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Oboe Offers Portable Playlist
Chiggers writes to tell us that Mad Penguin has an interesting look at Oboe, the new music service from MP3Tunes. For a monthly fee Oboe allows you unlimited space to create a cross-platform music playlist available anywhere you have an internet connection via their AJAX-enabled GUI. The audio player still needs a little work but overall it is an interesting idea.
ampache can do this:
http://www.ampache.org/
kplaylist is a bit more lightweight (i use it):
http://kplaylist.net/
jinzora is a bloat beast, but a nice one at that:
http://www.jinzora.org/
If you're into music playlists webs you really have to check Pandora, a great page that creates playlists based on genetic algorithms that relate an entire collection of songs to the one you describe as your favourite.
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does anyone here remember muse.net, the failed startup venture started by a bunch of the original winamp guys? it seems like this is a more expensive, less open version of that....
I still wish it took off. would have been a very convenient service...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The difference being that the previous services was you put in a number code from your physical CD and you get access to music THEY encoded and uploaded. This one YOU are uploading your music to their service
The problem before, as argued in court, is that they did not have permission from the rightsholders to rip and distribute the music. This time, they've taken themselves out of the equation. They're simply a storage facility with tools for playing the music. If YOU upload something you don't own, that's your fault. With the previous system, you just needed to have the number from the CD, whether you'd bought it or not, and you could trick the system into thinking you owned it.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
Well except without all the Ajax goodness - but myplay was fun while it lasted. They wanted to get in on the whole internet music scene but like everyone else they couldn't get licenses from the music business, so they let users store their music online and make it accessible wherever they went. The money ran out before the music industry started doing deals.
I'm not sure the RIAA is going to be such a big problem.
http://www.radioblogclub.com/ for example offers alot of pop music for free: all you need is a browser with flash. There are advertisements, granted, but otherwise, there doesn't seem to be any catch.
I'm not sure how they make money, and how they keep the *AA's happy, but they're doing it. So I don't think Oboe will have too much problems.
What makes Oboe unique is that you can store all of your music online and then access it from anywhere or sync it to multiple devices. There are 3 primary uses which make Oboe useful:
1) Backup all your music. You've probably spent a lot of time digitizing your music collection and making playlists. Or maybe you've bought lots of music from iTunes store. You can very economically and easily back that up with a single mouse click using the Oboe Sync software for Mac/Win/Lin. I'm surprised to hear slashdot readers say "I wouldn't trust my music to online storage." Very funny! That's what people said about the first banks too. In actuality, your music is much safer in data centers around the world then in your house where it can get stolen, broken, etc. $39.95 for unlimited storage is a new model for music fans that makes a lot of sense.
2) Keep your music in sync on multiple devices. If you listen to music on more than one computer, you can use Oboe Sync to keep the music on all your computers in sync. You'll have all your music and playlists on all your PCs with one click on Oboe Sync. If you add a CD to one computer it will ripple through your listening world. Today we offer sync clients for Mac/Win/Lin devices. Tomorrow we'll have sync clients for all devices. It's clear to me that people will have 20 devices they listen to music on in the future (car radio, sunglasses, phone, internet alarm clock, bike helmet, wifi-mp3 player, PDA, etc). You'll want a service to keep track of all your music and get it to all those devices. That's exactly where Oboe will shine.
I fully expect people to not understand this now because they'll say "I'll just carry my ipod around everywhere." I believe all your data will live online and you won't have to carry it everywhere. You also won't have to plug it into a PC to get music on it. It will just get the music directly from the net. You'll see new devices start to get this functionality shortly. And if you want to see a list of current locker sizes check out http://www.lockerenvy.com/ Here you'll find the biggest lockers and Sideload users.
3) Listen from any web device. Oboe has a nifty web interface so you can go to any computer in the world and play your music and playlists via streaming.
The concept is similar to my.mp3, but the music loading is very different. All music loaded into personal Oboe lockers are at the request of the user and not from a master database at MP3tunes. There's also a free account you can sign up for. You can't sync your music, but you can Sideload tracks and use web interface.
-- MR
CEO of MP3tunes.com
Services like these have been around for a long time. In fact, so long that I was dissatisfied with the few existing services and decided to try my own hand at something similar for my senior seminar project.
I'm quite sure that this service is more complicated and sophisticated and things, but I needed a simple solution for listening to music from my home PC while I was commuting to school with my laptop. I looked at existing solutions but they seemed to either be too sophisticated, not work, or cost more than I was willing to pay for such a service.
I always thought it was a tad bit redundant to host another whole collection of MP3s when all I really wanted was to listen to my own music while away from the computer. I didn't need a lot of bandwidth to pull this off, because it was only me listening.
My solution was a program I wrote that is basically a HTTP server modified to send playlist files containing the URLs of music, and will also zip up files if you have to get a whole album during a visit somewhere.
I know that most broadband has not enough upload speed for a real server, but if you are just serving yourself your own files and you don't mind leaving your computer on, why not just do it that way? I noticed that the 30k/sec I get in upload speed is more than enough to stream most MP3 files without a hitch. You definitely don't need a dedicated service to accomplish these goals.
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