Adding blinking lights to anything is a surefire way to make it totally obnoxious. For some of you, that's a good thing.

Here are two techniques you can use to add sound-reactive lights to your stereo, boom box, computer, or pretty much anything that makes music.

The first option is to use something like an EL Wire Sound Kit. These are sold online from various places and include some combination of electroluminescent wire, a power adapter, and a special power inverter that drives the wire's power in response to sound picked up by an integrated microphone.

The whole … Read more

If you're one of the 15 to 26 million people who use Spotify to listen to music on the regular, you'd probably appreciate being able to control it remotely from your iPhone, Android, or other device, so you don't have to walk over to your computer, Android, or iPhone in order to skip a song, queue up a new playlist or album, and so on.

Luckily for you, we've found several apps that let you do exactly that, whether you're trying to control Spotify on a Mac, Windows, or even an iOS or Android device. … Read more

This morning Apple quietly rolled out Hulu Plus on the Apple TV. The missing service was one of the last pieces to a puzzle being put together by those who've decided to cut cable, and go all streaming.

If you aren't seeing Hulu Plus show up on your Apple TV yet, you simply need to restart it. Turning it off and back on wasn't enough for me, I had to actually go in and restart it from the settings menu. Here's how.

On your Apple TV, go to Settings > General.

Scroll down to the bottom … Read more

Streaming can only take you so far. It's nice to carry at least some of our tunes and videos with us in our mobile devices, but most of us have run into space limitations. SD cards can only hold so much, but compressing your files can help you cram more onto your device. Note that higher levels of compression almost always mean lower levels of quality, but most of us won't notice much difference. 

I moved recently, and though I hired pros and consider myself to be fairly well organized, it was still stressful and exhausting. I did manage to save myself some time and heartache by planning ahead regarding my home network, media centers, and other devices. Here are some tips to make your own move a little simpler: 

On Monday, shortly after Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference, we showed you how to install the first iOS 6 developer preview on your iOS devices, but not an Apple TV.

As I previously warned, and will warn again, installing a beta operating system is for developers who are testing applications. It is not for individuals. There will be bugs and issues, sometimes rendering your device near useless.

You will need to be part of the iOS Developer Program with Apple and have access to the proper files, as well as access to registering the UDID (Unique Device Identifier ) of … Read more

The built-in sharing tools on iTunes make it easy to listen to a single library of music on several machines on your home or office network.

By tweaking a few settings through iTunes preference panes, you can control who can access your network, what they'll find there, and how your own remote listening habits can update your shared playlists and stats.

Traditional network sharing This was the first -- and at one time the only -- choice if you wanted to share your iTunes library. It's a simple one-click operation, with a few options that let you control … Read more

Once your music library expands beyond a few thousand tracks, you're likely to find that some of those tracks have incorrect or missing information, like artist, album, year, genre, and so on. Sometimes this doesn't matter much, but if you are having a hard time searching or your obsessive side is dominant, MusicBrainz Picard can help you get your music files back in shape. Here's how to use it:

When I reviewed the Panasonic TC-PVT50 series, I was annoyed to see that the latest software update caused a banner ad to appear for a few seconds whenever I turned on the TV. It disappeared quickly and only popped up upon power-on, but it was still obnoxious. The first thing I wondered was whether I could turn it off.

Happily, Panasonic built in a way to disable the advertising. It's a simple, albeit buried, menu command. Here it is in a nutshell.