Interesting: iPhone App: Simplify Media

August 24th, 2008

= 3 stars

Simplify Media is a free iTunes app that allows streaming of your iTunes music collection, stored on your computer, to your iPhone, wherever you may be.

The streaming occurs over the iPhone’s data connection, meaning 3G, 2G, or Wifi.

Needless to say, this is a really good idea. Most of us have music collections far larger than the 8 or 16 GB storage currently available on the iPhone. Ideally, the app will allow us to get around this storage limitation and give us access to all our music without having to take up storage on the iPhone.

The Good

• Works as advertised. My entire music collection is now mobile.
• Also cool: you can access up to thirty other music collections, further expanding your iPhone’s music library well beyond even what a normal iPod could do. In a sense, it’s like the existing share library feature in iTunes, that works only across a network, extended to any iPhone.

The Bad

• The program was rather difficult to set up initially. You have to install Simplify Media software on your computer that scans your iTunes library. The scanning in particular took a while. Then, you install the Simplify Media app on your iPhone, and the initial step of “connecting to library” took a really long time as well.
• I think you have to set up your home computer to be awake all the time.
• The audio quality is noticeably worse than tracks stored on the iPhone proper.
• There is some lag time when initially playing a track, which varies depending on your data connection speed. The lag time can be significant on 2G or 3G (30 seconds or longer) or surprisingly fast on WiFi (5 seconds). However, once that initial lag is passed, switching from track to track is faster, I suppose because the connection to the host computer is made.

Conclusion

Simplify Media’s initial set up wasn’t straightforward and I nearly gave up. It’s occasionally problematic to where I’m not fully trusting that the program will work all the time. However, when it does work, it’s very slick, and it’s really neat to have access to a huge library of music without taking up precious storage space. And the kicker: it’s free.

As a side note, it’s rumored the exact functionality of Simplify Media will be integrated into a future version of iTunes. This may be worth waiting for, because Apple’s implementation will certainly be easier to use than Simplify Media’s. But until then, Simplify Media’s version is here and now, and if you have a bit of free time to spend getting it working, I think it’s worth it.

iTunes App Store Link: