Content
I learned about MP3Tunes.com via a Boing Boing post earlier today. MP3Tunes is a new service from Michael Robertson, the Web 1.0 entrepreneur who brought us mp3.com and Linspire. MP3Tunes’ idea is simple — for $40/yr they will provide enough hosted storage for all of your music. You can synchronize your collection across any number of machines or you can stream the audio directly over the web. Their servers index the ID3 metadata and provide a browser-based interface into your collection. They also provide plugins for software such as iTunes to make the remote storage more transparent.
This wouldn’t necessarily obviate the need for your own storage — you’d still want a backup. But it certainly would save you the trouble of carrying around firewire hard drives just to listen to your music at work. (Nevermind the fact that the labels — I’m looking at you, Sony — don’t want you to be able to exercise your own legal right to do so.)
At least superficially, MP3Tunes is appealing. I’ve certainly spent more than $40 this year getting my mp3s from place to place. If they are offering something that can make this even easier for me — and more — why not go for it?
I’m a little worried about the size of the collection, though. So I sent them a note an hour ago:
From: DeWitt To: MP3Tunes Hi — I am very intrigued by the idea, and would be more than willing to pay the $40/yr for the service. However, my collection is on the large side. I currently have just over 130GB of (all legal) mp3s. Is this viable? I imagine it would take several weeks to upload the files, and I don’t know if you are planning for collections of this size. Thank you, best regards, and good luck! -DeWitt
And less than 5 minutes later (!) they replied:
From: MP3Tunes To: DeWitt Hello Dewitt! You’re right about it taking quite some time to sync up all your music, but think, once you’ve done this you won’t have to do it again!! ;) The real answer though is yes, the Premium MP3tunes Locker space is unlimited. Best Regards, –MP3tunes
There you have it. And they answered in under 5 minutes on the day they launched? That’s impressive and inspires confidence.
My friend Colin hypothesized that they do MD5 checksumming locally so as to reduce the number of bytes that need to cross the wire. Then they would only store each unique copy once, no matter how many people “upload” it. This would work for people that, um, download music other people rip, but wouldn’t help me that much, as all of my MP3s are ripped from source (at 256 VBR).
Since you are only accessing files that you uploaded — and presumably ripped — yourself, it is all perfectly legal. And the MP3Tunes Music Locker should work with just about any format they can extract metadata from. It will even work with existing DRM formats, so the labels will be hard pressed to come up with a reason to try and stop MP3Tunes. It’s your music, accessed the way you want it.
So it may be worth a shot. If it doesn’t work perfectly, then well, it’s only $40. If it does work, then great! I’ll have access to my music anywhere, and won’t have to do anything more than keep a backup or two safe.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:00 am
The only risk I worry about, though, is that people who do put stolen music up there become even easier to track down if the RIAA ever decides to subpeona MP3Tunes to prove people have illegal files without needing to look at their hard drives.
This could become additionally intriguing, though, if they do something like create a desktop app which recognizes a CD in the drive and automatically grants you the related mp3s, assuming they have them on their server. Network costs drop, and so does the time-wasting activity of ripping to mp3.