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January 25, 2007

Make Your iTunes Library Mobile

Michael Arrington

43 comments »

Avvenu has a new product that allows you to listen to your iTunes music connection from any web browser on a Windows PC, Mac, or Windows Mobile 5 smartphone. MobileCrunch covered an early version of the product that only worked on Windows Mobile phones here.

The base computer storing the music must be a Windows PC. As long as that base PC is powered on and online, your entire iTunes music library will stream to the browser on the remote computer, and playlists will also be available. Avvenu also allows users to store up to 250 songs on their servers, allowing you to play those songs remotely without your base PC online (this is getting into a legal gray area).

Avvenue plays only unrestricted MP3, AAC and WMA files, no iTunes DRM’d songs will work. Users can also share some music with others - but only the 250 songs stored on the Avvenu servers. An email is sent to the recipient, which as a link to open a browser window with a Flash player that plays the song. Here’s an example that was sent to me by Go2Web2, which also wrote about Avvenu this evening.

The ability to listen to this on a phone is what really intrigues me. Hopefully Avvenu will come out with a version that works with Macs and the new iPhone as well.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 2:15 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Kevin Fischer

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:32 am

    This kind of stuff got many companies sued into oblivion.

    It should be legal but isn’t. I hope that this company is willing to fight for their right to exist.

  2. Michael Arrington

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:43 am

    Yes it did, although the facts were different. MP3.com wasn’t actually uploading songs, just trying to confirm you owned the CD and then giving you access to a server copy. If I remember correctly.

  3. Rajeev Vashisht

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:51 am

    I am a living example of Digital divide I have yet to power myself with an I-Pod, and a home server as soon as possible,
    Thanks for keeping updated.

    htttp://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

  4. JasonM

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:53 am

    This looks like a good reason to start looking at a new Windows Mobile device after the bad press Apples iPhone has received.

  5. JJ

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:55 am

    Michael, as the iPhone is also an iPod, what would be the purpose of such an app on your iPhone? Your iTunes library would already be on your iPhone…

  6. Fletch

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:58 am

    Apple surely won’t like this ;)

  7. Kevin Fischer

    January 25th, 2007 at 3:01 am

    The RIAA won’t like this. Apple won’t like this. Microsoft won’t like this.

    But it’s a great product to monetize, as long as you have access to one hell of a law firm.

  8. Barty

    January 25th, 2007 at 3:50 am

    The site runs very slowly, i have 2500 songs, and the site was useless, crashed at least twice, and failed to load any songs. I dont no if there servers are under heavy load or if the site works better in IE, but in Firefox, its currently useless. I cant comment on smartphones as i dont have one, but i think they should upgrade to a flash-based music player.

  9. Kula bácsi

    January 25th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Hmm, big deal. I’ve installed the shoutcast server, stream with Audion or Winamp and the Nokia Internet Radio app plays it on any S60 phone through wifi or 3G.

  10. dave dvorak

    January 25th, 2007 at 5:43 am

    I’m looking forward for when The Filter launch their mobile app - supposed to be in the next few weeks.

  11. CharlesV

    January 25th, 2007 at 5:53 am

    Yeah, I’m trying to figure out the advantage to this over shoutcast or orb and am finding none.

  12. CharlesV

    January 25th, 2007 at 5:53 am

    I meant over slimserver, not shoutcast. http://www.slimdevices.com

  13. Lazear

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:22 am

    It doesn’t interface with last.fm. Useless.

  14. Greg

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:44 am

    BTW, this is the correct link to access the playlist in the article:

    https://share.avvenu.com/service/216574/datashare/?k=A350e2cd272297dd4a3159b6a5648bbf2&n=10&md=9fc2c0152638da10128fe020fb958467

  15. joy

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:44 am

    I received an invite to listen to Bill Tai’s stream and I noticed that the flash player (at least on OS X) didn’t show the artist - just the song name. Also, I would think that being able to search for either artist or song title would be useful on the client.

    I’m on cable at home and the stream quality was fine.

  16. Chris

    January 25th, 2007 at 6:53 am

    I wonder will this work with Palm Treo phones. If Apple and others don’t like it, then they should have a provision like this with their own software. It is just absurd that they can initimidate everyone.

  17. In Technology

    January 25th, 2007 at 7:45 am

    This is what we need and a lot of people and companies are fighting for (more open access to iTunes and apple products)
    Apple has always kept iTunes hard to access with 3rd party apps and more and more these days things are changing to better access for all (roll on the iPhone).

  18. Adrian Keys

    January 25th, 2007 at 7:52 am

    Yes…can’t deny it! 3 Billion Cell Phones and 90% of population with access by 2010, definitely the way to go………

  19. Robert Dewey

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    From reading over the regulations set out by various music licensing agencies, it is legal to upload your own music to any medium you would like as long as others do not have access to it. If that medium acts as storage for you (and only you), then you’re safe. Don’t worry about uploading your collection to Amazon S3 (for example) - there’s nothing illegal about that unless you’re allowing others to listen to it.

    MP3.com had it all wrong - they were duplicating music (ripping millions of CD’s) onto a server and letting people listen to it (regardless of the fact that those people had to own the CD to gain access). When you purchase a CD, you are free to duplicate it as many times as you want *for personal use*. MP3.com didn’t qualify as personal use. Stupid, but true.

  20. Mik

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:22 am

    It would be a lot easier to just take your ipod with you.

  21. Ravi

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:24 am

    Umm…doesnt Orb.com do all this and more (except for the server-side storage, but how useful is that) ?

    Just trying to figure out why I should install this bloatware instead.

  22. Robert Dewey

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:25 am

    Mik;

    True… for those that have an iPod. For the other 1 billion people that have a cellular phone instead, I’d venture to say this is a better idea ;-)

    Screw it, bring on the iPhone!

  23. Rémi

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:27 am

    I use Orb (Mycast now…). I don’t understand why people would use Avvenu’s product rather than Orb seeing how limited it is? I gave it a try, but really… it’s limited to your itunes library… it’s only music, and you can only share 250 songs that are stored on the server? Doesn’t make much sense to me… but maybe there’s something I didn’t see. If anybody knows, let me know. I didn’t like the previous version of Orb, you couldn’t customize anything and the navigation was a pain (no ajax, reloading page all the time). Sharing was crap too. V2 version’s much, much better. I stream all my music (no need for itunes), videos, photos and tv. And I can share all that stuff with no limitation (cannot share tv actually afaik). And works on more than just win mobile smarphones. Recently they released a new feature with different types of sharing (public/blogs/private). I started to use the public sharing (which isa personal page on public.orb.com that anybody can access)and this is what I use most now. However you get private sharing if you want to. Didn’t try the blog stuff, don’t have use for it so I don’t know. There are some glitches sometimes and the UI is not perfect, but I see that they update the web site with fixes and new stuff quite often, so it’s getting better. Anyway I’d be glad to hear the experience / feedbackof those who’ve used both and can compare the feature set.

  24. PJ

    January 25th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    I concur with prior users…ORB.com is the way to go. However, this interface looks nice and I am willing to give it a try.

    PJ

  25. Andy Atkinson

    January 25th, 2007 at 9:56 am

    When I first read the article headline in my RSS reader, I thought the article might be about storing your library externally. An author at Pain in the Tech just wrote about using Amazon S3 to store his iTunes library and a Mac client that facilitates upload. Check it out if interested. Does this mobile phone service work with storage provided by an S3 server instance?

  26. carmen

    January 25th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

    for all people like to complain about apple being closed, iTunes sharing is HTTP-based , fairly open, and supported by a lot of non-iTunes players, especially open-source ones. theres even a free clone of apples iTunes-song-server which works well..

    with the mentions of storing files on Avanue’s servers, and the lack of support for DRM files nd only working on windows, leads me to believe theyre bypassing DAAP - theres no reason DAAP can’t work over the wider internet, the only real issue is share-discovery normally only works on the local subnets - easily fixed by advertising to a HTTP directory somewhere, and possibly involving some NAt-punching HTTP proxy if needed..

    in other words, i expect simpler solutions to pop up - giving people full acces to their library from their cellphone/walkman. i mean its alreayd possible today if you can setup my-daapd and rhythmbox, but i mean for normal people..

  27. Taylor C.

    January 25th, 2007 at 12:57 pm

    There is a site that has been doing this for a while its called MP3Tunes. I think its owned by the guy who started Linspire. I got a year of their service half off and i think it was worth it. THey let you back up unlimited files and stream them. I would assume that there would be legal trouble hasnt seemed to happen.

  28. Jonathan

    January 25th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

    That’s pretty cool. It sounds like it has nothing to to with iTune. It runs on Windows & Windows Mobile, does not play iTune DRMed songs. The title should just say “Make Your Music Library Mobile”.

  29. Erick

    January 25th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    I run Orb. It does everything but the file storage but I dont need that. The streaming live tv to my Q is amazing.

  30. Kenyon Potter

    January 25th, 2007 at 1:50 pm

    I agree with many of the above comments. Avvenu is great for some cell phone users. Orb is great for cell phone users who wish to unlock their music, photos and videos. Another alternative is ViiBlast.com which stores all a user’s media files in a personal media center on a web-accessible server. Check it out.

  31. CrunchBack

    January 25th, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    Very cool - all of the devices in 5 years will have this capability natively and Avvenu may have no market. Hope the RIAA guys don’t go after this too…

    Permissible use may not include broadcasting your collection to the masses… I’m pretty sure that royalties would need to be involved (e.g. you are a radio station ??).

  32. theipphoneguy

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

    Avvenu is simply extending browser-based access to remotely stored media using what we all know will be the preferred, portable device.

    Now how will they monetize it?

  33. bhatia

    January 25th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    I finally tried it, after this post and it works great. I mean we can stream my itunes collection on my (home) computer to my work laptop. Already sent five sets of music sharing to my friends. I like this service.

  34. Erin

    January 26th, 2007 at 9:33 am

    Fabrik is doing this too, http://www.myfabrik.com. It’s Internet-based, so not only can you store, organize (tag) and share your stuff, you can listen to your music from anywhere, and from almost any device. Check out the interface too. It’s sweet.

  35. Dave Zatz

    January 27th, 2007 at 6:29 am

    Orb does this and more, WITHOUT third party servers and a 250 song restriction.

  36. Rocker

    January 28th, 2007 at 1:48 pm

    What’s amazing is the sharing. I just sent a share of a playlist I created from Cd’s I go at christmas, to 3 friends across the country. Works like a charm.

  37. Kevin

    January 30th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    Barty:
    There is an explanation why you may have had a problem sharing your music. Once you click on “share”, your shared playlist is copied to Avvenu’s secure media servers. It is from the Avvenu media server that we stream the playlist to your friend. This ensures they can listen to the music even when your computer is off-line. The time it takes to upload the shared playlist to Avvenu’s media servers depend on the number of tracks and your upstream bandwidth. Your iTunes PC must be also online and connected to Avvenu until all the playlist has been uploaded. We plan to put a progress bar in the next update of this beta version.

    Also the Avvenu Music Player does not support DRM protected music – DRM protected music will not load.

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