Simplify Media: P2P Like the Old Days
by
on July 14, 2007,
There are those of us old enough to remember a time when music was sold mainly in album form, and your media choices were limited to vinyl or cassette. When you wanted your friends to hear something new you'd gotten, you either went over to your friend's house with albums in tow or held a phone up to your speakers. That was the original peer-to-peer music sharing.
In this age of new media and social networking, we download our music and often have friends who aren't close enough to bring albums to. You could tell them about something you think they'd like and they could listen to a sample on an online site like iTunes, but a few seconds of a song doesn't really do it justice. And sending them the files is illegal, so what do you do?
Enter Simplify Media, a peer-to-peer service that allows you to share your music library without breaking any laws, setting yourself up as an online service, or holding a phone up to your tinny laptop speakers. Simplify Media is a small (4 MB) download that works on both Windows XP and Mac OS X (Vista support is in process, as is support for Winamp and Windows Media Players). Once you've downloaded the app and registered your account, you simply invite up to 30 friends to “share” your music. I use that word only in the most liberal sense of the word, because there are limits that should keep the RIAA happy.
For starters, even though you are using iTunes as the player, you won't be able to even view, much less play, any of your friends' iTunes-purchased music. Only music you've ripped yourself will be available for any of your friends to stream. Secondly, you can't import or otherwise copy the music to your own drive. There is no way to copy the music, and in the interest of science, I had a friend with a stream ripper give it a go. They don't play nicely together, so if you do decide you like your friend's music, you'll have to use the handy links to buy the track the legal way. In addition, if you are a fan of the “Party Shuffle” or playlist feature, it won't include your friends' music in either mode. So forget adding to your collection even for a short time with a playlist that includes items from both collections.
The friends' collections will appear in the iTunes sidebar as a share alongside your own. The Simplify Media app just shows a small window that shows you which of your friends are online and sharing with you. You can stream up to two songs at a time, and I had two friends both using my stream at the same time with no noticeable issues with bandwidth (I'm on a shared WiFi connection with cable for broadband). One friend has a little over 1 GB RAM in her machine and had issues with RAM, but I had no issues other than an iTunes crash when I was streaming, correcting information on a track I'd ripped from CD and ripping another CD at the same time.
Aside from those minor issues, playing with Simplify Media gave me flashbacks to Friday nights as a teen, playing music for my friends, hearing what they had to share, and commenting on each other's taste in music. The only difference was that my friends were in two different states, the music was on my laptop, and the conversations were via IM.
I've argued that P2P music sharing is the best way to discover new music, and Simplify Media seems to have found the right balance of promoting legal purchases and sharing music with your friends. I know that I have a few new albums I'll be buying in the future after this try-out.
