Notebook audio is always a mixed bag, and often a disappointingly muddy and quiet bag at that.

When you do hear good audio it’s usually found on notebooks designed to be stuck on a desk, but the Dell XPS 14z is able to pack in some of the best sounding speakers I’ve ever heard, in a surprisingly portable package — one that starts at $899.

I’ve spent the morning working on the Dell XPS 14z, after lusting over the Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook we’re giving away at GottaBeMobile, and I’m incredibly impressed with the sound quality coming out of this system.

The Dell XPS 14z has a few things working for it, including the large top open speaker grills which send the sound right at your head, instead of into your jeans like so many other notebooks do. Also helping out is the inclusion of Waves MaxxAudio on the system, which helps deliver better sounding audio in smaller packages.

The Dell XPS 14z speaker grilles help deliver great audio directed at your ears, not your lap.

Listening to a variety of music I was most impressed with the depth and clarity of the music. While listening to 99 Problems by Jay Z and I Put Your Picture Away (Live) by Kid Rock on Pandora it was hard to believe these were notebook speakers. I could make out background sounds that don’t come through on other notebooks and on some dedicated systems I have tried out.

Volume is good, though if you want to host a house party with this system, you’ll need to connect to some bigger speakers. For a dorm room, small office or a hotel room though, you get great sounding music at a sufficient volume.

This isn’t the only system from Dell with Waves MaxxAudio included, the Dell XPS 15z which I reviewed last year also impressed. If you are looking for a great audio experience on your notebook, I highly recommend the Dell XPS 14z, and suggest checking out other Dell systems with similar setups.

Stay Tuned for a full Dell XPS 14z review.

Dell XPS 14z Rocks – Great Speakers and Sound is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Apple finally released iTunes Match, which lets iTunes check all the music you have on your computer and then lets you access it from iCloud for a yearly fee. Setup isn’t complicated, but I want to show you the steps and warn of a snag or two, so you can take full advantage of the service with your computers and your iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad and even Apple TV.

First, this assumes a couple of things. You have to have the latest version of Mac OS X 10.7 if you are using a Mac. It also works on Windows. Then, you have to update iTunes to version 10.5.1. On a Mac, do this via the Apple menu by clicking on Software Update. On Windows you can download it manually from Apple.com/iTunes. Once installed you will find a new item in the left hand side of iTunes called iTunes Match. It goes away after you set things up.

Setup On Computers

Now, click iTunes Match and then go ahead and subscribe to the service. Apple will charge your credit card $24.95 before you can get started. After successfully charging your card, it then starts to go through the three-step process.

iTunes will gather information about your library. It reads your list of music files and then in step two it compares the music to their database of music to see if it has a compatible version of that song. Finally, in step three, it uploads the files that it didn’t find a match for in step two. In my case this required uploading 222 files.

Now, go to your other computers but wait till the process finishes on the first machine. I initially jumped the gun and tried to upload music from both of my MacBooks at once and it gave me an error message saying I had to wait till the first one finished uploading songs. Once it does, you can set things up on the other machines.

Setup On iOS

On your iOS device you turn this on by opening the Settings app, tap Music and the turn on iTunes Match. If you have an Apple TV you can also turn it on. There is a new tab called Music with iTunes Match as one of the items on that list.

Benefits of iTunes Match

What you get for your trouble is all of your matched music files in the cloud that you can then download to any of the devices or computers associated with your iTunes account. In my case I can access it via my iPad, my wife’s iPad, the three iPhones on our account and both of my MacBooks.

The music files are even upgraded once you match them and later download them.  Let’s say you ripped a song from an old CD in only 128-Kbps. The file you get to download from iTunes Match service will be encoded at the higher 256-Kbps in AAC format, which means you get better quality sound but at about the same or a lower total file size since AAC files are smaller than MP3 files. Also the files are DRM-free, so they should be playable on other devices besides iOS hardware or iPods. Files that have been matched but are not stored locally can be downloaded by clicking the little icon in iTunes seen to the right. Click the cloud and it begins to download the file.

See our coverage of the announcement at GottaBeMobile.com. For more information see Apple’s iCloud page.

How to Set Up iTunes Match on All Your Computers and iOS Devices is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

Sound is an important part of using your PC. We use our notebooks to listen to music, listen to the audio in a movie, while we chat with friends and to listen to online radio and video. Sound also indicates various events that take place in Windows, alerting you to a completed download, computer startup, common errors, new emails, calendar events and much more.

Unfortunately, sound may stop working in Windows 7 for a number of reasons. Because sound is an important part of using your computer, we take a look at resolving common sound problems in Windows.

The first thing I always recommend users try is check if the speaker attached to their computer is not turned on or turned down, this can be an obvious ‘duh’ moment, but it happens on numerous occasions to the best of us. So check that first before doing anything drastic.

If you are using a laptop, you can check the volume control in the Notification Area of Windows to see if it’s turned down. Most laptops also have an embedded function key, for example, Fn + Function key used to mute or turn on the volume, you can also check this to see if it might be preventing you from hearing sound.

Windows 7 Audio Troubleshooter

If the above tips don’t resolve these common sound problems, its time to move on to the next solution, the Windows 7 Audio Troubleshooter, which can help you try to automatically resolve problems with audio.

Click Start, type: troubleshooting.

Hit Enter on your keyboard.

This will open the Troubleshooting Control Panel item. Under Hardware and Sound click the link to Troubleshoot Audio Playback.

This will start the audio troubleshooting wizard, click Next to start it. It will go through a series of diagnostics test to see what might be preventing audio playback or what is not running such as the Windows Audio service. If it still does not resolve the problem, then we need to go on to some manual options.

Check the Windows Audio Service

The Windows Audio service manages audio for Windows-based programs. If this service is stopped, audio devices and effects will not function properly. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.

Click Start, type: services

Hit Enter on your keyboard.

Scroll down to Windows Audio, right-click it and click Properties.

Under the General tab, make sure that the Startup type: is set to Automatic If it isn’t do so and click Start under Service status then click Apply and OK. Check to see if Audio is working again.

Update Audio Drivers

When you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, this can sometimes break drivers. If you recently upgraded to Windows 7 and audio is no longer working, you probably need to install an updated driver. The first place you can check is Windows Update. Click Check for Updates and look for any audio related updates for your hardware. If there none available, you need to check the manufacturer’s website.

If you were previously running Windows Vista, you could try using the Windows Vista driver in Windows 7 since they share the same driver model. Try installing the same Windows Vista driver using Windows Troubleshooting. Right-click on the driver executable/installer file –> click Properties and select the Compatibility tab; click the check box before Run this program in Compatibility mode for option and select Windows Vista in the list-down box. Then try installing the device driver via Run as administrator.

For more, check out this article about How To Install, Update and Troubleshoot Hardware in Windows 7.

Plug in Headphones

My brother recently updated his DELL Inspiron laptop running Windows 7 RTM to Windows 7 SP1. After upgrading he realized that audio playback wasn’t working anymore. We tried what seemed like every possible solution, including the ones above, but none worked.

On a whim I decided to plug in my head phones, I could hear sound, but none was coming from the built in speakers. I unplugged the speakers, restarted to continue troubleshooting the problem, to my surprise, I started hearing audio from the built in speakers again.

What seemed to have happened is plugging in the head phone diverted the sound signal from the external speakers but there are times when unplugging the head phones from audio jack does not return the signal to the built in speakers. So by plugging in the head phone into the sound jack will sometimes resolve this type of problem.

Hopefully these tips can help you resolve any problems you might have with audio in Windows 7.

How to Troubleshoot Sound Problems in Windows is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.

If your system partition, where Windows, applications are installed, personal files and settings exist is beginning to fill up you have a number of options such as freeing up disk space by uninstalling applications or move files from the local drive to an external hard disk. This can be a chore though, because you just don’t know when a need to use an application might arise or you might need to reference a file, which means plugging in your external hard disk and turning it on. Although these are minor inconveniences, there is still a better option, such as installing a new hard disk and separate your personal files from your system drive.

The key benefits of this are;

• your system drive does not full up easily
• better performance
• in the event of a disaster your personal files are kept much safer.

This is also handy for users who might be moving to Solid State Disks, which are fast, but small in storage capacity and still expensive. The great thing too about SSD’s is, you can use them in combination with a mechanical spinning hard disk. So you can have an SSD just for your operating system and applications and keep your large files such as videos, pictures and music on the hard disk when you need to access and store them. In this article, we take a look at such a scenario, based up on redirecting your Windows 7 Personal Folder (or User Folder or what is known as the account folder for Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos to another storage location. Please note, this also works great for partitions too, so if you have a big old hard disk in your computer, you can partition it and redirect some of your user folders there.

How to Change The Location of Your Personal Folders in Windows 7

To open your User folder, click Start > and click on your account name up at the top of the Start menu.

In this folder you will see all the common locations where you store and organize your different data types, like Word documents, spreadsheets, pictures, music, videos and even contacts and saved searches. Before we start redirecting any of these folders to a new storage location, lets prepare the location.

A few months ago, I had created a new partition for backup files, I am going to be using it to store my Documents folder. The first thing I want to do is create a new folder here with an identifiable name to indicate that it belongs to me. Click the ‘New folder’ button on the command bar and give a name, I going to call it adacosta also since that is my user name on this computer.

Creating a folder for our redirected Personal folders.

Another benefit of doing this too, if you have other user accounts on the computer and would like redirect their user folders, you won’t overwrite or damage files from either account.

Once you have created and given the folder a name, go back to your user folder, select the folder you would like to redirect, right click it and click Properties.

This will bring up the properties dialog of that folder, click the Location tab. As described, you can change where files in this folder are stored to another place on tis hard drive, another drive, another computer on your network. Just like we intend to do, click the Move button to begin.

This will bring up the ‘Select a Destination’ window, navigate to the location where you would like to have the Documents folder stored. In my case, it’s on the E:\ Volume in the adacosta folder. I had forgotten to also create a destination folder for it, so I will click ‘New folder’ on the command bar and Select Folder to change its location.

The new location has now moved from C:\ to E:\ to complete this action, click Apply and OK.

Click Yes when this dialog appears.

Any files created from now on that are Saved to the Documents Library in Windows 7, will automatically be saved on the E:\ drive, see below:

Remember, you can repeat this same step for other personal folders such as Music, Pictures, Videos or any of the others available in the User folder.

How to Redirect Your Personal Folders in Windows 7 is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.

DropTunes is a service that streams music stored in a user’s Dropbox folder to almost any browser, including HTML5 only gadgets like iOS devices. It is simple to use and set up. The hardest part will be waiting for your own music files to upload to your Dropbox cloud storage space if you haven’t already loaded them.

The site is accessed through a web browser like Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, or Internet Explorer 8 and higher. The service is promising apps to come soon for iOS and Android. By default the site uses Flash. However, browsers like Safari on an iPad or iPhone will work because they support HTML5.

DropTunes Streams Music from DropBox

Start by logging into DropTunes (the address is actually DropTun.es using the Spanish top-level domain ending .es) with your Dropbox user ID and password. The site automatically creates a folder in your Public Dropbox folder called DropTunes

You can choose to use this folder, but I have a folder in my Dropbox folder called music, so I just put my music there at first. Unfortunately, once one file was completed streaming DropTunes would not automatically go to the next song in the folder like it does when the music is in the DropTunes folder under Public. So, it is a good idea to use this special folder.

After your music is finished uploading to Dropbox, go to the folder in your browser using the DropTunes site and click or tap on the “Play” link next to the track you want to start streaming. When it is finished playing, it will move to the next song. If you want to advance it, then just tap on the skip button at the top left. The progress of the streamed file is shown above the list.

This service competes with Amazon’s new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player service released at the end of March 2011. The added ability to stream music to iOS devices might make DropTunes preferable. However, there is one severe limitation to DropTunes – the amount of storage. A free DropBox account only provides 2GB of free storage (plus any extras you earn through referring friends or completing their tutorial or periodic scavenger hunts).

Amazon gives users 5GB for free and upgrades them to 20GB if they just buy one album. That 20GB is in addition to any albums they buy from Amazon’s MP3 service. So, if you have 3GB of music purchased from Amazon after they released the Cloud Drive/Cloud Player, then you will actually get 23GB of free space for the first year.

Another consideration is that your music will sync to all of your computers by default. You may wish to use the selective sync feature in Dropbox and only sync your DropTunes folder with one computer, as DropTunes suggest on their “Info & Tips” page. Otherwise you may have very long synchronization times as it uploads and then downloads all of the music you put in the folder.

If you have a small library or a large Dropbox account and want to stream to an iOS device, then DropTunes is probably the best solution. It is also one of the simplest to set up and use. If you chose to use DropTunes but need another cloud storage or syncing service, check out our roundup of free online storage. It has a lot of great options, some of which offer synchronization in addition to cloud storage.

How to Stream Your Own Music Using DropTunes and Dropbox is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

mSpot announced that they are increasing their cloud music storage service to 5GB to match the free storage Amazon Cloud Drive offers. mSpot works like Amazon’s new Cloud Drive and Cloud Player. It plays the music in a browser streamed from the Internet. Your music is available on any computer with an Internet browser and a decent Internet connection. mSpot also has mobile apps for playing your stored music.

When Amazon announced its Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player music service, the world took note. mSpot has had this service for a while. mSpot was limited to 2GB of free storage. When Amazon offered 5GB, mSpot chose to match the offer.

mSpot works on both iOS and Android devices

Unlike Amazon, mSpot does not offer music for sale. To get more than 5GB with mSpot you will have to pay $3.99/month. Amazon will increase the free storage limit to 20GB if you buy an album from Amazon.

mSpot offers two storage options

mSpot does claim to do a good job of caching your music so that it won’t stop playing even when wireless data signals get week on a smartphone. They also offer a movie service. Some Internet enabled TVs have mSpot’s player built-in as well.

mSpot Cloud Music Service Raises Storage Limit and Works on iOS is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

We were excited about the announcement from Amazon that they are offering 5GB of free storage for MP3 files and 20GB of free storage for anyone who is willing to buy an album from their music downloading service. So we immediately signed up, bought an album we were planning to get from iTunes, and tested it out. As of the writing of this post, our initial upload is still in progress. But it looks good so far.

Amazon Cloud Player offers 6GB of free storage

While they launch this new service, the Amazon home page proudly invites customers to get started with the new online player. It includes three parts. The online storage called Cloud Drive, the Cloud Player, and for those who wish to store their already purchased music files, the Amazon MP3 Uploader which you download by clicking on the button in the player that reads “Upload to your Cloud Drive” in the upper left corner.

Amazon Cloud Player

The Amazon Cloud Player is little more than a listing of all your music files and playlists. Hover over one of them and a play button appears inviting you to stream that song from your storage space to your computer. In our initial test it began to play the song almost instantly on a fairly fast cable Internet connection.

Amazon Cloud Player song list

Other options are to create or add files to playlists and downloading the files. Each file has a check box. Select all the files you wish to either download or add to a playlist. Once selected use the buttons in the upper right to download the file or add it to one of your playlists or a brand new one.

Along the left, all of your playlists are listed. Above them is the count of all of your Songs, Albums, Artists, Genres of music, and Deleted items. The amount of storage you have left for new songs is above that.

At the bottom on the left are the play controls. And the bottom of the window shows the progress of the current file.

If you want to delete a file, just select it and choose the delete button. Or you can click on the drop-down arrow that appears next to the file name when you hover over the file name in the song list. The options are to download the file, add to playlist or delete it. If you are playing a file and choose delete, it will continue to play the file even though it seems to have been deleted. However, if you play a playlist and delete it while it is playing it will stop playing. That’s odd.

Amazon MP3 Uploader

The upload process has gone well so far. The Amazon MP3 uploaded searched our hard drive for files that it could play. The vast majority of them were songs and files from the iTunes folder. About fifty percent of those files were purchased in iTunes and 336 of them were excluded due to the DRM that iTunes used to put in music. We never upgraded those DRM-laden music files when Apple was removed DRM on most of their library a few years ago.

Amazon Cloud Player uploads your music

The upload speed is fast. Over 8GB of files are about three-fourths of the way finished after less than 12 hours of uploading. That is faster than other cloud storage upload speeds we’ve tested.

Storage Limits and Cost

The initial backup said we were going to be 3GB over the 5GB upload limit. To fix that we bought an album in the Amazon MP3 music store. Instantly that album showed up in our storage locker and our cap was increased to 20GB for nothing extra. We received an email promising that the free 20GB cap was for one year, but one year only. At that time it will revert back to 5GB and we will have to upgrade for a fee. So unless you are willing to pay about $20/year after that first year, don’t get too comfy in the large online space.

Amazon offers more storage for a price

You will notice from the chart above that the cost for extra storage is about $1/GB. You will also notice that Amazon shows that Photos and HD video can be uploaded as well. This is in addition to the storage needed to hold any music you buy from Amazon after you sign up. So, if you had 20GB of your own MP3s to upload, you could store more music so long as you buy it from Amazon.

Amazon Cloud Drive

To use the Cloud Drive for storing other kinds of files, go and upload it directly from the Cloud Drive page. While you can find free storage from services like DropBox, SugarSync, and Windows Live, this is the only one that offers the special music interface that lets you store and stream your music and increase your storage limit just by buying from the provider.

Video First Look

Amazon Cloud Player v. Apple’s MobileMe

Amazon has been offering online storage for a long time through their S3 service. But this new add-on focusing on music comes when Apple is rumored to be planning a similar service for iTunes. Should Apple choose to offer the service, there will be two such music locker options. If Apple’s is as good as Amazon’s, then there will be some good competition. That’s always good for consumers. If Apple does not offer this service at a competitive price, I can’t see myself buying another music file from iTunes.

Amazon and Music Labels

There are reports that Amazon jumped into this arena without asking permission from their record label partners. They are now apparently scrambling to get the rights to offer this service after it is already released. To be honest, we don’t think that they will without paying up. The music record labels are a greedy bunch. Mom said, “When it looks to good to be true, it probably is too good to be true!” We think this is awfully good in early tests. So, we also think the music moguls will torpedo it in the courts if Amazon doesn’t get their permission after the fact.

To get started head over to the Amazon Cloud Player page. We truly hope Amazon will succeed in getting the rights from music companies to continue this service.

To play Amazon Cloud Drive songs on an iPad select the file and then download it and it will play in Safari

Amazon Cloud Player and iOS

For users of iOS devices, the Cloud Player doesn’t work. I found a way to play the music files within Safari and show users how to do this over at our sister site Gottabemobile.com.

Amazon Cloud Drive & Player First Look is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

If you want to listen to your music loud, but don’t want to completely tune out your surroundings, you need to get Audio Monitor for Mac. This handy application passes audio from the Mac’s internal microphone through your headphones so that you can hear other people or events around you. This application will work great on your MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air or any other Mac with a built in or connected Microphone.

The audio monitor app is a free download that listens to inputs and passes them along to an output. You can use this to pass audio through to another device, but we’ve found that it is a great way to listen to music but still stay aware of what’s going on around us.

This is handy in a number of situations. Personally we’ve used it at home to listen to music, but still be able to hear a question from our significant other and it has worked out nicely. While working at the coffee shop with some other writers we have all used the app so that we could allow interruptions when we want them. It’s also nice to use when you want to look like you’re tuning the world out, but listen in anyway.

One of our friends uses this app to listen to his music, but still be able to listen for crying coming from his twins while they are sleeping. The app would work out just as well in an office setting where you want to be able to hear an incoming call or other interruption.

You can adjust the sensitivity and volume of the pass through to pick up audio from as close or far away as you prefer. When we pumped up the sensitivity we could hear our typing and the clatter of dishes around the corner of the coffee shop which is a bit too high, but shows just how sensitive you can make the Audio Monitor.

Once you try it, you’ll wish that your smartphone had the same feature.

Audio Monitor is enabled with MTCoreAudio which is a free download and works on Mac OS X.

Listen to Music and Your Surroundings w/ Audio Monitor Pass Thru on Mac is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

GarageBand is one of the two new apps that Apple released along with the iPad 2 on March 11. The other is iMovie which we wills show you next week.

We downloaded GarageBand and it was so fun to use that we are making it this week’s iPad App of the Week.

The purpose behind GarageBand is to allow people to have fun while they play, record and learn to play synthesized musical instruments. It is amazing how accurate the sound is that GarageBand produces. Someone could use this app to record any level or kind of music.

While we have not had a lot of time to really learn enough of the app’s features to give you a full review like we normally would for an iPad App of the Week, we have enjoyed it enough to want to highlight it for you.

Below is our video demo of the app:

The thing we like is the ability to play an instrument making complex and interesting sounds coming from just tapping one or two keys. It is easy for a musical idiot like me to produce something that sounds “musical”. With some practice someone with some skill and actual talent could use this to really create something special.

The app is only $4.99. Our Chuong Nguyen got to play around with it at the Apple announcement event. Here is his video of that demo:

We don’t know enough about the app yet to give you a comprehensive list of pros and cons as we normally would. Just suffice it to say that it is fun and makes me want to learn more so I can actually produce some nice music. For $5 we recommend it for anyone from the person who wants to just have fun to the musician who might like to record and distribute some songs.

Add one of the nice recording microphones for the iPad like Mike from Apogee (available soon) and you could just use it as a high quality audio recorder for podcasts, speeches, class lectures, or whatever you want.

GarageBand Turns Musical Idiots into Geniuses is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

If you’re a fan of streaming music services, you should take a look at Rdio, an unlimited music streaming service which is available in your browser, on the iPhone or Android, and now on the Mac. Rdio for Mac just launched this week and offers a native Mac app for listening to your favorite tunes.

Rdio offers millions of songs from artists big and small with plans starting at $4.99 a month. There is a free trial available which will allow you to test out the service on your Mac, Windows PC and smart phone.

Because the new Rdio app is native to Mac you can use your Mac keyboard shortcuts to control music, allowing you to play, pause and skip music without jumping to another window. This is a big plus, and something that can’t be done with the Pandora Air App available for Mac.

The Rdio for Mac can look into your local iTunes library and match it in Rdio so that you can listen to the music from within the Mac app and on any of the numerous devices like the iPhone or Android smart phones.

Check out the free trial of Rdio and the numerous apps to see if how it compares to your favorite method for listening to music.

Unlike Pandora, Rdio allows you to choose the music you want to listen to at a given time and also allows you to take songs offline with you as part of the premium $9.99 a month plan. Rdio isn’t the only company beefing up its game and competing for your money, Rhapsody just announced a free 60 day trial in order to lure in customers before rumored Spotify U.S. launch. Unfortunately Rhapsody only allows Mac users to listen to the music in their browser. Rhapsody doesn’t have a Mac version even though the company has long offered an iPhone app.

Unlimited Music Streaming on Your Mac: Rdio Launches Mac App is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.