Music
Stream all your music to wherever you are…
I really like my iPhone - it’s gloriously gadgety. But it is a little disappointing in terms of storage. I mean, 8 gigabytes is a lot of data, but my music library is 14 gigabytes, and then there are the movies I’ve bought. What to do?
I’ve heard of ways to stream music from your home computer to your iPhone, but only if it’s been jailbroken. Now, however, there’s a way to do it without having to go down the jailbreak route, an application in the app store called Simplify Media. Simplify Media streams music from your home computer to your iPhone over an EDGE, GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi connection (though I’d recommend trying to use Wi-Fi wherever possible).
But, more than that, if you install Simplify Media on multiple computers you can play music from either one wherever you are. So if you’re at work, you can listen to your home music library without having to bring the files with you. And if your friends install Simplify Media, they can hear your music and you can hear theirs (be sure to check the local laws before you try that one).
Here’s an overview of the idea:
But… does it work? Actually, yes. With Simplify Media running on my Mac-Mini at home, I can pick from my entire music library and listen to it while I’m out and about. I’ve tried it on Wi-Fi (best performance), 3G (good performance) and GPRS (OK performance). On GPRS the audio quality was even reduced to improve the buffering time. It sounded like I was listening to AM radio, but it still did the job. I have to admit that I probably won’t be using this day in, day out, but it is very handy for if I want a particular track I haven’t moved over to my iPhone. And I have to say I’m very impressed at how well it works.
Simplify Media for iPhone is free for the first 100,000 users, and will cost $3.99 after that. It is completely free for the desktop.
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Discussion
2 comments for “Stream all your music to wherever you are…”
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Chris, Simplify Media looks like a sweet deal. Do you have any sense of the effect that streaming media has on your data plan?
It does look good, doesn’t it Ian?
Judging from my listening today, it looks like it can be quite heavy on the data-use. I listened to 2 songs and it used up 3Mb. It’s not a huge amount, but if you’re paying per Mb or if you have a limited data plan it could eat through it pretty quickly.
Personally, I plan to use it most when I’m at wi-fi hotspots or on work’s wi-fi.
If you’re using the desktop version, though, you obviously won’t run into the same problems.