I've been asked several times how you can get music off of your iPhone or iPod. More often than not it's because something happened to the user's music library on their computer, and they are looking for a way to snag all of their precious music from their iPod before it's completely gone.

Media players are becoming an increasingly important part of our daily lives. Many of us listen to music while we work, study, or just browse the Internet. The chances are pretty good that you're using a media player such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, or Winamp, but there's one more that's worth checking out.

Recently I have become more aware of people around me who are struggling to transition into the digital age. For example, I was recently introduced to someone who uses email to communicate, only because they have to for work. If it were up to them, they wouldn't use it at all. What's worse is that this person prints a copy of every single email they receive, not for recording purposes though.

I've always enjoyed listening to Internet radio stations because I don't have to worry about putting together my own playlists of music. iTunes has a decent selection of these radio stations available, but Apple has full control over what appears in that section of the media player. Fortunately that doesn't mean you can't add some of your own favorite radio streams to iTunes.

There have been a few times where I've wanted to extract audio from video files, but it's not always easy to find a free tool that can successfully do that. I highly recommend grabbing the free Pazera app if you ever find yourself in a similar situation. To make it even more useful the program also doubles as an audio conversion utility.

Back around 1999 and 2000 when Napster was place to go when you wanted to get your hands on music, we certainly wouldn't have expected that almost 10 years later, they'd have gone through so much yet still able to survive. Not only that, we wouldn't have expected that out of anybody that could have acquired the service, that it would be Best Buy.

Let's just pretend for a minute that the RIAA has come knocking on your door accusing you of using a P2P service to illegally share music, and violating copyrights. Your first instinct is what? If you're Jeffrey Howell, you:

Saturday's CyberNotes was all about a service called Grooveshark Lite which reminds us of a combination of Pandora and Last.fm. It provides users with a quick and easy way to listen to and discover music. After writing about Grooveshark Lite, we recently came across a site called TinySong which is linked to Grooveshark.

It's always interesting to see how many companies are up for the challenge of making a name for themselves in the online music industry.

One of the things that Apple hasn't made easy for iPhone owners is providing a way to create custom ringtones in Windows. If you're a Mac owner you can use GarageBand, but Apple doesn't provide that application on Windows.

One of the benefits of purchasing music online versus a physical CD from the store is that you don't get taxed, at least here in the United States, in states. With digital downloads becoming popular, states are trying to push a new "iTax" that would change things. Digital downloads have become a massive industry and states realize this.

We've been wondering when Google was going to get into the music game, and it appears as though they're diving in head-first starting today. The only catch is that the service is only available in China. Users outside of China will need to use a China proxy if they want to gain access to the site.

Songbird is a media player that I've had a lot of faith in ever since I took a look at it back at version 0.2. The fact that users create extensions just like in Firefox gave the perception that it would become very successful, but for awhile development had slowed down considerably.

AOL has retired the older version of their radio application for the Mac OS X operating system in favor of the new AOL Radio 2.0. The application is powered by CBS Radio, and includes over 200 radio stations including 150+ CBS Radio stations that are spread out across the United States.

Some of you may remember when Dell attempted make a name for themselves in the digital music player market by launching a couple of different music players in 2003. And you may remember that in 2006 they decided to end production of both their hard drive and flash-based players because they simply could not compete with Apple and the iPod.

VLC is one of the most well-known media players out there, and it's been almost 4 years since they've released a major new version. VLC 0.9.0 is on the horizon, and it packs in 2 years of development... so you can expect some great things. There's just one gotcha: Windows 98/ME and Mac OS X 10.3.9 are no longer supported operating systems.

Over the weekend, Ryan found himself re-organizing our photos so that we could make the most out of using iPhoto. Some of you will remember our article comparing iPhoto with Windows Photo Gallery and how we still prefer Windows Photo Gallery to iPhoto.

"How many songs are in your music collection?" is the question we're wondering this week. With digital downloads easily accessible and rather affordable these days, some people have music collections with thousands upon thousands of songs. For us, our collection ranges between 1,000 and 2,000 songs and it's a collection we've been building for about 9 years.

We know many of you appreciate online music services, so we wanted to point out Jogli. It's a fairly new music search engine. They scan the internet to find music and music video clips, and then because they're a search engine, they index it all so that when people do a search, the music they are looking for is easy to find.

I swear that Napster is as close as it gets to a cat with 9-lives. In 1999 it started off as a file sharing service that exploded with popularity. People could share and download songs freely, but the service was doomed to failure since it used central servers to connect one user to another.