Well, the fat lady has finally sung woman of generous girth has finally vocalized lyrically—the mothership has picked a location for its East Coast server farm. I guess this means we should be speculating where their mid-continent, West Cost and worldwide centers might end up.

When I last looked over the open-source movement’s answer to iTunes, it was clear that in spite of a number of great features, it was also lacking in some significant ways. Now, a few of those caveats have been addressed, so it’s time to look again at this surprisingly thoughtful and functional jukebox application.

Palm yesterday responded to Apple’s announcement that it may shut off access to iTunes syncing from the Pre smartphone, simultaneously taking a stand on the matter and showing the Palm corporate ethic.

Apple has given notice that even though some third-party vendors, most notably Palm and their Pre, have gained access to iTunes for syncing, that access will be  short lived indeed.

Apple says they’ll sell whatever they can wherever they can, as long as publishers and royalty collecting boards issue them the licenses, and this has been the absurd 19th Century situation Europe finds itself mired in as it tries to navigate the digital era—27 mostly little, squabbling, jealous fiefdoms.

Now there’s another nifty feature built into the world’s best music discovery and Internet radio customization service, which already includes iTunes and Amazon integration for purchasing.

Snowtape offers an easy and free way to take what you listen to on the Internet and automatically record and export it to iTunes. Snowtape’s not the first application to do this, but it might be easiest and it’s definitely among the least expensive (ie free).

You really have to give the record labels credit as they have managed to bugger the one segment of post-Napster retail music that was delivering growing unit volumes and revenues—an objective lesson in why you should be careful what you wish for.

During a visit to Sam’s Club last Friday, I was reminded that Apple was an early backer of Sony’s next generation optical disc technology. A looped video demo (copyright 2006) on a flatscreen TV prominently listed the Cupertino, CA-based computer and widget maker. Since then, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said he viewed Blu-ray as “a bag of hurt” and not worth supporting — that stance may be about to change.

Last night my daughter asked me to find and print the lyrics Nickelback’s Rockstar (she’ll get the expurgated version). Shortly thereafter I realized that pearLyric, my long time go to application and Dashboard (a veritable one-two punch) for lyrics, had stopped functioning and there isn’t a new version available either. Drat.