Way back in 2003, there was a brief window (between iTunes 4.0 and 4.0.1) where iTunes music could be streamed willy-nilly over the Internet; as long as you had the IP address of the source machine, you could play tracks from all across the globe with no difficulty, rather than being limited to the other iTunes users on your local network. That bucolic interlude (also known to Apple's legal team as "the great unpleasantness") was shortlived, and subsequent attempts to broaden the local-subnet limitation on iTunes sharing have been equally transient or otherwise undesirable (Windows only, costly, over-social or too tricky for casual use). [For clarity, what iTunes calls 'sharing' is technically streaming; the remote tracks are only accessible while the source machine is online, and you cannot copy shared music to your local library, at least not easily/legally.]
Now, Simplify Media has released a free beta of its namesake music buddy tool, designed to expand the Shared list in iTunes to include up to 30 of your friends' music libraries, regardless of physical proximity. Using the SM app is as simple as advertised: download for Mac or XP, sign up to create your sharing name, and invite friends to become your buddies. After the SM app scans your music folder (took a while for me), just leave it running; your buddies' music libraries show up in your iTunes shared list, and yours shows up in theirs. Playback and browsing was quick and stutter-free on my DSL connection, and likewise for the remote users browsing my library.
There are a few caveats with this beta: other music player apps are unsupported, as is iTunes on Windows Vista;
Thanks, Paul.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
7-12-2007 @ 10:27AM
autoy said...
No thanks, I don't support adware. So nineties... yuk.
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7-12-2007 @ 10:28AM
YodaMac said...
Sounds like I could use this software to share and listen to my home iTunes library when I'm at work. Correct? If so, awesome!
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7-12-2007 @ 10:31AM
Michael Rose said...
#3: Yep, you can use SM to listen to home music from work; you can log in up to 5x with the same screen name.
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7-12-2007 @ 11:02AM
Chris said...
Just use hamachi. No adware or popups
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7-12-2007 @ 11:10AM
Michael Rose said...
#5 -- Chris, Hamachi is great for one-to-one sharing (ie. home to office) although opening up a VPN tunnel is a lot of CPU to burn for this purpose. SM provides more ad-hoc sharing; I'm not going to get my friends to install Hamachi and give me direct access to their home/work machines for the purpose of playing music.
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7-12-2007 @ 11:22AM
jason said...
Or you can use dot-tunes which does a much better job
http://www.dottunes.net/
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7-12-2007 @ 11:22AM
Michael Rose said...
FYI, some other tools in this space:
http://www.avvenu.com/ -- Windows clients only, streams to phones as well similar to Sling
http://www.dottunes.net/ -- paid service, more sharing controls
iLike.com -- more a social network than pure music sharing
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7-12-2007 @ 11:59AM
Dan said...
Does not appear to work for me. Friends are showing offline, though they are in the same room and are clearly online.
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7-12-2007 @ 12:31PM
ichunes said...
Just installed it. Works great!!! Finally I dont have to use the web browser to listen to my tunes at work. Most excellent!
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7-12-2007 @ 1:23PM
John said...
Talking Heads, nice!
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7-12-2007 @ 1:27PM
Paul Joyce said...
Thanks for the great comments. Mike has done a better job explaining what we do than I could, so I don't want to get in the way. But, I did want to let you know that if you have any problems or suggestions please contact us at support at our company name. Alternately, you can email me directly at paul at our company name.
I also wanted to mention a known conflict. Simplify Media works with almost all types of residential and corporate networks, but if you are using certain VPN software, remote libraries will be unavailable while the VPN is connected. Everything is normal when the VPN is off. We realized this is inconvenient for folks who need to be on the office network while working from home or the road, and we are working on a solution.
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7-12-2007 @ 3:34PM
Sam W said...
Just tried it out, works as advertised, how ever only seems to play audio formats. I was not able to get it to play .mov or other video files.
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7-13-2007 @ 9:48AM
A_V said...
I use a combination of a program from Rogue Amoeba (NiceCast) and a remote-control software program I wrote myself (Vespasian). All I do is open NiceCast, tell it to broadcast using iTunes as the audio source. Then when I'm at work or wherever I just connect to my NiceCast stream just like it was a normal shoutcast station and then I just load up Vespasian in my web-browser to actually control iTunes. If anyone wants to check it out, you can download my remote control software from the following URL. Please note you have to enable PHP support in your OS X's web-server install.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vespasian/
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7-13-2007 @ 6:51PM
Paul Joyce said...
an update: popup removed from simplify media
We have posted a new build on our website that does not include the Buy Music popup. New users will not see this window, and current users can reinstall if they prefer. This is our first public beta release, so we are looking for this kind of feedback to make our product better.
The point of the Amazon links was to enable people to buy songs they discover. However, it was meant to be a convenience, not an annoyance. We hope to provide an option to do this in the future that is much less obtrusive and not a popup.
Paul Joyce, co-founder Simplify Media
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7-13-2007 @ 10:57PM
ryandbrimhall said...
Hey Paul,
I know some people don't care too much about application icons, but there is a large crowd in the mac community that does. You might want to get a designer to make a better icon then the one you have right now. The "S" does not do you're program justice.
Danny
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7-13-2007 @ 11:00PM
ryandbrimhall said...
Yeah, i know, I used the wrong spelling for your.
I saw that and was instantly dissapointed in myself.
Danny
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7-14-2007 @ 4:44AM
YankInOz said...
OK.... I have tried it for several days...
My findings:
Spotlight no longer works if I leave it running. Shut it off and Spotlight works fine.
I see double counts of my music in my playlists and main music file. So instead of 12,000 + songs, I have over 24,000 songs. Not funny. When I do an get info - it tells e teh double is my shared file in a new register in iTunes folder!!! REALLY not funny. It dupped the songs.
REALLY slows down my ADSL 2+ speed. Even if neither of us are palying shared music at the time.
Th eonly way to solve these attrocities is to repair permissions (or OnyX my sys) and reboot.
NOT WORTH IT - VEN THO IT IS FREE. YOU OWE ME MY TIME BACK!!!
Phuque!!!!
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7-14-2007 @ 3:10PM
Paul Joyce said...
@YankInOz: We are sorry you had problems with Simplify Media. We'll look into any Spotlight conflicts. Thanks!
Song duplicates are common, but it isn't us. The iTunes boards have had questions about this for years, the most common of which may be around the "Copy files to the iTunes Music folder when adding to library" preference. People may not notice this because iTunes only displays one copy in your local library. We show both because we display all files in the folders you choose to share.
Simplify Media does not duplicate, create, delete or edit any files in your music directories. We also make no changes to your local iTunes library or the database Apple uses to store your iTunes information. I hope this helps.
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7-16-2007 @ 1:40PM
paz said...
I just tried SimplfyMedia out...sharing my iTunes library at home with myself at work. It works - sort of. Once I start playing a song at work on my windows machine, Task Manager tells me that SimplifyMedia is consuming approximately 80-90% of my CPU (Dell Imspiron 1.7GHz Pentium M). This is unacceptable but I guess you get what you pay for...maybe next release?
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7-19-2007 @ 5:13PM
Universe Man said...
"The great unpleasantness"--ha, that's funny stuff!
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