All Your Media R Belong To Us
March 16th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve been fooling around with a tool called Simplify Media, which is supposed to allow me to stream my music no matter where I am through iTunes or Winamp.
Then I realized that I don’t actually listen to music, and I could care less what my friends are listening to. It’s the same Modest Mouse crap that was no good ten years ago. I have less patience for it now.
However, I am trying to find an interesting solution for making all my media mobile — other than wearing the very cool USB Flash Drive around my neck and toting the 750 gig removable storage memory that I have.
Here’s a company trying to do at least a little bit of that.
Ubucket — which has an AIR download already — allows you to link and search for music, photos and other media. I’m not sure why they always use music at the topper, but there is more than just music. You can upload photos and such so that you can create a “virtualized” server for your media.
You can also browse through your friends list. I’m not sure how that is going to be legal. You can listen to someone else’s music. You can even add their music to your bucket. What?
Clearly I need to do some investigation with this, but i like the concept: a one-stop shop for all your cool media.
6 Responses to “All Your Media R Belong To Us”
By AndersenPeters on Mar 16, 2008 | Reply
While fancy media serving apps are good for some people I’ve personally always found a simple HTTP/FTP server combo with all my music on it to be an effective solution, it works from nearly everywhere on essentially all platforms and is simple to set up and maintain. If you need a fancy interface you can use something like Zina ( http://www.pancake.org/zina ).
By paul_simplifymedia on Mar 16, 2008 | Reply
brad, thanks for the mention and the laugh. modest mouse is one of those artists everyone seems to have in their collections. oddly, abba is too.
By Brad on Mar 16, 2008 | Reply
@Andersen: yes, buddy, but we live in a world of nerd. That’s not a solution for everyone. PS. I love nerds.
@Paul: Anything Xeni recommends, I believe has value. I just don’t quite get it yet. I am open to learning more about what you all want to do. I’ve been wrong FAR more than I’ve been right. I’m okay with that. Can we talk?
By paul_simplifymedia on Mar 16, 2008 | Reply
@Brad, I dropped you an email. The short answer: our vision is similar to yours. We’ve started with music and we will branch out to other media from there.
By Brad on Mar 16, 2008 | Reply
@Paul: your answer wasn’t PR’ish at all. In fact, I would invite you to post it here.
This is a site to learn (I hope), and I thought you acquitted yourself well. :)
By paul_simplifymedia on Mar 17, 2008 | Reply
brad had asked for a short explanation of how people use simplify media. I failed on the short part, but I am happy to add it here. We’re trying hard to improve the software and we appreciate suggestions and criticism.
The use case that seems to work for most people is listening to their own music when away from home. At the office is the natural place, but our iPhone and iPod Touch versions (jailbreak currently required) open up more possibilities.
The second use case is the one mentioned: exploring friends’ music. If you have a music geek friend whose taste you trust, this can be awesome. For me, the fun has been in listening to older tunes I’ve forgotten about and in discovering more about genres (like real funk) that I never paid much attention to.
In both cases, a strength of the Simplify Media approach is that it is relatively painless to set up (no port-forwarding, no worries about firewalls, etc), cross-platform and integrated with desktop players. The downside is that you have to install software on both sides, but the upside is that it is fast to browse, search, etc in a single library or across a set of libraries because you have a rich UI. We’ve heard from a lot of folks with 10s of GBs or (no joke) 100s of GBs of music.