Thanks to a new partnership with Rhapsody, Lifehacker notes, Yahoo has added playable music clips to their search results.

When you search for and find a popular artist, you can play full-length tracks and/or music videos without leaving the search results.

I had good luck with singers Norah Jones, Alicia Keys, Sinead O’Connor, and even an oldie, Dusty Springfield, but didn’t turn up playable results with a few othes.  Try your favorite artists.

If you are in the market for some personal technology but are feeling the current pinch during this economic downturn, you’ll be interested in PC Magazine’s picks for the 20 best products (rating 3 or better) under $100.

Categories include:

• Mobile Phones and PDAs,
• interesting computer peripherals such as mice, flash drives, and video cams,
• digital photo and video equipment
• MP3 players and headphones,
• and printers.
  

Who doesn’t have a lot of old audio and video tapes around that you would like to move to the latest media?  These DIY tips and instructions from Rick Broida at PC Magazine will get you started off on the right foot.

He suggests that “it’s not too late to resurrect that old content, to free it from its analog cage and make it part of your digital world.  You can turn albums, 45s, and cassettes into iPod-ready MP3s and wrangle VHS tapes onto DVDs.  You may need to invest a few dollars in hardware to make the transition, but at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing that your wedding video and other treasures will live on forever—or at least until today’s media turns old.”

Included are how to turn…

• Tapes to MP3s 
• VHS to DVD
• Vinyl to MP3s 

Mobile picture books
Hot sellers in Japan are made-for-mobile picture books for kids.  One publisher plans to have 50 titles and 10,000 downloads by next September. [via iLibrarian]

How Americans use the Internet for purchase decisions
“The internet plays an important role in how people conduct research for purchases, but it is just one among a variety of sources people use and usually not the key factor in final purchasing decisions,” notes this Pew Internet & American Life report (PDF).

Among online Americans who use the Internet for product research, online resources make shopping more efficient by helping them explore options and compare features.  Although many use online resources to look for better deals, few actually make the purchase online.  Among the product purchases examined were music, cell phones, and new housing.

New instant copyright licensing services
In response to growth in blogging and social networking, iCopyright has launched two new instant licensing services – Instant PDF E-Prints and Instant Web Post – to help online publishers promote lawful reuses of their copyrighted content while protecting their rights.  See LISWire for details.

Free Web conferencing tools useful for librarians
iLibrarian has collected a group of six Web conferencing applications that enable a presenter to host a Webinar or meeting with live video and audio, text chat, whiteboards, shared files, and even desktop sharing.

Web conferencing systems have been expensive and certainly beyond the every day uses that librarians might enjoy such as remote library instruction, hosting Webinars, and online meetings with library or community groups.

The tools include:

• VRooms
• Yugma 
• Wiziq
• Dimdim
• PalBee
• Vyew 

Free Web app tutorial sites
Web Worker Daily recommends four free tutorial sites especially for web developers.  Topics covered include photoshop, DreamWeaver, Adobe Premiere and Illustration, Excel, CSS, and more.

The sites include:

• TechTutor.TV
• FreelanceSwitch
• InPictures
• BMC PhotoArt 

Napster offers 6 million DRM-free MP3s
Napster has started offering its complete catalog of more than 6 million tracks in the MP3 format. 

Napster’s Web-based store, where you can purchase and download the tracks, is compatible with every operating system, and the MP3s can be played on any MP3 player, portable video player, or music cell phone.

The online and To Go subscription services for $12.95 or $14.95 per month, respectively, will continue and the music associated with a subscription will remain in the protected WMA format with the time-out capability.

Music: Mix it up
ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want, they say.  You can download and sample from music on the site and share the results with anyone, anywhere, anytime.  Watch for occasional copyright restrictions, depending on the specific license.

If you are just browsing and listening there is no need to register.  But if you register you get your own artist’s page where you can upload your own music, cut-ups of other artists and loop libraries.  You can leave reviews, and interact in the forums, pick favorites and more. 

Those who create music that they want to retain all rights to should not upload it to ccMixter.

MySpace Music CEO sees money in free tunes
 MySpace Music, the major-label-backed online service slated for a summer rollout, is planning to deliver “all the music in the world” for free.

Once that mission is accomplished, according to MySpace CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe, the cash will follow as music fans turn MySpace Music into a money-making machine with multiple revenue streams.

The new service will strip out band pages from the original MySpace — currently the most popular social-networking site — and stream full-length songs and videos for free.  MySpace Music will peddle DRM-free downloads, ringtones, concert tickets, T-shirts and more.

For more information read Wired.com’s in-depth interview with DeWolfe.

National Public Radio (NPR) has relaunched NPR Music, and Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb calls it “a real joy to use.”  The new site features an easy to use Flash pop-up player (see below) instead of Windows Media or RealPlayer. 

The new player works not just at NPR Music, but across all NPR properties.  You can click a single link anywhere on the site to add an audio file you’re reading about to your playlist.  ”Playlists will run continuously and link back out to the articles they were derived from. In testing the site I was able to quickly assemble a playlist of both single songs and hour-long concert performances. Playback was very smooth in most circumstances though switching between multiple hour-long recordings sometimes took awhile to buffer,” say Kirkpatrick.

The new NPR Music site highlights a wide variety of pre-built playlists.  I’m a jazz fan so I tried the “Top 5 Jazz Halloween Songs” and enjoyed listening to them while preparing this post.  Way to go NPR!