Forum Overview :: No Stairway to Heaven
 
Simplify Media by Horrible Gelatinous Blob 02/05/2010, 1:15pm PST
I've been using Simplify Media for about a year now, I guess. It allows you to access your music and image files across the internet, so you can have access to your songs and playlists pretty much wherever you go. I've gone as far as to replicate my music library across multiple computers as well as set it up as a service on my home server, so that I always have access to it even if I turn off my main system or my torrent box. The social aspect of it allows you to invite up to 30 people to share your music, your image files, or both. It's an easy way to bypass burning CDs or sending .rars when you're exchanging music or making recommendations to a friend: just create a playlist and they can listen to it immediately, no hassle. There are Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu Linux versions, with no cross-platform incompatibilities at all.

There's even a iPhone/iPod touch version, although I've never gotten it to work properly. I'm pretty sure that's due to my library size and being on AT&T's 3G network as opposed to anything else, though.

Downsides: the program has to be open and running on the client and the host, which means that if your machine reboots while you're away and you don't have it set to start on startup, you're out of luck. Unlike Mojo, you can't actually download the files from computer to computer -- streaming only. Of course, Mojo is dead now and Simplify is alive, so take that for all it's worth. Large libraries take a little while to load, and like I said, don't seem to work well on the App Store version. There's also a persistent bug/network streaming issue where a song may suddenly stop playing and skip to the next track unpredictably. It's frustrating, but infrequent enough to remain more of an annoyance than anything. There's no Songbird compatibility, which is criminal since Songbird is open-source. Finally, the only way to scrobble your plays to last.fm is to use iTunes. Songs played via HTTP won't scrobble at all in Winamp unless you do some registry tweaking, and even then they won't scrobble reliably.

But if you want to listen to your entire music library and your friends' libraries as well, plus have easy access to your folder of animated .gifs and image macros on any computer that you can install a program to, it's the simplest and most robust option I've tried so far.
REPLY QUOTE
 
Simplify Media by Horrible Gelatinous Blob 02/05/2010, 1:15pm PST NEW
 
powered by pointy