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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.
anything new here? except for that I might have to spend some time customizing my playlist on my radio, but it sure is shorter than uploading
byw this Robertson (CEO/prez) is the same guy behind Linspire.
this mp3tunes.com is brought to you by the same people that were behind mp3.com
I don't know if I would be comfortable with the idea of having all my music hosted by someone else. Obviously with local security you can only do so much, but for people that thought apple suggesting songs via itunes as a breach of privacy, having some service house your whole music collection surely shoots up the red flag and makes this thing a tasty target for the RIAA. Who needs logs when you have the whole collection.
1.) 60 Gigs of Music would take a good while to upload at 32k/sec.
No arguments there, except that not everybody has 60 gigs of music, particularly legal music (I only have about 10 ripped from CDs I own, and that more than meets my needs).
2.) This assumes you always have internet connectivity.
It assumes you always have Internet connectivity when you want to listen to your music. I'm near a computer surprisingly often throughout the day, and I always have access to broadband at those computers.
3.) Just seems like a huge pain really, and for what gain?
There's several gains. It's one less thing to carry around in your pockets. While it's more expensive in the long run, the start-up costs of getting an account are cheap ($3.33 per month for all the disk space you need, versus at least $20 per month to pay off an iPod). The music is presumably backed up more carefully than a typical user's music would be, and immune from being dropped and other problematic situations. I won't deny that there's downsides - just fewer than you might think.
4.) I can do the same thing right now if I wanted to with my broadband connection.
Yes, but not everybody else can. For example, I have broadband, but my upload speed isn't high enough to stream high-quality music. Even if it anybody could do this, there's always a market for individuals and companies that specialize in a particular service that you could technically do yourself, but at a higher opportunity cost. That's basic economics.
5.) This is more convienent than my iPod how? Cheaper in the short run maybe, but not more convienent.
It depends on your activities. This would be incredibly useful for me, and if I didn't suspect the RIAA might sue me merely for being a member (even if all the music I upload is completely legal and I physically own the media it's ripped from) I might actually look into it a little more.
Since this is not customary historic use of music, it hasn't got a chance.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
From DVD Jon:s blog http://nanocrew.net/2005/10/21/moved-to-san-diego/
As you might have read, I've moved to San Diego. I've joined a great team at MP3tunes and will be applying my expertise to a project called Oboe. That's about all I can say at this point.
On my way to San Diego I stopped by San Francisco. I met up with some of the people at the EFF and Seth Schoen demonstrated the research they've been doing into printers that spy on you. Unfortunately I did not have much time in San Francisco, but I did get to visit the Exploratorium.
I will try to get back to everyone who has emailed me recently. If you haven't received a response by Monday, feel free to resend your email.
Interesting.
There was a big difference there. Mp3.com's system had made copies of the music already and when you loaded your cd it used those copies to add to your locker. Back then a lot of people were still on dialup or 128k connections at best.
Today people are mostly above 384k for uploads and us lucky few that have bigger pipes can really take advantage of this. Since I made the copy it falls under fair use. No different if I ripped them all down to iso's and kept them on a accessable server that I paid for.
All I'm doing is paying them for reliable space and transferr speed. In the end it's my music.
...
That's even worse! Whatever happened to Oboe, the instrument? And no, I was not being ironic, I seriously did not expect that. Idiots. PageRank wielding idiots. >:-(