Oboe’s Web Music Locker

This sounds cool. When does the Google version come out?

Seriously.

I work for a company called Streamload, we are releasing a product, called Streamload MediaMax, next month that does most of what Oboe does and a whole lot more. It’s currently in beta, but the end product will have a fully functional online music locker much like Oboe as one component of the total service.

As a fully integrated Online Media Center, it also includes a Movie and TV locker for permanent archiving of all your Media Center recordings and Tivo-To-Go files, and full-quality photo sharing and video sharing applications built in. Video sharing and on-demand streaming will work for up to HD-quality videos. Best of all, there will be built in transcoding (server-side) so you can get that High-def AVI into PSP/iPod format/resolution by clicking a button.

Once again, it’s in beta but should be ready for full public use sometime in mid-January. We offer a free account that gives users 10 GB of online storage and a $9.95/mo. option that will give users 250 GB of online storage and access to all five online services included in the suite.

If you would like to test out the beta, you can sign up at http://www.streamload.com/mediamax. The site is located at http://www.mediamax.com.

I’m happy for Oboe and I think its integration within the iTunes interface is great for consumers who just want to back up their collections. Speaking solely as a consumer, I like all my stuff in one central place where I can securely manage, remotely access and send the files where and when I want them. I’m happy there are emerging solutions to these issues.

Mike,

Your service sounds awesome. I was wondering if I could upload photos and other files to Oboe just to have a backed-up copy somewhere (I’ll try it out). I like that your service will be handling all media.

I would pay $10/month for 250 GB…although Oboe may be setting a lower price barrier by offering unlimited storage for $40/year. How will you address that? Can you run the business on a lower price?

My computer is still chugging away and uploading files to Oboe. It will be interesting to see how it works once the files are there, in a few days.

The webload feature seems to actually copy the file from a remote server to your locker (aka mp3 tunes server). I can upload any music file (paid or pirated) to their servers. If I give a friend my user/pw, they can listen to all my music.

I think Michael Robertson is going to have similar legal issues to the original mp3.com lawsuit.

Thoughts?

Mike,

I’m testing out your service. Nice multi-file uploading tool. What happens if I drag a multi gig folder into it and later turn off my computer before it is complete? Oboe seems to deal with this nicely with their syncing tool.

Mitch,

I think the biggest potential problem will be when people “loan” out their credentials to others and they can download the files, not just stream them. The RIAA is going to go nuts.

Michael:

I downloaded Oboe and tried it out, but had a number of problems, including unexplained hangs, installer quitting, etc. Then when I started it synching it just sat there and the progress bar never moved. Of course, that could just be me

Michael –

In a couple weeks we are releasing a free client-side application that works as an upload manager for Streamload MediaMax. It will address disconnection issues by resuming uploads if the internet connection should break as well as allowing users to pause and resume when they want.

Additionally, it will help people get over their up-stream bandwidth constraints by allowing for background uploading. I can launch the application, select my entire hard drive (or whatever files I want to get up to my online media center) and let the upload processing happen in the background while I do whatever else I need to do with my computer.

Unfortunately, the first release of the client will be windows-only, but we would like to be able to support Mac and Linux sometime in the near future. And a subsequent version is in the works that includes a full-featured download manager as well. Since the rest of the application is totally web-based, Mac and Linux users are already able to access all the other key features of the service.

Sorry, I forgot to address your other question regarding price competitiveness. We believe that our service will be compelling enough to our customers to warrant paying for it. We believe we will find a great deal of people willing to pay to relieve their pains of increasing digital chaos and remove the current technology limits that bind our media to our hard drive.

Our goal is to continue to offer, via partnerships and additional features, more and more tools to make a one-stop-shop for digital media management a reality. Some people will not pay for a service like ours and that’s fine. That’s why we offer those people are free to use our more limited free service.

As for Oboe, $40 a year is a good price if all I care about is music. But we believe we bring a great deal more to the table for those people who care about videos and photos and that people will pay a slightly higher premium for a service that manages everything for you. Look at Apple’s .mac service. They have half a million subscribers. They have a relatively poor set of features, they only offer 2 GB of online storage, and they charge $99 a year. Then again, they’re Apple…

you know why oboe is cheaper? they are selling tunes that go straight to your “locker”

Mike,

As a potential customer I would be more willing to pay for bandwidth costs than storage costs. Correct me if I’m wrong but a person who downloads 10gb a month of a free account will cost more than someone dl’ing 1 gb a month and who stores 250gb. Since this is my perception of where the costs lie in such a business I would suggest making it clear why its better your way to your customers…. I don’t imagine I am alone in this perception.

Also, positioning this service in bandwidth tiers aligns you with both ISP costs and Cellular costs which people grok. Space, in my opinion has become something people assume will be infinite, thanks to Google and Gmail.

-Ian

Mike, I agree with Ian…and I am really looking forward to reviewing your product. Please let me know when the uploader is available.

mp3tunes makes it really annoying and innefficient for pirating, so i woulnd’t worry about that angle.

syncing is COMPLETE, there is no partial sync. so you’ll have to download all 20 gigs or so. also, no more than 2 simultaneous logins are permitted, so you can’t even have lots of people stream from the site.

this makes it pretty clear that it’s just a locker, just a backup solution for the subscriber.

i hope they win the legal crap, because i’d like to be able to feel secure about my music collection.

#13 - Ok, well, that certainly does make it less useful as a way to pirate the music. I did not find this info on the website. Do you have a pointer?

But why can’t I subscribe for mp3tunes? I click on the Upgrade link and check on the agreement, then it tell me to update the billing info and I did. Then what? no way to go - no purchase button, only the “Update billing info button” and … “Cancel”?

What a service that make the payment process so trouble for user?

I subscribed for the free account so far, but i don’t get it: With the firefox extension i should be able to get music from eg. GarageBand easily into Locker - but how? I don’t find any link anywhere…

I thought the locker interface looked familiar. I was anxious to try out the free version. I could’t get it to work. Maybe one can get it to work, I couldn’t. This feels like a service in early alpha. Shame on on them!

Ian/Michael –

You’re both very correct about bandwidth vs. storage. In all plans we will offer there are bandwidth limits as well (only on downloads). We do not count uploads to ones account against their bandwidth usage total.

The issue when trying to briefly describe the service is that the mainstream public doesn’t really understand ‘bandwidth,’ but they do understand storage (i.e. “250 GB is bigger than my hard drive.”) However, we are very upfront on the bandwidth constraints (unlike some other companies that just disable your account when you’ve hit your limit.) In our pricing guide, we call bandwidth “Total Downloads Per Month.” You can see that here:

http://mediamax.streamload.com.....rison.aspx

Oboe sucks, but the interface in mp3tunes.com is nice.

Here is a little hack: Log in, and open http://www.mp3tunes.com/locker....._playlist/
Then you get all yours songs in a xml file.

Mike,

Thanks for the pricing breakdown. While the premium account is a bit expensive for my tastes, it seems in line with similar products. I suggest a free month premium trial (e.g. Flickr), or 3 months at 9.95/m with the option to pay for the rest of the year at that price at the end or continue at 14.95/m from then on. I hope this all works smoothly and that I can try it soon.

-Ian

I run a webservice called Streampad (http://www.streampad.com) which takes a different approach. Instead of uploading your music to a server, you use your home pc as a server. It is a free service (you are using your own bandwidth) and you don’t have to worry about uploading for 3 days.

There are some possible disadvantages though, such as having to leave your pc on all the time, and having at least 128k upload speed.

It would be possible to stream from Oboe or Medimax though (if they were open which Oboe seems to be with that xml file)!

I tried Oboe and had the same experience as many others here. It uploaded all night, and in the morning said it only uploaded 14 songs. They were not even there. The sideloader worked though, so I was able to test it with 2 songs.

Hi everyone!

Sharmaine from MP3tunes.com here. I’d like to address some issues that have been raised on this blog.

First:
Matthew, can you email us at oboetech@mp3tunes.com and let us know what the issues you came across were with the installer etc.. We’d love to help you regarding this. Just FYI if you were using the free account syncing is not available.

Re: Syncing

Currently when you sync down you must do an entire sync of your locker. This is something that will have more options as we add new features to the client.

Re: Upgrading

Definitely something we need to and will look into immediately. Please email us about this if you have not already!

Re: Free Version

Sideloading with the Firefox Plugin is available on various sites. Try out http://www.pastemusic.com for a look at how this works. Garagebands free mp3s can be webloaded by copying the target link location and pasting that into the URL form on our site.

Re: Free Version not working

Please let us know what isn’t functioning correctly with the free version and we will look into it!

We’re working hard to get all of the kinks with the initial release worked out and hope to dazzle you all with the service. Please let us know if you need help by writing to oboetech@mp3tunes.com. We’re want to make your experience the most enjoyable that it can be!

Agreeing with Michael that online mass storage was a key service that I was waiting for - my 300gb drive is full to the brim - I went ahead and signed up for a paid account with Oboe once I had seen it posted here. That was nearly a week ago and I have still not been able to sync any files with my locker! The software just does not seem to work for me, and Oboe appear to agree that their program does not work in emails I have received. Now I guess they can fall back on the fact that it is a stated Beta service, but I reckon that once you role out a new service that you are getting people to pay up front for, you ought to be pretty damn sure your software works.

I am hoping that I can get Oboe to work, but they are rapidly losing me to Mike’s Streamload, which looks a lot more useful although a little expensive.

I was excited when I read about mp3tunes in the paper last week. I signed up for the premium acct today, and have been having similar issues with Oboe as others. To upload 4 single albums it said it was going to take 7+ hours. Considering I have ~200g of mp3s, this could take weeks!

I’m excited to see solution emerging in this space! I’m a DJ and I have *lots* of hours and money invested in my digital music collection. I’d rather pay someone $40/year to back it up than invest in a RAID array.

Having said that, I agree that mp3tunes is more like alpha than beta right now.

As for “Streamload MediaMax”, Mike, I’ve got ask: is your company in any way related to the “MediaMax” that’s involved in the current Sony DRM malware controversy? If so, I hope you’ll understand that I’m going to need a real good reason to trust you. If not, consider rebranding…

It’s been over 11 months since that last comment, and MP3Tunes price has dropped a bit. It’s still SO slow and I’ve basically given up until I can find something more efficient. It really wasn’t clear how I was supposed to get my music online, and what I could do with it - the site needs simpler instructions, for simpler people (such as myself?) Also, I have Oboe and Oboe Sync 2.0 (beta). I’m not really sure what Oboe does

I tried streampad on my Dell at work, which has a much better interface, many more options, and seems much easier to use. However, I tried to upload for a while though MediaMax (which is not mac compatible as of yet), and was told that it couldn’t read any media.

This field has a lot of potential, but I don’t expect to see anything that lives up to its hype for a while.

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