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AudiogalaxyToday I’d like to highlight a software I found out about yesterday called Audiogalaxy.
If you’re about my age you surely remember the peer-to-peer audio file sharing application by the same name that took over Napster’s market share in 2001. Well this software is actually made by the same people only that they’ve shifted their focus from file sharing to a “placeshifting service” as they call it. Audiogalaxy lets you install a small client software on your computer that scans all your music and makes it available to you on the audiogalaxy.com website, Android phones & iPhone. And it’s completely free!

There have already been a number of attempts to offer this kind of service, the one I used quite a bit was Simplify Media which unfortunately was shut down. What makes Audiogalaxy truly stand out for me is it’s easy of installation, performance and iOS integration. I’ll outline the steps necessary to get the whole system up and running on a Mac and an iPhone.

  • First go to audiogalaxy.com and click on Sign Up. The easiest way is to use Facebook connect so we’ll choose that option.
  • Next you’ll be offered to download the client application for your computer which already has your login data included, so just drop it into your Mac’s application folder, start it and you’re good to go.
  • The website patiently waits to detect the client application on your computer which then starts scanning your default Music location.
  • It can take quite a while to index a big library, so hop over to your iPhone in the meantime and download the Audiogalaxy App from the App Store.
  • Start the Audiogalaxy App on your iPhone, log in with Facebook and you’ll be instantly connected to the music on your computer including all the Playlists you’ve set up in iTunes.

From now on you’ll be able to play all your computer’s music via the website or your mobile device (an Android client is available as well). What makes this service really special is the level of integration they’ve been able to accomplish with iOS. It can really replace you iPod App on the iPhone by offering background music playing, access to play/pause/skip/volume controls via all the available shortcuts and the headset buttons. One last thing I was doubtful about was how it will perform while being on the move, so I tested it out on my morning commute today and let me say I was extremely pleased.
I started music playback before leaving my appartement, so I was still connected to my home WiFi. When I reached the street my iPhone lost contact to the WiFi and switched to 3G, this only triggered a ~2 second gap in playback, after which the music just played on from where it lost contact. Performance on 3G is absolutely brilliant and I could keep on listening during the whole train ride. What was astonishing was that there is a tunnel on my way to work where I know that there is no cellular access at all (phone calls always drop while going through that tunnel), the Audiogalaxy app apparently had enough of the music buffered, so playback continued without interruption. When I got close to my office I once again experienced a little gap in the playback, that was when my phone picked up the company WiFi.

Let me finish of by stating a few things I’d love to see improved/added to the iPhone client:

  • Submission of played tracks to Last.fm
  • Updating of the playcount in iTunes’ library
  • Gapless playback between tracks of an album. If the software manages to play through short signal losses, why not pre buffer the next track as well to offer continuous playback?

Software download Links:

 

Android market QR code for Audiogalaxy

 

Available on the App Store


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iScrobbler is an awesome little menubar item that submits all the music you play, to the music community site last.fm. It just sends track name, artist & album, no filename or file type. So it can’t determine if you played from an original CD or a file on your computer (just in case you worried 😉 ).

To start your last.fm experience you first have to get an account there. Easy as that!

Next you need the iScrobbler application, you can choose from two different versions:

The Beta version works fine for me (Mac OS X 10.4.8. & iTunes 7.0.2) so you might as well try it and take advantage of the added features.

Setting up the iScrobbler application isn’t much of a big deal and I trust you to find out how to do that yourself 😉
The tricky part was finding out how to get iScrobbler to also “scrobble” the tracks I played on my iPod. I say “finding out” was hard, because the instructions delivered with the program aren’t that clear, but once you figure it out it’s actually quite simple. I’ll try to sum up in a few steps how I think is the easiest way to accomplish that.

  1. Make sure you’ve got an intelligent playlist in iTunes that keeps track of recently played music. In the standard set-up this is called “Recently Played”. I made myself one that lists all of the tracks that where played in the last 2 weeks and named it “scrobble”.
    This list doesn’t necessarily have to be existent on your iPod as well.
  2. Set your iPod to sync automatically and disable disk use.
    In my case this means that a few selected playlists get automatically synced to my 4GB iPod nano and I didn’t need disk use anyway so it was ok for me to disable that.
  3. Klick on “Preferences…” in the iScrobbler menu in your menubar and check “Enable iPod Submissions” and select your prepared playlist in the dropdown underneath.

So much for that but one big caveat remains:
You have to “scrobble” the tracks you played on your iPod before you play any other music in iTunes!

This is due to some obscure policy by last.fm that only accepts track submissions in the order they are played, for whatever reason – I’m sure they have a good one 8)

If you’re interested check out my profile and see what I’ve been listening to.
There’s also a good iScrobbler support group in last.fm that’s worth checking out if you run into problems or want to check for program updates.

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Over at the Red Sweater Blog Daniel Jalkut had a quite clever idea of how it might be possible to give some sort of video playing capability to the iPod Nano. He tried using iTune’s chapter marks to assign picture frames to a track. The outcome is quite interessting although playback is a little choppy in iTunes.

Download his experimantal song here.

Sadly copying the song over to his Nano provided even worse results. The iPod simply refused to play back the title, most probably because of the over 800 chaptermarks.

? read the whole article for some more details