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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.
However, I see mucho problemos in this sites future. In short, I'll summarize them all into 4 letters:
RIAA.
1. Create MP3 storage service
2. Wait, rubbing hands and cackling evilly, for everyone to upload their pirated music.
3. Show up at the door and demand to see the CDs the music came from...in fact, forget the CD, just sue.
4. ???
5. Profit!!
12:50 - press return.
Isn't this similar to the service that mp3.com provided and got into trouble over? If I recall correctly, because mp3.com provided the same service, Vivendi-Universal got to buy them out at a discount price.
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/
20 MB audio file limit per song
So I'm guessing that means I won't be able to take some extended Iron Butterfly tracks with me then?
If big boobed women work at Hooters do one legged women work at IHOP?
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.
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.
--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
Create a small portable device with either a hard drive or flash storage, a battery, and maybe a screen that displays the song title, album name, artist name, and album art. That way people could bring their playlists anywhere, even if they are behind facist firewalls or even (gasp) away from a computer.
Oh wait, I seem to have one right here. It's called "Photo iPod 60Gb". Come to think of it, I think my wife has one too - hers is called "iPod Mini 4Gb".
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I have a great service for my music collection. It works on multiple hardware and software platforms. I can even use it in my car, without being tied to a network connection -- or monthly fee. That's right, I have a CD-RW drive. It's great! With RW discs I can burn new playlists anytime I would like. Mind you, I can't use the service anywhere, but I certainly couldn't use the online service at work either. I think these CDs are really going to take off soon. Yep, they are super fantastic. [/sarcasm]
The idea is all fine and dandy, but I have serious issues with not being able to use my music or change playlist "offline". Even though we are in an always on society, sometimes its nice to be disconnected.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
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
How is this substantially better than Launchcast or Pandora?
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Nice to see the Oboe finally getting the respect it deserves!
1.) 60 Gigs of Music would take a good while to upload at 32k/sec.
2.) This assumes you always have internet connectivity.
3.) Just seems like a huge pain really, and for what gain?
4.) I can do the same thing right now if I wanted to with my broadband connection.
5.) This is more convienent than my iPod how? Cheaper in the short run maybe, but not more convienent.
Someone needs to explain the need for this. Maybe for a small segment of the population that has internet access and a computer attached to their hip 24/7 this would work. The review says he has problems carrying around an iPod, even an iPod nano, because he would forget it.
Come on people. I don't see how this can possible last, or take off and the capital investment involved on the company's side as far as storage and bandwith costs doesn't seem at all to be covered by $40/year?? How does the company make a profit off that? That seems a bit ridiculous to me. I'd be leery of uploading my entire collection of music to a third party. Especially one of questionable staying power. So I spend hours and hours uploading my entire collection and then what happens when it all goes down?
Just don't think this was well thought out.
You know there's just going to be some guy sitting at the big 9-screen display at the company HQ watching as the hard drives fill up with music, shifting his hands in that manical way saying: "MINE! THEY'RE ALL MINE! ALL THE MUSIC I COULD EVER WANT!!! MINE!!!"
He'll download all of it to his 500TB iPod Mega-edition and never listen to the same song twice in his life.
And they said zombies weren't real!
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.
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.
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.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.