Simplify Media

I fully expected my first post to be about the iPhone or the Mac, instead I need to talk to you about a different piece of tech altogether.

Simplify Media has developed a free application that allows you to share your music in iTunes with other Simplify Media account holders. You can’t give anyone your music or steal the music via Simplify. What it does, is take iTune’s built-in local network sharing feature and one-ups it by taking your music over The Internet.

Simplify Media can be downloaded for free to either a Mac, Windows or Ubuntu running personal computer. And it works its voodoo on iTunes, Winamp, and Rhythmbox. People still use Winamp? But really, what makes Simplify stand out for me, is the ability to run it on the Apple iPhone.

You see, I don’t begin to pretend or assume that anyone out there wants to hear my music. And I will very rarely care to listen to your music library. Especially if I don’t know you. But with Simplify installed on my iPhone. I can listen to mostly any music in my home library without having to load a single song on my iPhone. I say mostly, because I have noticed that some of my songs don’t appear, but I do have access to probably 98% of my library. I haven’t had time to figure out what the issue is, but if I figure it out or get wind of a solution, I’ll be sure to share it with you.

It works just fine on my original iPhone, and I’m sure screams on the 3G iPhone. Of course it works better on WiFi, but perfectly respectable on Edge, if you don’t mind a slight buffering time. After buffering is done for the first song, Simplify must buffer the next song in the background, because it moves on to the next song without hesitation. If I hit skip too many times, I do see the buffering begin again.

This gives me a whole new reason to start making playlists again. I, like most of you, have my iPhone on me ALL THE TIME! So now, when ever I feel like listening to something obscure, different, or just something from the 80’s - I have ready access to my library.