But a few days later it was gone. Undoubtedly prompted by IFPI, BPI and the Big Four labels behind them, the British police arrested the owner of the domain. Despite no charges sticking, the operators pulled the plug on the project. What the labels could not do, however, was anything about the source of the music – VKontakte itself.

This problem was exploited during November by a new and altogether more powerful tool. The Mielophone app truly was Mulve on steroids, not only pulling music from more sources but integrating discovery, last.fm, a playlist and download manager, videos, lyrics and more.

But as history repeated itself, on February 16th the person who registered the Mielophone domain name received an email from EMI and Gala Records, which set in motion the death of this fledgling and promising application.

“As you probably know, our company actively protects its copyright and related rights in the territory of the Russian Federation, including via the courts and law enforcement agencies. The Mielophone software which, obviously, is connected to you (in any case, according to the technical information for your domain name) violates the copyright and related rights of EMI / Gala Records,” the email began.

The email then went on to state that the operation of Mielophone constituted a civil breach of Article 146 (Infringement of Copyright and Related Rights), which allows for imprisonment for up to 6 years.

Secondly, and most strangely, EMI and Gala then indicated that the Mielophone operators’ activities constituted a criminal breach of Article 273 – offenses which carry a maximum sentence of 7 years imprisonment.

Article 273 concerns the “Creation, use and distribution of malicious computer programs” as detailed below.

Creating computer programs or changes to existing programs, which obviously lead to the unauthorized destruction, blocking, modification or copying of information, disruption of computers, computer systems or networks, as well as the use or dissemination of such programs or machine carriers with such programs -shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term of three years with a fine of up to two hundred thousand rubles or the salary or other income for the period up to eighteen months.

The same act which negligently caused grave consequences, shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term of three to seven years.

However, since EMI and Gala Records are very fine and reasonable people, something they were keen to point out to in their correspondence, the operators of Mielophone were given the opportunity to “close the issue with a peaceful pre-trial procedure”, i.e stop the Mielophone project and end its distribution.

TorrentFreak has learned that the people behind Mielophone wisely tried to seek legal advice but were met with an unhelpful legal profession – specifically when the lawyers they approached learned they would be going up against EMI. So, with little option, Mielophone is no more. The creators have made it very clear that they want to steer clear of legal action and won’t be reviving or revisiting the project.

In the meantime, the Mielophone.air installer remains available via Google Code and the Google search engine. Oh, and VKontakte is still up and doing its thing but they, of course, are easily able to retain lawyers and as such probably don’t respond to scary emails.

But this is the Internet, and it seems that the demise of this software hasn’t gone unnoticed. Already there is another group promising to bring out a new application to replace Mielophone although at this stage we were unable to get a comment from those behind it to find out more. We’ll persevere, investigate and report back in due course.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, as we pointed out in a follow-up article, Mulve-style functionality could be achieved in a number of different ways, but none of them really added anything to the original experience.

But now, Mielophone – a new app from a small team of Russian coders – takes the Mulve idea and pumps it full of performance enhancing substances.

“Basically there’s two of us. There was also guy who created a design for the app but he disappeared somewhere,” programmer Yamalight told TorrentFreak.

While Yamalight is a guitar-playing martial artist currently doing a PhD in Europe, his partner in the project, Recoilme, simply describes himself as a music lover.

“Our motivation to create Mielophone was pretty simple. After last.fm (and all other online radios like Spotify etc) became completely paid in Russia (‘cos they couldn’t get an agreement with local music labels etc.), there was no more sites to just listen to music or discover new stuff, or do any of cool things from last.fm,” Yamalight explained.

“So we decided to write our own app that combines all cool services into one thing.”

Once installed and run, the Mielephone interface is pretty self-explanatory. While one can search for individual tracks by clicking the ‘Tracks’ tab, music discovery can also take place using the ‘Albums’ tab. By clicking here and entering an artist or band name, a selection of album covers will appear as shown below (left). Clicking an album cover will automatically switch to the tracks view where all tracks in the chosen album will be displayed (shown below, right).

Selecting single tracks for listening in the integrated player (which also has a playlist editor) is as simple as left clicking them while download queuing is achieved with a right click. Queuing the entire album is achieved with the ‘Download all’ button in the bottom right of the track window. All chosen tracks will then be transferred to the ‘Downloads’ tab where queued but unwanted tracks can be deleted with a right click.

Downloading all queued tracks is done with a click of the floppy disc icon. Download folder location can be configured in Options/Settings.

Clicking the ‘Artist’ tab will bring up a bio of the artist in question (albeit currently in Russian) and selecting the adjacent ‘Video’ tab willl, unsurprisingly, give a collage of artist videos which can be either be viewed in the app or a web browser.

But Mielophone isn’t done yet. Aside from the selectable music sources (listed in ‘Options’) and YouTube, three other online services are also utilized.

First off, MusicBrainz is used to get albums and tracklists and was chosen for its accuracy. Last.fm is used for a number of functions including obtaining artist info and covers, to generate radio by tag, to get the top 100 songs by artist (right click, track view, excellent for discovery), and to scrobble. Lyrics.com use is self-explanatory and again accessed with a right click in the track view.

Mielophone requires Adobe’s AIR to run and was chosen in order to service users of multiple operating systems and to ensure they get new versions of the software as soon as they become available.

“The first versions of Mielophone were actually written in like 3 or 4 different languages, but when lots of people started to ask us for a version for Mac and Linux we decided to switch to AIR which has all the stuff we need and works great under all OSs,” said Yamalight.

Development of Mielophone is still underway and users of more operating systems will be able to enjoy it soon – there is already iOS and Android versions on the way.

The Mielophone homepage can be found here, and the ‘install now’ button is the most user friendly option for those without AIR already installed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.