Monday, July 30, 2007

MP3Tunes at Last

Last month I wrote about MP3Tunes' Oboe Locker. They recently started offering free unlimited online storage and bi-directional sync capabilities. After several weeks of starting/stopping the maiden upload process, I've finally got my stuff up there (Tip: Kick off the original sync while you are way out your door of an extended vacation). My collection netted out at just over 40GBs - at least of the DRMless MP3s that are useful to sync.

The upload process was unfortunately a bit more painful than I had hoped due to the relatively limited upstream bandwidth afforded my by my cable ISP - the rest of my online experiences suffered through the duration. I actually think the process of ripping all of my CDs several years ago was completed in less absolute time - although it was obviously much more labor intensive.

Now that I've got my music up there, I must say I like it. I have a handful of other remote-access products that I use or have tried in the past that will enable a similar use case. The problem is that I often find that either my machine has rebooted, is offline, or something has failed. And when the planets have aligned and it is all working, some of the web-based UIs I have used have felt unnecessarily heavy and slow for some reason. That is why I particularly like the MP3Tunes' Oboe Locker as integrated within Streampad. It's lightweight, responsive and easy to navigate. Also, with MP3tunes not only can I sync content from one machine to another, I can post MP3s directly to the locker (using the nice MP3Tunes sideloading browser plugins) and then have it sync back down to multiple machines (either Mac or PC). Another nice addition is that the sync utility will find/download/sync album art for all your content as well.

My only complaint at this point is that the syncs don't appear to run automatically on a schedule and/or delta detection. Other than that, now that my entire collection is easily and, more importantly, reliably accessible - I have found myself listening to more of my old stuff than I have in a long time.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too have been using the combination of MP3tunes and Streampad. However what I really want is to be able to not bother downloading music files to my local computer only just to upload them to somewhere else. Seems a bit daft. Why not cut out the middle man, me.

With Streampad I'd also like the ability to create auto-playlists using something like the MusicIP Mixer, as well as be able to scrobble my listening to Last.fm.

Otherwise good stuff

David Jennings said...

Junior,

Isn't that what the MP3Tunes sideload plug-in does?

If I see a song on an MP3 blog or promotional page, I quite often sideload it directly to my MP3Tunes locker, and it stays there - never touches my hard drive.

Like your film BTW.

David

jherskowitz said...

Yeah, that it how I use the MP3Tunes sideload plug-in for Firefox. Upload directly to the sky and then let my computers (one a Mac the other a PC) pull them down from there on their next sync.

Agree that an auto-playlist function (or even "import playlist") would be nice to have, although the "scrobble to Last.fm" feature does indeed exist in Streampad.

Anonymous said...

yep, just found the last.fm option, so thats good.

David - I guess I'm thinking about if you get most of your music from downloading from sites like itunes or emusic, or even dare I say p2p options.

cheers

Anonymous said...

"My only complaint at this point is that the syncs don't appear to run automatically on a schedule and/or delta detection. Other than that, now that my entire collection is easily and, more importantly, reliably accessible - I have found myself listening to more of my old stuff than I have in a long time."

Then you will be a very happy camper in the coming weeks ;)

Also note that the LockerSync 3 beta does have scheduling

- Alex (MP3tunes client developer)

Anonymous said...

Hey there... I know this is a super old post, but I've been trying to get streampad working with my mp3tunes locker for 2 weeks now with no joy. How do I get my tracks played via streampad on my blogger blog from mp3tunes? Please...? Sounds lame, I know, but I'm really stuck... and either very stupid, or very ignorant. Thanks!