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Posted by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on July 14th, 2007
There are those of us old enough to remember a time when music was sold mainly in album form, and your media choices were limited to vinyl or cassette. When you wanted your friends to hear something new you'd gotten, you either went over to your friend's house with albums in tow or held a phone up to your speakers. That was the original peer-to-peer music sharing.
In this age of new media and social networking, we download our music and often have friends who aren't close enough to bring albums to. You could tell them about something you think they'd like and they could listen to a sample on an online site like iTunes, but a few seconds of a song doesn't really do it justice. And sending them the files is illegal, so what do you do?
Enter Simplify Media, a peer-to-peer service that allows you to share your music library without breaking any laws, setting yourself up as an online service, or holding a phone up to your tinny laptop speakers. Simplify Media is a small (4 MB) download that works on both Windows XP and Mac OS X (Vista support is in process, as is support for Winamp and Windows Media Players). Once you've downloaded the app and registered your account, you simply invite up to 30 friends to “share” your music. I use that word only in the most liberal sense of the word, because there are limits that should keep the RIAA happy.
For starters, even though you are using iTunes as the player, you won't be able to even view, much less play, any of your friends' iTunes-purchased music. Only music you've ripped yourself will be available for any of your friends to stream. Secondly, you can't import or otherwise copy the music to your own drive. There is no way to copy the music, and in the interest of science, I had a friend with a stream ripper give it a go. They don't play nicely together, so if you do decide you like your friend's music, you'll have to use the handy links to buy the track the legal way. In addition, if you are a fan of the “Party Shuffle” or playlist feature, it won't include your friends' music in either mode. So forget adding to your collection even for a short time with a playlist that includes items from both collections.
The friends' collections will appear in the iTunes sidebar as a share alongside your own. The Simplify Media app just shows a small window that shows you which of your friends are online and sharing with you. You can stream up to two songs at a time, and I had two friends both using my stream at the same time with no noticeable issues with bandwidth (I'm on a shared WiFi connection with cable for broadband). One friend has a little over 1 GB RAM in her machine and had issues with RAM, but I had no issues other than an iTunes crash when I was streaming, correcting information on a track I'd ripped from CD and ripping another CD at the same time.
Aside from those minor issues, playing with Simplify Media gave me flashbacks to Friday nights as a teen, playing music for my friends, hearing what they had to share, and commenting on each other's taste in music. The only difference was that my friends were in two different states, the music was on my laptop, and the conversations were via IM.
I've argued that P2P music sharing is the best way to discover new music, and Simplify Media seems to have found the right balance of promoting legal purchases and sharing music with your friends. I know that I have a few new albums I'll be buying in the future after this try-out.
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| Apple Grrl | How Do You Find New Music In An RIAA Thug Age? | July 14th, 2007 at 9:07 am |
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[…] You can try programs like SimplifyMedia. My friend Cyndy and I tried this last night, and she wrote a review of it in her Web 2.0 series on Profy. She liked it better than I did. I give it points for catering to the voyeur in me - snooping around someone else’s iTunes and judging them for bonding with them over their taste in music is always fun. Plus you get to see the guilty pleasure songs they never allow to pop up on their iPod and tease them about it (she got to see my Johnny Cash hiding in my playlist, I got to see her show tunes). SimplifyMedia has a couple of major drawback though. First, you can not see the music you bought using iTunes. That is a huge blow against this software for me as I’m a big believer in fair use once I’ve paid for something. Second, while the program doesn’t take up much room on your hard drive, or use much bandwidth, using it really blows up your RAM consumption. I have 1.25 GB in my MacBook, and I found I had to close programs to keep the stream going - not cool. […] | |
| Get Groovin’ With Grooveshark - Profy.Com | March 25th, 2008 at 12:10 pm |
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[…] We've reviewed social music applications on Profy before (SimplifyMedia comes to mind). We've also given a thumbs down to other companies trying a similar business model, like Limewire, mainly because those companies were a means to steal music before they tried to go legit. Grooveshark has the advantage of paying royalties right from the start, without the stigma associated with other P2P sales models that used to be P2P music gateways used for stealing songs. […] | |
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| leslie | July 14th, 2007 at 9:15 am |
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I had a ton of fun trying this out with you last night. Dave didn’t explode from the strain of trying something new did he? Just checking… | |
| Cyndy Aleo-Carreira | July 14th, 2007 at 2:21 pm |
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Thanks for helping me with it! As for Dave, I haven’t seen him all day so he may have. | |
| Laurent | July 14th, 2007 at 5:10 pm |
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I have used a bunch of these services or programs, even a couple not mentioned here but I found that 1 or 2 particularly stood out from the rest… What I particularly found useful was Quickeo for sharing all kind of stuff, because it leverages the most common form of communication today which is Email… You’re presented with a nice email like interface, you add pictures, or images, or videos or other files to an album, and then you send to whomever you want [including yourself of course], the files in question via email. The email that arrives doesn’t require you to download anything or have anything special beyond a Web browser and support for Flash which lets face it every computer has these days.. even my mom’s computer qualifies… If you have pictures or videos, they autostart for you in a nice slideshow type format and you’re good to go… anyways, slick behind the scene synching, easy to deal with when you receive the email and pretty to look at when you receive it…. sounds like a winning combination and it’s FREE for 1 gb of storage space.. Anyways, that’s my 2 cents… You can download your copy where I did, which is: Sincerely, | |
| leslie | July 16th, 2007 at 9:41 am |
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By the way - the article I linked back here from generated a comment from Paul Joyce, co-founder of SimplifyMedia which I posted today on AppleGrrl. they are on the pulse of customers, and wanted to know why I wasn’t thrilled with the product - nice. | |
| crassbass | September 7th, 2007 at 12:38 am |
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This is cool. Im gonna check it out! I’ve used a bunch of these services too (tho not quickeo), and I’ve ended up always going back to mediamaster. It’s similar to simplifymedia, except you upload your music to the website, and then to share with friends you can make radio streams. But I’ll definitely give simplify media a run too! Thanks as always! | |
| Joseph | September 7th, 2007 at 3:00 pm |
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how do i get songs off my friends shared music? | |
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