Buy Windows Products 
Buy Mac Products This has little to do with the media business, but it’s so cool that it’s worth sharing. Check out http://recaptcha.net.
This service supplies free captchas – those squiggly words supposedly readable only by humans and not computers, used to prevent automated submissions of forms. The captchas are taken from scanning books where the OCR software fails. After enough humans verify a captcha, the word is corrected as a part of the book scan.
This solves two real world problems at once – supplying unique captchas to Web sites, and deciphering unreadable words using human power. Brilliant!
(Read more from the site to see how the software knows that a captcha is correct before it’s actually verified.)
Recaptcha.net
Replay Media Splitter 1.3
– Some missing ASF metadata now copying from source file to destination file.
– Fixed issue wtith marker not matching with slider.
– Fixed incorrect program behavior when opening .mp3 files and moving slider (such as spontaneous playing and so on).
– Fixed issue of sometimes when moving previous or next K-frame slider moves at wrong position
– Foxed issue of sometimes when copy time from clipboard to the time calculator, to the navigation edit box or to the marker position edit box time is copied incorrect.
– Fixed high CPU usage when splitting some WMV files.
– Fixed lost audio data problem when splitting some files.
– Problem with the installed Haali Media Slpitter (KLite Codec Pack) with AVI support was fixed. Previous version returned “Input file has not been set properly or damaged (The parameter is incorrect. hr = 0x80070057)” Error if Haali was installed.
– Added WMSP1 (“Windows Media Audio 9 Voice”) audio stream recognition.
– Added MSS2 (“Windows Media Video 9 Screen”) video stream recognition.
Google Audio Ads
This is one of the weirdest things I’ve seen in a while: Google is setting up an Adwords-like system to be able to place and track radio ads. It’s called Google Audio Ads.
No, this isn’t online advertising – these are ads placed on terrestrial AM and FM radio stations. Ads are tracked by a callback phone number in the ads itself.
Why would Google undertake something so far outside their core area of expertise? Either it’s incredibly stupid, or really smart.
Perhaps Google thinks it can take over another advertising area, duplicating the success of Adwords and Adsense. Adsense works well for the hosting sites, but in our experience it doesn’t do nearly as well as targeted keyword advertising. Radio ads are usually expensive to run and ineffective unless you have a huge budget.
The other possibility is that they are setting up infrastructure for local advertising of all kinds. Location-based ads are hot in the investment community, and show a lot of promise, so perhaps this is Google’s way of trying to dominate the sector before the other location-based technologies take hold.
Google Audio Ads an interesting development, but don’t be surprised to see it become a total flop.
Replay Media Catcher 2.10
– Remembers previous screen position between sessions
– Added Shoutcast plug-in
– Added MP3 snagger plug-in (defaulted to OFF) – works for MP3 sites like last.fm
– Settings dialog has more room to display plug-ins
– New authenticated installer
Cool New Product News for May
The Applian Advantage Club: A while back I asked some of you for your opinion about a “Members Only Club” – a club for Suite owners that would offer certain benefits to its members. Well we still plan on starting the club – it’s just taken a bit longer than we thought. We are redoing our website in the next month and once it’s done we will start the club. Please watch for an invitation. We are really excited to get this going.
If you would like details on the future Applian Advantage Club benefits please click here:
Replay AV 8.2 – This latest version of Replay AV will include Applian Media Courier powered by YouSendIt: -a new feature that enables Replay AV customers to retrieve their recorded files anywhere they can access e-mail . Imagine being at work and getting an e-mail with a link to your favorite daily recording? Or being on vacation and listening to all your favorite shows?
This is slated for release in early June. If you are interested in receiving an email when Replay AV with Applian Media Courier powered by YouSendIt is available, please click here.
Replay Converter with DVD Burning Capabilty: We are about to release a whole new version of Replay Converter with a brand new look and a great new feature – DVD burning! Replay Converter with DVD burning should be available early to mid summer. Thanks to this new feature you will be able to go from download to DVD in one easy step.
If you are interested in being notified when Replay Converter with DVD Burning capability is available, please check here.
<Replay Media Catcher 2.10: This first-ever streaming Flash Video Recorder was released in February and we have already improved it. Replay Media Catcher now includes automatic naming of captured videos, and can record, recognize and tag streaming MP3 files too. Version 2.10 will have the ability to capture more MP3 streams, as well as extract MP3 tracks from Shoutcast radio stations. If you haven’t tried this super easy recorder yet – you should. Just remember the secret to using Replay Media Catcher is that you need to open the program and hit “start recording” BEFORE even going to the website that you want to record.
Replay Media Catcher 2.10 will be available by June 1. Updates are free for existing customers.
Learn more about Replay Media Catcher 2.10 here.
<Replay Music Fans: With the release of Windows Vista, the current recording method that Replay Music employs doesn’t work anymore. We understand this is frustrating. But we are very excited about a new technology under development that will restore audio recording capabilities to Vista.
Read why we believe Replay Music doesn’t work with Vista and sign up to be notified about this new recording technology when it becomes available. Please click here.
Updates: We are never satisfied to leave well enough alone. We are constantly updating our programs. Why not add our updates page link to your RSS reader or bookmarked pages and check it once a week or so. That way you will always know the latest new features we have added to our programs.
http://applian.com/blog/updates/index.html
Thanks for reading all our latest news. If you have any questions please e-mail me (Leslie Bee) at:
[email protected]
Have fun.
Replay Converter 2.80
– Added audio conversion options that allows users to either convert audio files using DirectShow or not.
– Now detects if a file has no audio and reports an error when trying to convert to an audio format.
– Can convert more files to Ogg.
– Can convert more video files to audio files.
– Added “Open Target Folder” button in “Options”.
– Added computer resource usage options.
– After deleting an item in the converter list, the selector line appears on the next item.
– Improved ASF to MP3 conversions.
MP3 Compression
Maximum PC has an interesting article about the quality of compressed MP3s. While not totally scientific, the results nonetheless indicate that a 160 Kbps VBR MP3 file is often indistinguishable from the original. If you have friends who are audio snobs, tell them to go read the article!
Save Pandora
Pandora – the awesome music recommendation internet radio site – is likely to shut down if the new rates for Internet Radio broadcasters are upheld. This is an RIAA backed initiative that will essentially kill Internet Radio, or at least force it overseas.
Read Pandora’s letter to learn more.
New Video Technologies from Adobe, Microsoft
Adobe and Microsoft are gearing up for battle in the next wave of internet video delivery technology. This article from Streamingmedia.com gives a great summary of what we have to look forward to.
Replay AV 8.14
– URL Finder cache list now shows only FLV files
– Added special log file for shoutcast tracks – used by radio station guys
– Added 16 Kbps MP3 conversion option
– Podcasts with long URLs no longer get saved in program files folder
– In Convert/Transfer dialog, the selector bar no longer vanishes every 30 seconds or so
– Podcast MP3s can now be retagged
– New Podcasts by default have retag option set to off