(sidenote: I find that streaming music or talk radio can really help me get through a long day, especially if dealing with boring tasks that involve only myself and a computer. As I began pulling together ideas for a post about various choice spots to stream live music, I realized there’s simply a ton of good stuff out there. Hence, I am making this into a multi-part series)
Part I: Stream Your Own Tunes From Any System
Right as I was pulling together some musings on various places to stream music, I also happened to read about a new killer web app of the “Web 2.0” variety: Streampad.
Streampad does something I mentioned a while back as a possible add-on for Songbird’s music app to the personal homepage “eco-system” of Netvibes: it lets you stream your own music collection through a simple app on a web browser. All you need to do is register and leave your home system on and open for the app to work.
It’s a simple idea, but a really great one, and I think, maybe even a bit revolutionary. It deals with the realities of so many people being away from much larger music collections than they can on an MP3 player. I don’t know about you, but my 20GB iPod hardly even deals with a ¼ of my entire digital music collection…and sometimes, that’s annoying. Also, like many other folks out there, I am almost always on a computer and online while at work…Streampad simply hooks me back up to my system. Also, what sets apart Streampad is that you don’t need to install anything, it’s always updated, and it’s accessible through any computer. It also has some other cool features that tip into other online music repositories and are a bit more “web 2.0” style:
Live Music Archive Concerts
Streampad is also linked to the Internet Archive’s “Live Music Archive,” offering a convenient way to stream live concerts (though it does not appear to link to the entire archive…which is massive; so if your band or concert is not listed, you’ll have to heads over to the LMA directly for downloading or streaming those).
Play the Web
This is reminiscent of Songbird’s browser-based application for playing media files (which I discussed a while back). Basically, it will grab any/all the audio files from a given webpage and stream it to you. But it is an app that is built into the browser (not the actual browser), meaning you can use any web browser once you’ve set it up at your home system. You can listen to tracks off of the Hype Machine or any music blog that hosts a lot of tunes (let me suggest Aquarium Drunkard or the LiveMusicbBlog for great paces to start).
MP3Tunes – Locker access
MP3 Tunes is another “Web 2.0” solution to the online storage of your music. It offers a great “locker” system for storing your media away from your home system. And Streampad has added the ability to stream tunes from your MP3Tunes locker.
Streampad’s interface is simple and easy to navigate. I’m already tapping into some tunes I recently downloaded but have not yet added to my ipod…that was just TOO easy!
Some quick musings:
- Though it doesn’t look like it is yet hooked up to Netvibes, I imagine these types of personal start pages and portals would be a great next step for Streampad. If you’ve got all your news, email, and other feeds coming into one web page, why not also throw in your personal streams?
- Also, I’m thinking that if one were to swap usernames/passwords with trusted friends, this would be a cool way to share music with others (heck, maybe Dan will add another feature so the password swap isn’t even necessary?)
Read more about Streampad and its inventor, Dan Kantor, here:
Dan’s Streampad Blog
Techcrunch
A VC
DigialMusicWeblog
