This is, by far, about my favorite StumbleUpon discovery to date. I don’t know if Anywhere.FM is unique in what it does, but it’s certainly the easiest to use and enticing option I’ve come across.
What is Anywhere.FM? It’s a free music backup service. Basically, you upload your music to an easy-to-create user account (hint: they don’t even verify your email address). It then gives you a very simple music player (laid out almost identical to a very popular music-playing software by Apple). Since it’s flash based, it’s happy with Windows or Mac, Firefox or IE - whatever. I imagine it would even work well on an iPhone or an iPod touch when in range of a WiFi signal.
Why would you want to do that? You’ve already got a music player on there. Well, say you have an iPhone w 4 gigs of storage but you own 8 gigs of music. You keep 4 on your iPod that you listen to most often, but can quickly connect to your Anywhere.FM account for the other 4 gig that just don’t fit there.
An even better practical application is if you want to be able to listen to your music (and the same library nonetheless) anywhere you happen to be on a computer. You load your customized page from any internet connection in the world and instantly have access to high-quality backups of all your music.
The player does have a system for tying into other people’s libraries by subscribing to their “radio station” - basically you don’t get to pick the order you listen to things in and can’t browse by song, but you do get access to their full library. The long and short of it: very cool stuff. Check it out.
October 24th, 2007 at 9:58 am
[…] Mike Yamamoto wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThis is, by far, about my favorite StumbleUpon discovery to date. I don’t know if Anywhere.FM is unique in what it does, but it’s certainly the easiest to use and enticing option I’ve come across. What is Anywhere.FM? … […]
October 26th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Anywhere.FM is very excited about the possibility of Apple supporting Flash on their iPhone and iPod Touch, because then we will be able to provide the full Anywhere.FM experience on those devices as you suggest.
It’s going to be awesome because then the user will get access to his ridiculously large library even though his device only supports 4GB or 8GB. That’s the way cloud storage for music should work and we are making that a reality
Sachin
October 26th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Hey there lesseffective. Nice post. Just want to let you and your readers know about Mediamaster http://www.mediamaster.com ??? They are a tremendously rockin and hugely popular web 2.0 music service. Couple days ago PCWorld named them a Top 10 (non-goog) web app and the only one in the audio category. Check them out: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/138634-2/review_the_10_best_nongoogle_web_apps.html
Full disclosure: MediaMaster is client. Any readers interested also in a fascinating, in-depth discussion/primer on the future of DRM-free music check this out http://scobleizer.com/2007/10/24/future-of-home-entertainment/#comment-1282733