Orange are launching a new service – Fireplayer, which allows users to download tracks and remix them by adding effects. Attendees at Glastonbury were the first to get their hands on the new service, and it launches to the rest of us on July 1st. Fireplay currently offers 20 tracks for remixing, but the company is hoping to expand the range to offer more choice.
Fireplayer is available as a free download from the Orange World portal. Your finished masterpiece than then be saved to your mobile as a TrueTone ringtone to impress/offend your friends/travelling companions.
Also launching on 1st July will be Orange’s new music service, the imaginatively titled Music Player, where subscribers will be able to download and listen to music directly to their mobile phones. Given that the service will launch with only 200 tracks will no doubt be somewhat of a hindrance to uptake. However, Orange see mobile music as critical to their future and have a history of successful innovation and so to expand the range of available music, they are conducting talks with all major labels. Tracks for Music Player are a proprietary format, but perhaps this is the beginning of music labels seeing mobile phones as a secure platform for content distribution?
Tracks for Fireplayer cost UK£3.50 (€5.25), music downloads for Music Player cost UK£1.50 (€2.25)
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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