features to retain its lead in the natural-media painting world. Making the application more accessible is a good move, and one that I hope to see continued in the next iteration of this venerable art application.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Microsoft Rumored to Buy Nook Media and E-readers for $1 Billion

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From Laptopmagazine. Product reviews and advice for best reference

How to build a social media command center

Releasing great content is the best, cheapest way to market a small business and reach customers. You start with a website, a blog, and well-managed accounts on the key social media channels. Next, you must feed your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest followers a delicious, steady diet of words, images, and videos. Although you can find native apps for each big social media brand, they offer only limited assistance in juggling rich media across multiple content streams.

The following ten apps will help you automate your publishing and then analyze who's paying attention and how. It's up to you to get creative and stand out from the crowd.

From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Review: PowerDVD 13 Ultra media player is loaded with under-the-hood improvements

The PowerDVD Ultra series have been the most powerful, feature-laden DVD, Blu-ray, and media players available at retail. On the other hand, each version has also been somewhat slow to launch and sluggish to respond. Version 13 starts up more quickly and is better all around, although it's not a startling upgrade if you already have version 12. That said, there are more than a few new features here, including a user interface that Windows 8 aficionados will find appealing.

Before getting into the new stuff, a quick but impressive list of what PowerDVD Ultra already supports: Playback of DVDs and 2D and 3D Blu-ray movies with resolution enhancement; cataloging and playback of large collections of photos, music files, and videos; a 10-foot interface for use with a remote; and playback of media streamed via DLNA media servers (e.g., other PCs and NAS boxes).

PowerDVD 13 Ultra ($100) now supports every major video technology, including 2K/4K resolution, AVCHD 2.0 and 3D, and it comes with free players and remote-control apps for iOS and Android devices, plus PowerDVD Mobile for Windows tablets (both Windows 8 and RT). The Android and iOS apps are also free with the $80 Pro version, but you’ll need to pay $20 for PowerDVD Mobile. The Pro version drops support for 3D, 7.1-channel surround sound, and DLNA. You’ll need to pay for all three apps if you buy the $60 Deluxe version, which subtracts both Blu-ray and 3D support. Upgrades from previous versions of PowerDVD start at $45.

The last two versions of PowerDVD had the program morphing into a jack-of-all-trades media player, and version 13 continues that trend—albeit mildly. There’s a new a movie library with art for video files (not just movies), though as with many players, it's rather hit or miss on whether the art is correct. If the file name is explicit enough, it does okay. PowerDVD is also ready for Ultra Violet, the online movie storage/delivery service, and it already supports video streaming from most social networks (Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

PowerDVD 13 Ultra now provides its TrueTheater enhancements for 1920-by-1080p video. TrueTheater bypasses GPU hardware acceleration, though, so the hardware requirements are extreme. Even on a Core i7 965 test bed, enhanced video wouldn't play smoothly beyond about 25 Mbps. That’s fine for smaller downloaded files, but not for most Blu-ray movies. If you have the horsepower, TrueTheater really makes video look better. The ability to disable BD-live to speed movie start times is another significant improvement.

Cyberlink added support for two lossless audio codecs that will endear it to hard-core music fans everywhere: FLAC and APE. There's also a software EQ with common settings, and you can use Dolby to produce more spacious sound, but there’s no support for bass enhancement such as Windows Media Player's SRS TruBass. A new mini-player keeps the program out of the way when playing music.

With PowerDVD, CyberLink aspires to deliver the ultimate all-in-one solution for multimedia on the desktop. Version 13 is closer to that ideal, but still lacks a few features, including live TV support. It remains the best available video and movie playback application for state-of-the-art technologies (there are no free Blu-ray 3D alternatives). Only Corel's $50 WinDVD 11 comes close.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Julliard, and now he power mods his car for kicks.
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Do social media ads really work? We put them to the test!

Social media sites already offer free advertising in the form of tweets and Facebook posts, but these tools can only take your brand so far. The next step involves paying for social media ads, and if you're considering this option, you're probably most concerned with one big question: What will my return actually be? Will spending money on an ad on Twitter or Facebook bring more customers to my business than the same amount spent on Google AdWords?

I put that question to the test by setting up experimental ads across five services: Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. I wanted to see exactly how these tools benefited my own content-creation and corporate blogging business. Indeed, Null Media is exactly the kind of small business that could benefit from social media ads—in theory.

Google's own ad for AdWords

First, a few words about the baseline for this experiment—Google AdWords—where I had already been running ads for several months. For this test run, I raised my overall budget to $25 a day to make it comparable with the social media sites being evaluated. (See page 2 for how I tested.) I quickly discovered that my budget wasn't being exhausted because my bids were too low. By raising these bids to about $2 per click, in line with other services reviewed here, I received more traffic, but not much.

Over the course of the ad run, at both low and high bids, I received 13,970 impressions and got 65 clicks for a total of $80.74. That's an 0.47 percent clickthrough rate at an average price of $1.24 per click.

The verdict: What may sound like poor performance is actually quite good, and since those ads are delivered to people who are actively searching for terms I'm targeting with my keyword ads, that represents a worthwhile investment.

Over 1 billion served, but what about your customers?

Setting up my ad with Facebook was by far my most complicated experience with these services, although its management system and tracking services are quite powerful. The hassles began right from the beginning. I waited all day for my first ad to be approved, but it was "pending" indefinitely. I canceled it and tried again the next day, and it was abruptly approved within minutes.

My ad on Facebook

Facebook offers both CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads. I settled on a CPC ad, targeting Facebook users who expressed an interest in various business topics, with a bid of $0.15 per click. Twelve hours later, the ad had received no impressions, likely because the bid was far too low. Facebook suggested a higher bid of $0.57, which got things moving, but slowly. A day later, Facebook's reporting tool suggested an even higher bid of $1.41. Again, impressions increased, but not clicks. Another day later, I raised the bid yet again to $2, at which point Facebook suggested a bid between $2.58 and a whopping $7.30 per click.

The final ad results from Facebook.

What was going on here? I'm still baffled. Is Facebook's ad bidding a bait-and-switch system or just bad programming? Regardless of how much you pay, Facebook encourages you to pay even more. Yes, higher bids result in additional clicks because your ad is displayed more often, but shouldn't Facebook's system be smarter about its recommendations?

After four days, the numbers were in, at a mammoth 253,207 impressions and a mere 25 clicks. The total clickthrough rate was an infinitesimal 0.01 percent, at a total expense of $37.70. That works out to an average CPC of $1.51.

The verdict: The numbers aren't terrible, and the heavy exposure, even without many clicks, is worth something. However, the scant number of actual visits makes me wonder if Facebook was the wrong venue for this ad. (My business page did, however, get one extra "Like" during the ad run.)

LinkedIn makes a special pitch for SMBs.

I'm advertising a B2B service, so LinkedIn sounded like a perfect match. Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers both CPM and CPC ads, so I gave a CPM ad a whirl for my first day, bidding the minimum allowed rate of $2 per 1000 impressions, targeting a fairly broad segment of LinkedIn users with job descriptions relevant to my product.

My final LinkedIn ad.

My ad began showing within about 10 minutes, and took off. I hit my $25 limit within an hour. The results for this first day were 13,643 impressions and 6 clicks, for a 0.044 percent clickthrough rate and a whopping $4.17 CPC.

The CPM ad did not feel cost-effective, so I switched to a $2 CPC bid and turned on the "Collect Leads" option, which encourages people who click on your ad to provide contact information.

LinkedIn results.

The final tally: After four days, my ad had 51,192 impressions, 13 clicks, and a low 0.025 percent clickthrough rate. My total spend was $41.50 for a $3.19 average CPC. Take out the first CPM-ad day, and the clickthrough suffers—a net 0.019 percent rate—but the CPC of $2.36 (more than my bid, oddly) is more affordable. I never received any leads from LinkedIn, however.

The verdict: After my ad ended, LinkedIn emailed suggestions on improving my ad's performance.  It said the site's "better performing ads" averaged a 0.02 percent CPC, so my ad actually seems to have been a pretty solid performer for LinkedIn, compared to those by other advertisers.

Next page: Twitter, StumbleUpon, and what you need to know before launching an ad...

Christopher Null is a veteran technology and business journalist. He contributes regularly to PC World and Wired, and is a technology columnist for Executive Travel magazine.
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From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference

Do social media ads really work? We put them to the test!

Social media sites already offer free advertising in the form of tweets and Facebook posts, but these tools can only take your brand so far. The next step involves paying for social media ads, and if you're considering this option, you're probably most concerned with one big question: What will my return actually be? Will spending money on an ad on Twitter or Facebook bring more customers to my business than the same amount spent on Google AdWords?

I put that question to the test by setting up experimental ads across five services: Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. I wanted to see exactly how these tools benefited my own content-creation and corporate blogging business. Indeed, Null Media is exactly the kind of small business that could benefit from social media ads—in theory.

Google's own ad for AdWords

First, a few words about the baseline for this experiment—Google AdWords—where I had already been running ads for several months. For this test run, I raised my overall budget to $25 a day to make it comparable with the social media sites being evaluated. (See page 2 for how I tested.) I quickly discovered that my budget wasn't being exhausted because my bids were too low. By raising these bids to about $2 per click, in line with other services reviewed here, I received more traffic, but not much.

Over the course of the ad run, at both low and high bids, I received 13,970 impressions and got 65 clicks for a total of $80.74. That's an 0.47 percent clickthrough rate at an average price of $1.24 per click.

The verdict: What may sound like poor performance is actually quite good, and since those ads are delivered to people who are actively searching for terms I'm targeting with my keyword ads, that represents a worthwhile investment.

Over 1 billion served, but what about your customers?

Setting up my ad with Facebook was by far my most complicated experience with these services, although its management system and tracking services are quite powerful. The hassles began right from the beginning. I waited all day for my first ad to be approved, but it was "pending" indefinitely. I canceled it and tried again the next day, and it was abruptly approved within minutes.

My ad on Facebook

Facebook offers both CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads. I settled on a CPC ad, targeting Facebook users who expressed an interest in various business topics, with a bid of $0.15 per click. Twelve hours later, the ad had received no impressions, likely because the bid was far too low. Facebook suggested a higher bid of $0.57, which got things moving, but slowly. A day later, Facebook's reporting tool suggested an even higher bid of $1.41. Again, impressions increased, but not clicks. Another day later, I raised the bid yet again to $2, at which point Facebook suggested a bid between $2.58 and a whopping $7.30 per click.

The final ad results from Facebook.

What was going on here? I'm still baffled. Is Facebook's ad bidding a bait-and-switch system or just bad programming? Regardless of how much you pay, Facebook encourages you to pay even more. Yes, higher bids result in additional clicks because your ad is displayed more often, but shouldn't Facebook's system be smarter about its recommendations?

After four days, the numbers were in, at a mammoth 253,207 impressions and a mere 25 clicks. The total clickthrough rate was an infinitesimal 0.01 percent, at a total expense of $37.70. That works out to an average CPC of $1.51.

The verdict: The numbers aren't terrible, and the heavy exposure, even without many clicks, is worth something. However, the scant number of actual visits makes me wonder if Facebook was the wrong venue for this ad. (My business page did, however, get one extra "Like" during the ad run.)

LinkedIn makes a special pitch for SMBs.

I'm advertising a B2B service, so LinkedIn sounded like a perfect match. Like Facebook, LinkedIn offers both CPM and CPC ads, so I gave a CPM ad a whirl for my first day, bidding the minimum allowed rate of $2 per 1000 impressions, targeting a fairly broad segment of LinkedIn users with job descriptions relevant to my product.

My final LinkedIn ad.

My ad began showing within about 10 minutes, and took off. I hit my $25 limit within an hour. The results for this first day were 13,643 impressions and 6 clicks, for a 0.044 percent clickthrough rate and a whopping $4.17 CPC.

The CPM ad did not feel cost-effective, so I switched to a $2 CPC bid and turned on the "Collect Leads" option, which encourages people who click on your ad to provide contact information.

LinkedIn results.

The final tally: After four days, my ad had 51,192 impressions, 13 clicks, and a low 0.025 percent clickthrough rate. My total spend was $41.50 for a $3.19 average CPC. Take out the first CPM-ad day, and the clickthrough suffers—a net 0.019 percent rate—but the CPC of $2.36 (more than my bid, oddly) is more affordable. I never received any leads from LinkedIn, however.

The verdict: After my ad ended, LinkedIn emailed suggestions on improving my ad's performance.  It said the site's "better performing ads" averaged a 0.02 percent CPC, so my ad actually seems to have been a pretty solid performer for LinkedIn, compared to those by other advertisers.

Next page: Twitter, StumbleUpon, and what you need to know before launching an ad...

Christopher Null is a veteran technology and business journalist. He contributes regularly to PC World, Wired, and The Daily, and is a technology columnist for Executive Travel magazine.
More by Christopher Null

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Review: Songbird Desktop is much more than just a media player

Songbird Desktop is a media player that's not chained to your desktop, despite its name. Although this free application for PC and Mac will organize you collection and playback audio and video files from your computer, it's also a tool for discovering new music, learning more about your favorite artists, and connecting with friends.

Songbird installs quickly and easily, but getting your music into the program is entirely up to you. You have to add files manually, by pointing Songbird in the direction of your media collection. Once your songs and videos are added to Songbird, you can take advantage of its basic media playback functions. You can play songs, rip CDs (but not burn them), create playlists, and more. Songbird does play videos, but you may have to download some video codecs to play back all files, as Songbird doesn't include some that would require it to pay a royalty.

Songbird includes a Web browser that lets you discover info about your favorite artists.

Songbird will sync with Android mobile devices and smartphones, but not Apple's products. While iPhone and iPod owners are out of luck, Android users will appreciate that Songbird syncs with their devices. I had to download an add-on from Songbird's library in order to get the application to recognize my Motorola Droid Bionic, but once I made it through that somewhat confusing process, Songbird worked seamlessly with my phone.

In fact, Songbird's extensive library of add-ons is just one of the factors that make this application so interesting. In there, you can find add-ons that will do everything from adding lyrics to songs as they play to displaying album art from Last.fm. If you're willing to spend some time poking around the add-on collection, you can find plenty of tools for customizing everything from the look of Songbird to the experience of using its Web browser, which displays right in the main window of the application. This  allows you to find out more about your favorite artists. It also allows you to connect with other users, and lets you connect via Facebook to find out what artists your friends like, too.

Songbird's interface is a bit bland, but you can customize it with skins to get a new look.

And that's not all: Songbird also works as a media server, streaming your media collection to UPnP or DLNA devices on the same local network. It's also available as a Web app and an Android app that sync with the desktop version. In short, there's not a lot Songbird can't do.  It may all be too much for the casual user who simply wants to listen to a few tunes, and if you want to sync them to your iPhone, you're out of luck. But adventurous music fans looking for a player that they can customize will find a lot to sing about in Songbird.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your system.

From PCWorld. Visit Amazon Computer and Notebook Center here

Review: IFTTT connects social media, photo and other Web services

Think of social media—and the Web in general, really—as a game of dominoes: One action creates an entire range of reactions. That's what makes it so powerful...and so time-consuming, especially for those people who are trying to update a constant stream of information on multiple social media accounts. But IFTTT tries to make this easier by allowing you to link Web services, so doing something on one triggers the rest. It is a free service that's a lot like its name: a little bit confusing until you understand just how simple and useful it is.

IFTTT (it's pronounced like "gift" without the "g") stands for If This Then That. And that basically describes what IFTTT does: when one thing happens, IFTTT lets you create an automatic reaction. You could, for example, use IFTTT so that you'll receive a text message whenever someone posts a picture of you on Facebook. Or to receive an email if the weather forecast calls for rain. Or automatically save a copy of a photo to Dropbox whenever one is posted to Instagram.

IFTTT's neat, clean interface makes the service easy to use.

To use IFTTT, you simply create a free account with your email address. Then, you can get started building IFTTT recipes. IFTTT works on the basis of channels, which are what it calls the basic building blocks of its recipes. Channels are things like Facebook, Evernote, Email, Weather, Buffer, Craigslist, and more—there are 59 channels currently available.

To create a recipe, you select the first channel and then the trigger (the "this" part of IFTTT). Once the channel is selected, IFTTT displays applicable triggers. When I selected Etsy as my channel, available triggers were things like "new purchased item" or "new item in shop."

After selecting the trigger, you select the channel and the action (the "that"). The same 59 channels are available as the action channels; once you select one, you activate (if it's not already active) and then choose the action from the available choices.

Once you select the channel and the action, you can customize it using what IFTTT calls Ingredients. These ingredients are pieces of data from the trigger. For Etsy, the ingredients could be the Etsy URL and the price. For Facebook, the ingredients could be a photo caption and the image source. You use these ingredients to customize the resulting action, such as sending a text message or email, or posting a status update to Facebook.

IFTTT lets you customize any messages it sends or posts by adding "ingredients," which can be a bit confusing.

Once all the pieces are in place, you can save your recipe by giving it a name. Recipes can be kept private or shared with the entire IFTTT community—and IFTTT does have plenty of shared recipes to give you ideas or the building blocks for creating your own. (When you share a recipe, you're not sharing access to your personal data; anyone who accesses the recipe only gets the basic steps, and then fills in their own personal data to make it work for them.) When you select a channel, you'll have to give IFTTT access to your account, which usually involves either linking accounts or granting certain permissions. This process was simple and painless with all of the channels I tested.

Using IFTTT is actually a lot easier than explaining it, though the service is definitely not perfect. I was, for example, slightly disappointed with the result of one of my recipes. I set up a recipe where I would get a text message whenever a photo of me was tagged on Facebook. I set the action channel—the text message I'd receive—to include ingredients like caption, image source, upload date, and uploaded by. I was hoping to receive a detailed message with the photo and all of the data I'd requested. Instead, I got a link to view the photo online (not on Facebook)—and only the photo, not any of the other info I'd requested. The message format makes sense (given that it was an SMS, not MMS), but that SMS still could have included the additional details about the photo that I'd requested.

I was more impressed with my other IFTTT recipes, though, and I was definitely amused by some of the shared recipes available on the site. One user created a recipe that will alert him via SMS if the CDC reports a zombie outbreak, while another user created one that automatically uploads any photo he posts to Facebook to Picasa, too.  These two recipes sum up the appeal of IFTTT: it's fun and pretty darn useful, too.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use this Web-based software.

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Samsung HomeSync 1TB Media Center Doubles as Android Station

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Review: Songbird Desktop is much more than just a media player

Songbird Desktop is a media player that's not chained to your desktop, despite its name. Although this free application for PC and Mac will organize you collection and playback audio and video files from your computer, it's also a tool for discovering new music, learning more about your favorite artists, and connecting with friends.

Songbird installs quickly and easily, but getting your music into the program is entirely up to you. You have to add files manually, by pointing Songbird in the direction of your media collection. Once your songs and videos are added to Songbird, you can take advantage of its basic media playback functions. You can play songs, rip CDs (but not burn them), create playlists, and more. Songbird does play videos, but you may have to download some video codecs to play back all files, as Songbird doesn't include some that would require it to pay a royalty.

Songbird includes a Web browser that lets you discover info about your favorite artists.

Songbird will sync with Android mobile devices and smartphones, but not Apple's products. While iPhone and iPod owners are out of luck, Android users will appreciate that Songbird syncs with their devices. I had to download an add-on from Songbird's library in order to get the application to recognize my Motorola Droid Bionic, but once I made it through that somewhat confusing process, Songbird worked seamlessly with my phone.

In fact, Songbird's extensive library of add-ons is just one of the factors that make this application so interesting. In there, you can find add-ons that will do everything from adding lyrics to songs as they play to displaying album art from Last.fm. If you're willing to spend some time poking around the add-on collection, you can find plenty of tools for customizing everything from the look of Songbird to the experience of using its Web browser, which displays right in the main window of the application. This  allows you to find out more about your favorite artists. It also allows you to connect with other users, and lets you connect via Facebook to find out what artists your friends like, too.

Songbird's interface is a bit bland, but you can customize it with skins to get a new look.

And that's not all: Songbird also works as a media server, streaming your media collection to UPnP or DLNA devices on the same local network. It's also available as a Web app and an Android app that sync with the desktop version. In short, there's not a lot Songbird can't do.  It may all be too much for the casual user who simply wants to listen to a few tunes, and if you want to sync them to your iPhone, you're out of luck. But adventurous music fans looking for a player that they can customize will find a lot to sing about in Songbird.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software appropriate to your system.

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Ceton Echo review: Extend Windows Media Center from your PC to your TV

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
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The universe of Windows Media Center Extenders—a class of networking hardware that enables you to connect the PC in your den to the TV in your living room—rapidly shrunk to just one device after Microsoft rendered its Xbox gaming console capable of the trick. Now Ceton is trying to carve out a niche in this space with its Echo—a component barely larger than a Roku box.

The only means of connecting the Echo to your TV is via HDMI (Ceton provides a cable in the box). You’ll also need to run an Ethernet cable from your router to device, as the Echo doesn’t support Wi-Fi. The FAQ on Ceton’s website claims that the quality of service available with wireless networking hardware isn’t sufficiently robust to deliver a satisfactory HDTV experience, which is a curious supposition considering that other media-streaming devices (such as the Roku XS and the Slingbox 500) handle HD video over Wi-Fi just fine. If Ethernet isn’t convenient, Ceton suggests powerline or MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) networking as alternatives.

The Echo must be paired with a Windows 7 PC equipped with a TV tuner (the Xbox 360 being the only Windows Media Center Extender currently compatible with Windows 8). I used a machine equipped with Ceton’s InfiniTV 4 USB tuner and a CableCARD, which was connected in turn to a digital cable TV service. The combo forms a robust DVR that can record even premium channels such as HBO and Showtime. If you abhor paying for TV, the Echo will work also work with any TV tuner—or without one if you simply want access to your media libraries.

After a few more simple setup steps, the Echo lived up to its name, producing a full-on Windows Media Center experience on my TV, same as if I was sitting in front of my PC—or if I’d used an Xbox. Thus I could watch, pause, and record TV shows; listen to my music library; view my photos; play my videos; stream Netflix; and so on. It can’t stream DVDs, but that’s a Windows limitation.

Unfortunately, my joy was tempered by some frustration after trying to navigate Windows Media Center with the Echo’s remote, which is small and crowded with mushy, non-backlit buttons. What’s more, the Echo didn’t recognize input at all unless I pointed the remote directly at it. There’s an alternative in the form of the Ceton’s new My Media Center mobile app for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices, but Ceton expects to collect an addition $5 for it. I think a $179 set-top box should have a fantastic remote, not the chintzy one provided here.

The good news is that the Echo performed superbly with just about everything, most notably live and recorded TV. There was very little lag in the Windows Media Center user interface, something I’ve noticed when using an Xbox for the same purpose. My only other complaint was when the Echo decided to install an update right while I was watching a show, with no warning and no option to delay it. It not only interrupted my viewing, but made me wait for a good five minutes while it downloaded, installed, and rebooted.

Ceton hopes to add Windows 8 support in a future update. An Android “layer” that will open the door to Android apps, including a Web browser, is also in the works.

It’s hard to recommend the Echo given that a $200 Xbox 360 performs the same function and plays top-shelf games, too. The Echo is smaller and quieter, but it would be a much more attractive solution if it came with a better remote, supported Wi-Fi, and cost a whole lot less.

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Review: GOM Media Player plays just about anything

Open-source media player VLC's ability to play back just about any file I can throw at it has made me a fan, but its geeky feel and utilitarian interface can be a turnoff.  Enter GOM Media Player (free). It’s a full-featured video player that can handle almost anything, and looks good doing it.

GOM Media Player supports a wide range of audio and video formats out of the box. Supported file types include flv, mp4, mov, mpg, ts, avi, divx, asx, wmv, m4v, dat, ifo, vob, 3gp/3gp2, rm/rmvb, mkv, ogm video files and mp3, .m4a, .aac, .ogg audio files.

If GOM doesn't support your file format, you're not out of luck. The application includes a Codec Finder service that tells you which codec you need, and points you to sources for downloads and more information about the codecs. It's a nice touch that offers enough freedom for advanced users and enough hand-holding for newbies.

GOM Media Player features an attractive interface and a settings menu that provides plenty of options without overwhelming you.Another nice touch is GOM's slick design.

The edges of the video player look like polished steel, and the buttons resemble those you'd see on an actual device. You can easily load videos, create playlists, fast forward and rewind, move quickly through the video to find an exact spot, and switch to full-screen mode.

Advanced users will appreciate options like the ability to capture the screen, change the stereo mode for audio playback, and adjust subtitle size and displayand all of these are laid out in a settings menu that doesn't feel overwhelming.

But all of this wouldn't matter if the video output didn't look good. Luckily, that wasn't the case: Video played back on GOM Media Player looked great. There’s no reason to not keep using GOM as my media player of choice.

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Review: Toshiba's LX835-D3230 is a compact all-in-one with strong media capability

All-in-one computers are popular due to their simplicity, low profile, and media capabilities. They have increasingly become more powerful, too, offering features and performance closer to what a power user desires. The LX835-D3230, Toshiba’s latest all-in-one model, offers good performance for the price, but some users may find the screen size constraining.

Priced competitively at $999, the LX835-D3230 comes with an Intel Core i7-3610QM processor that runs at 2.3GHz, plus 6GB of RAM for speedy multitasking. It managed a score of 103 on our strenuous WorldBench 7 benchmark suite, so it's about 3 percent faster than our baseline system.

Unfortunately, the LX835-D3230 has only Intel's integrated HD 4000 graphics technology. In our graphics tests, it barely ran Dirt 3 and Crysis 2 on high settings at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, achieving an average of just 15.0 frames per second and 9.2 fps respectively. When we lowered the graphics settings and dropped the resolution to 1024 by 768 pixels, the system ran Dirt 3 at 52.0 fps and Crysis 2 at 31.4 fps. In any case, you won't want to try playing any graphically intensive games on the LX835-D3230, though it should manage casual, low-end games fairly well.

Despite the LX835-D3230's inability to play games, you shouldn't count it out as a media maven. The 23-inch high-definition screen sports a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and is great for watching movies and television. It may be a little tough to watch from the couch, but it's ideal for a small room or dorm. It also comes with a remote that allows you to sit back and enjoy media from a comfortable distance. Unfortunately, since the system lacks a touchscreen, it can't take full advantage of the impending Windows 8 features. Most people won’t mind, though, and the absence of touch support will help you keep the screen clean.

The LX835-D3230 boasts a plethora of ports for the media aficionado, including a TV tuner and an HDMI-in port for connecting video game consoles or Blu-ray players. If you have a superb DVD collection, you’re in luck with the included DVD drive. You'll also find four USB 2.0 ports and a gigabit ethernet port on the back, plus two USB 3.0 ports, a memory card reader, a headphone jack, and a microphone jack on the left side.

As far as connectivity is concerned, the LX835-D3230 covers all the bases with 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. With both kinds of wireless tech available for staying connected or syncing devices, you'll get to keep the area around the system free of cable clutter.

A standard wireless mouse and keyboard accompany the system. Both are a comfortable size, and easy to use. The keyboard isn’t particularly useful for media capabilities, but it does offer the standard pause/play, skip, and back controls when you use the function key.

The screen leans on a small stand that allows a little room for adjustment. It isn’t the most elegant setup that we have seen on an all-in-one, but it works. The speakers are located on the front, and the sound quality is reasonably good with the installed SRS Premium Sound 3D software.

The LX835-D3230 has your storage needs covered for the foreseeable future, as it comes with 1TB of 7200-rpm storage for all of your programs, files, and media. A terabyte should last most people (even media collectors) a long while before they start looking to expand. Of course, this all-in-one's lack of easy internal accessibility means that any expansion will have to take the form of an external drive.

If you’re looking for an AIO, and you want to get a bit more power without killing your wallet, the Vizio CA27-A1—that company's first all-in-one—may be an alternative to keep an eye on. The $1250 (as of September 5, 2012) CA27-A1 managed a score of 122 on our WorldBench 7 benchmark, and has a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 640M graphics card. It still isn’t a gaming machine by any means, but you will certainly get your money’s worth from it. The Vizio is also larger, with a 27-inch display and 1920-by-1080-pixel high-definition resolution. Its startup times are faster since it uses a small solid-state drive to cache the larger, slower 5400-rpm hard drive.

Overall, though, the Toshiba LX835-D3230 is a great all-in-one system for a great price. It is encouraging to see how affordable AIO systems have become without sacrificing a lot of power and usability. In an age where media consumption is a centerpiece for most people, options such as the LX835-D3230 are key to staying on a budget and still enjoying everything that modern entertainment has to offer.

WorldBench 7 results Gaming test results

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