music everywhere
Seems like only a few years ago that I was completely amazed by the fact that I could carry around my entire music collection in the space that a deck of cards would occupy. It was a big deal for me, because it meant I could finally ditch the gigantic binder of CDs I'd been lugging around in my car for years, which still only represented a small portion of my catalog.
But why lug around a hard drive any more? My pocket real estate is valuable. Fuck iPods I say!
Enter, The iPhone. SimplifyMedia lets me stream my entire music collection from home. And applications like Last.FM and Tuner are better for music discovery than terestrial radio ever was.
But there are at least two problems with this setup that need to be addressed:
1) Headphones.
2) Buttons.
I mean seriously, how difficult could it be to embed a tiny 3g chip in my head linked to some eardrum audio transmitters? For the controls, I propose an optical component, attached directly to my retina, which creates a semi-transparent overlay. But none of that Minority Report shit. I don't want to have to actually lift my arm to navigate controls only I can see. I want eye-twitch, better yet nerve impulse, control. Steve, there's your next i-whatever. Get on it.
4 comments:
I'm not being sarcastic, I really am trying to understand. Does Simplify Media effectively make the memory size of the iPhone irrelevant?
I've been on the sidelines of the iPhone world since I like my 80gb iPod just fine, and don't want to lug around an iPhone as well. I've been waiting until the memory was sufficient so I could carry around a significant volume of my music collection.
So, Simplify Media basically means it doesn't matter anymore since you just have to be able to access your home computer?
How quick is it? Does it take forever to go from track to track? What's the sound quality like? What if you lose your connection, does it store anything?
A_B
SimplifyMedia streams your iTunes music collection from your PC, so your computer will need to be on. It's identical to the Library Sharing feature in iTunes, but this enables it over the internet to any machine running a SimplifyMedia client, including the iPhone/iPod Touch, PC, Mac and Linux. Mostly I use it on my work machine and over 3g, and the longest wait between songs I've seen is about a second or three. I've tested it briefly on an Edge connection but there didn't seem to be a reduction in quality or any longer of a wait between songs.
You can also invite up to 30 other SimplifyMedia users to stream from your collection if you want. I haven't tried that part, but I believe you can even specify subsets of your collection.
So down to brass tacks: is it as good as having an iPod with your entire collection? If not, why not? Would you consider it a replacement?
I honestly don't know. I still have an older iPod photo which, for now at least, still holds all my music. So I haven't really put the service through the ringer with every day use for an extended period of time.
There are a lot of variables. If your home internet upload speed is crap, it's probably no good. If your server/computer crashes, you'll have no music until you start it up again. If the mobile internet coverage where you're at sucks, you could see more pauses in the music for caching, which is just annoying.
It's definitely an option, but it probably won't work for everyone (Detroit has much better 3g coverage than most places), and I haven't used it enough to know if it would even work for me all the time.
SimplifyMedia is free, so if you've already got an iPhone then there's nothing to lose. I wouldn't recommend buying an iPhone just for this app though (however you really should get an iPhone just because it's fucking awesome).
Post a Comment