One of the greatest things about the iPhone (or any smartphone) is that it has music listening capabilites so you can bring your tunes with you anywhere. Also, with tons of music apps in the iTunes App Store, you have even more ways to listen to, edit, mix, and organize your music.

There are many apps in the app store for listening to music, like the popular Pandora Radio that's great for music discovery, or Djay for iPhone that lets you mix and scratch with your music. But there are also some music apps that are in a league by themselves--the ones that are admittedly quirky, but still quite useful to music lovers.

This week's collection of apps are all unique music tools. The first lets you stream your music to game consoles; the second auto-matches rhythms for beat synced mixes; and the third offers a gesture-based interface for easy control of your music.

AirMusic ($3.99) is a unique music app that lets you stream music on your iPhone to popular gaming consoles. Some readers may already use Apple's Airplay feature that streams music to your Apple TV. But with AirMusic, you can stream music to your XBox 360, PS3, or a PC running Vista or Windows 7.

To get started, you'll need to be on a shared Wi-Fi network with the console or computer you're going to stream to. Then, you simply turn on Air Tunes via a slider within the app, then navigate to your music folder on your chosen device. In our tests, the app worked beautifully, but we experienced some skipping on the XBox 360. Fortunately there is a fix: If you turn off High-Quality streams in the settings, the music plays normally (with little difference in quality).

We should note that AirMusic has a couple of less-than-ideal features including the inability to play songs from iTunes that have Apple's former DRM attached. But all of the newer DRM-free iTunes songs will work. The app also requires that you re-launch every 10 minutes when listening to music in the background, but the developer points out that this requirement is imposed by Apple.

Overall, if you want an easy way to play your iPhone music over your entertainment system, AirMusic offers a painless way to do it.

MiniMash ($1.99) is a DJ app that automatically matches beats from songs in your iTunes library, but it doesn't always produce great results. Immediately upon launching MiniMash, you'll notice a unique artistic style to the interface. The hand-drawn looking controls and bright colors are easy on the eyes, but its difficult to know immediately what each control does. Fortunately, you can touch an info button that explains how to use each control and get your music up and running quickly.

The app has you start by "Preparing" your tracks--MiniMash runs an analysis algorithm to scan each track's beat information. From there you can add songs from your library to each turntable on the play screen. Both songs will play at the same beats-per-minute, which can be great if you picked songs with similar rhythm, but will sound choppy and strange if the original songs differ too greatly. Also, MiniMash will only let you use music you created as a playlist, so make sure to put together a list of similar rhythm songs beforehand in iTunes or on your iOS device before launching MiniMash. You have the ability to create loops for more advanced mixes and MiniMash offers tools for starting and stopping songs at specific points you control. The app also offers recording features so you can later play a mix made in MiniMash from iTunes.

Overall, MiniMash is a unique take on the DJ app genre allowing you to automatically match BPM between songs. With a little planning while making your playlist, you'll be able to create beat-matched mixes easily using a cool-looking interface.

CarTunes Music Player (99 cents) is the perfect app for the road or at the gym--it lets you use gestures as music controls so you don't need to look at the device to control your music.

Upon launch, CarTunes will go through a brief tutorial showing you the main gestures to play a song, quickly move from track to track, and many other options using a swipe-controlled interface. Simply touch to play, swipe left or right to switch tracks, or touch-and-hold in the middle to control a volume knob. To add songs and control the apps settings, swipe upwards to open the app's menu. From here you can create and edit a playlist using songs from your music library, change what info each track shows on screen, and switch the font to your liking. You also get a menu that shows you all of your available gestures, with some options that might make it easier for you to use (you can switch volume control to a single verticle swipe, for example, if that's easier than using the volume knob). You can assign other functions to more-complex gestures (a three-finger tap, for example) as well, making it easy to set the app up just the way you like it.

Overall, CarTunes Music Player is an excellent idea that makes it easy to control your music without looking at your iPhone--perfect for when you're on a roadtrip or excercising and don't have time to fiddle with controls.

The latest Firefox beta jumps to version 6 and lands with improvements made to security, tablet appearance, memory management, and Android fixes. Download for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, Firefox 6 beta comes with a laundry list of changes made to both desktop and mobile platforms.

Some of the changes were included in the developer's Aurora release of Firefox 6, such as the built-in verification tool for plug-ins like Adobe Flash, better memory management for the Panorama grouping feature, a Chrome-style Scratchpad for testing out JavaScript snippets, and a new window for fine-tuning Web site permissions.

Other changes are new. One minor tweak, called domain highlighting, will help you read the domain of the Web site you're on more easily. This is a small but important change that people can use to visually verify that they are at the correct URL--for online banking, for example--as opposed to a spoofed one that's likely to be malicious.

In the new Firefox for Android beta, version 6 debuts numerous changes that appear to function well with no crashing during light testing. Mozilla said in a blog post that these include faster start times; less memory usage; less pixelation on image scaling; form tweaks; IndexedDB support for storing offline data; and Touch Events for better Web page interaction. However, favicons still appeared to be pixelated, for the most part.

There's also a new animation that quickly shows you the hidden tab bar on the left and options menu on the right when you launch the browser for the first time. Again, it's a minor change that ought to nevertheless improve the browser's usability for first-timers. Mozilla said that the browser has received a new look for Android 2.3 Gingerbread, although it was difficult to discern just what had changed from the previous version.

Open-Xchange, a company making open-source software for e-mail and other collaboration tasks, released a tool today to help people migrate extract contact information their Facebook friends have shared.

"The cloud needs to be open--just as source code and data protocols needed to be open to create the Internet. With more and more data moving into and being created inside the cloud, this data needs to be owned by the creators, not the services," Open-Xchange Chief Executive Rafael Laguna said in a blog post explaining Open-Xchange's tool.

His perspective differs from Facebook's: the company has blocked a Chrome extension that would extract not just e-mail addresses, but birthdays, phone numbers, and more. It was designed to import that information directly into Gmail, from which it could easily be used to help reconstitute people's Facebook connections on the new Google+ social network.

Facebook doesn't want people exporting friends' contact information--though it's happy to import the same data from Google. Google argues for a more open policy, letting you export address-book information from Google+, but it's been on the other side of the fence too: it blocked export of e-mail addresses from an earlier social network attempt, Orkut.

The Open-Xchange's tool uses a demo account to use a feature called Social OX on the company's server software that matches contact information with e-mail you've sent already. It's available online right now, but the company is building it into the next version of the software that people can download and run themselves, too.

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"We use the APIs from the social and business networks to create address books for each of them. Then we enhance this data with the contacts we can harvest from your e-mail accounts made available to your Open-Xchange user," Laguna said. "This data from all your networks and address books and all contacts from your emails is then merged into your 'magic' address book...Import to your liking, in Apple iCal, Gmail/G+, Facebook, Outlook, whatever you like."

You also can try a method that, perversely, is sanctioned by Facebook: a Yahoo import tool.

You won't get phone numbers, birthdays, and other useful information, but the main thing you need for Google+ and Gmail is e-mail addresses.

To do that, open a fresh account at Yahoo. As soon as it's created, you'll get an option to import contacts from elsewhere, including Facebook. Choose that option, authorize the tool, and it'll import the contacts.

You'll then have to transfer them to Google by exporting a CSV (comma-separated values) spreadsheet. Gmail lets you import a CSV by clicking Contacts, then the More actions button, then the Import menu item. Of course you can use the CSV file elsewhere, too.

Originally posted at Deep Tech