For as long as companies have sold portable music players, a free pair of headphones has been part of the deal. It started with round, foam-covered, over-the-head models packaged with the original Sony Walkman cassette player in the late 1970s. Nearly 30 years later, the white earbuds included with Apple's iPod line have become a fashion statement on their own. Fashion statements aside, packaging headphones along with the music player is more about convenience than anything else. And it's certainly not about sound.

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Music_Flow.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="468" height="374" style="display:block;" /Do you think of your MP3 player as the well from whence music springs forth like so much cool, pure H2O? Neither do I, but that didn't stop some brainy (that is, totally insaney) designers from coming up with a painfully elaborate music-player concept based on just such an analogy./p pOver at Yanko Design you can see the Music Flow concept by Min-Kyung Kang, Tae-Seung Kim and Jeong-Min Og. As you can see, you turn the faucet knob to initiate the musical stream, which "flows" into the headphones connected to the spigot. With me so far? OK, so the headphone cable is a garden hose, of sorts, and it uses a capacitive sensor to detect pinching: If you pinch the hose, the watery music momentarily ceases to flow! Feel free to take your bong hit now, cuz it's only getting weirder...br img src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Music_Flow_2.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="468" height="326" style="display:block;" / bull; The remote "looks like waves" and controls the player without the faucet knob.br bull; The faucet knob is actually also a disguised speaker.br bull; And the spigot, being the player itself, houses a battery that you charge up before attaching to "a wall or window."br bull; None of these pieces, save the spigot and the presumably prohibitively expensive headphones, come together./p pIt's definitely more, uh, creative than that a href="http://gizmodo.com/5095409/have-a-cow-with-creatives-zen-moo-moo+sic-player"goofy cow MP3 player/a, but that doesn't mean it makes any sense. I almost forgot the kicker: It's not waterproof. [a href="http://www.yankodesign.com/2008/11/21/bend-the-beats-to-stop-the-flow-of-the-beats/"Yanko/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=88cbb7ad32148f9fbe19461672232659p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=88cbb7ad32148f9fbe19461672232659p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=88cbb7ad32148f9fbe19461672232659" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=jaG0jq6B"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=ItbvJXpW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=y8px42es"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=y8px42es" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=MJHIaW6a"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=MJHIaW6a" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/rPxf5-nheHM" height="1" width="1"/

pEarlier this year, the last of the four major music labels offered its respective catalog for digital download to Amazon.com's music service in the MP3 format with no digital copy protections, giving users the ability to freely transfer songs to any portable MP3 music player./p

Chris Stephenson, GM of global marketing for Microsoft's entertainment business, recently spoke with Billboard about the re-thinking behind the Microsoft's Zune music player and subscription service.

pobject width="494" height="400"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/vQL0tqLCjcQhl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/vQL0tqLCjcQhl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="494" height="400"/embed/objectMercedes-Benz new myCOMAND system has appeared at the a href="http://jalopnik.com/tag/la-auto-show/"Los Angeles Auto Show/a, taking on the a href="http://gizmodo.com/5070122/bmw-idrive-40-remixes-xbox-360-and-ipod-into-simpler-control-system"fourth-generation BMW iDrive/a. Whereas the latter has an Xbox 360 feeling, this one gets some clues from Apple's, specially Coverflow and the menu navigation, which reminds me of the first version of the Apple TV and Front Row. One big difference is that myCOMAND is connected to the web, grabbing information wirelessly and presenting it through their own on-screen apps. Looking at the high resolution screens and the feature list, it looks very good:/p pscript type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"galleryPost('mycomand', 3, '');/script/p p· Off-board navigation: The GPS is constantly updated, from the maps to the points of interests. It also has a satellite overview and the search language is open: you can write directions without having to follow a format. It looks like the are plugging into Google Maps for this one, although I'm not sure how well the writing will work using their navigation knob./p p· Trip assist: This part is quite nice, grabbing information pertaining your planned trip from different web sources and presenting it in a useful manner. You can, for example, see the weather forecast for the trip, as well as giving you the possibility to make hotel and restaurants reservations from the system itself./p p· World radio: Instead of using a normal radio, this one plugs into the web to access all the stations available. The menu gives the possibility to access radio via genre. More interesting is the idea of storing your music in a web server and accessing it through the system directly, without the need to connect an digital music player or storing things locally./p p· Internet telephony: It has support for voice over IP systems like Skype./p p· Web browser: They also include a web browser, in case you need to get more information than the one provided with the thin clients above./p p· YouTube: For huh... hmmm. iSome/i reason./p pThe navigation knob, which looks similar to the a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/notag/powermate-5576.php"Powermate/a, is simpler than the iDrive 4.0. Our a href="http://jalopnik.com/tag/la-auto-show/"Jalopnik comrades/a will have to try it to see if their user interface approach is better or not. [a href="http://www.emercedesbenz.com/Nov08/19_001517_Mercedes_Benz_Debuts_myCOMAND_Internet_Based_Infotainment_System_At_Los_Angeles_Auto_Show.html"Mercedes Benz/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=86e1f373f34c866416f246fd64fe5ff6p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=86e1f373f34c866416f246fd64fe5ff6p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=86e1f373f34c866416f246fd64fe5ff6" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=h7HDN7dU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=nGkNAEin"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=73nHQO7j"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=73nHQO7j" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=TIXZOHyO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=TIXZOHyO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/2wCMaabbx0s" height="1" width="1"/

Apple iTunes 8.0.2iTunes is the #1 music player available for the Macintosh. You can listen to CDs, MP3, AAC and more.

You can listen to streaming music over a local network, buy individual songs for $1, download over 2,000 music videos, copy songs to your iPod, buy music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks, or download free podcasts from the iTunes Store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Organize and play everything on your Mac or PC. Then sync it to your iPod and bring it along. Anywhere.
WHAT'S NEWiTunes 8.0.2 improves stability and performance and provides a number of important bug fixes, including: Addresses a quality issue creating MP3s on some computers. Fixes a connectivity issue with the iTunes Store when using some Internet proxies with Mac OS X. Improves accessibility with VoiceOver.
REQUIREMENTSMac OS X version 10.4.9 or later, QuickTime 7.5.5 or later.
DEVELOPERApple
DOWNLOADS253791
DOWNLOAD NOW (57.8 MB)
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