Taking music along with you can be a hassle, even in the iPod age. You have to bring along either CDs or your MP3 player with you everywhere you go; and then you have to spend time sorting your music manually at each location, which I find to be a huge time waster. Even though the iPod Nanos and other similar MP3 players are very small, it still is a bit of a bother to have yet one more device in my brief case.
The Oboe service from MP3tunes.com has
helped me address these issues. Oboe is a cross-platform music and playlist syncing service offered by MP3tunes, and it is worth checking out. Think of it as iTunes for Linux. And Windows. And the Mac. For about $40.00 US per year, you can rent unlimited space on MP3tunes' server to store and sync
your music with a few mouse clicks. You also have the option of streaming it to yourself via MP3tunes' AJAX-enabled GUI. No more advance planning needed. Your music is always in the cloud, and always in an open format. As long as you have Internet access, you need only log onto the Oboe service with Firefox and
click on your playlists to listen to them or sync them. Oboe is not yet fully feature-mature as an audio player, but it performs its primary mission of streaming and automated syncing quite well, and those two functions are not offered for Linux anywhere else. Oboe also does not have the same limitations of some other services, such as DRM. It also has the potential to bring more traffic to Indy music labels, which is a feel-good feature of Oboe's service. All things
considered, I would say that unless you are someone who really does not like to listen to music, or who does not like to listen to digital music, you will probably find that Oboe is worth the $3.33 US
per month average fee.
Some people will find the audio player aspect of Oboe's GUI interface to be too lacking in features to be worth the $40.00 annual fee, but having messed around with iTunes, I found that I preferred Oboe's more simple interface to iTunes more complex, more arcane interface. (Screen shots of Oboe's GUI can be found here). Also, I preferred the fact that Oboe didn't deliver music to my computer in a locked down format, as with iTunes. MP3tunes is also planning to expand its service so that you can sync all or part of your playlist to Internet devices such as watches, Internet alarm clocks, tablet PCs, PDAs, cell phones, you name it. For that reason, MP3tunes wants to keep Oboe light-weight so that it will play nicely
with all of those different hardware platforms.
For those occasions when you need feature richness (such as automatic fetching of album art, lyrics, and Wikipedia articles on the artist being played), you can always call on your favorite free open source juke box to do those things while playing the music that you have synchronized locally. (My favorite jukebox is Amarok).
I will compare Oboe to other services in greater detail soon, so stay tuned. If you need all of the rich features of iTunes, such as video syncing to an iPod, or iTunes consumer ranking service, and you are willing to use Windows or the Mac as your primary media box, you will want to get iTunes. But if you don't need those features, and it's more important to use a Linux computer as your primary media box, you want to choose Oboe.
The Oboe feature list:
There is a free Oboe service for you to test, but since the annual fee is a mere $40.00, you really don't lose anything from trying the paid service. Or, to put it backwards, you don't really gain anything from using the free Oboe service, as it is rather limited. As discussed below, a teenager on a small budget will like the free service, but otherwise the free service really only gives you a tiny sample of the paid service. Here's what the free service does allow you to do. These features will be explained below.
Webload music files
Sideload music files
Music streaming at 56kbps
Control buttons: volume control; play; pause; stop; next track; previous track; easy
artist, album and track selection
Play in iTunes
Do all of the above cross-platform on Windows, Linux and the Mac
Webloading allows you to move music into your locker by pasting a music file's URL into a field on the MP3tunes website, at which point the song is automatically copied to your MP3tunes locker. Sideloading is the same thing, except simpler. Rather than pasting your song's URL, you simply browse to any site with MP3s open format music files linked for direct download on the site, and click on an icon provided by your Oboe-enabled browser, and the Oboe software will essentially do the pasting for you. I'll go into greater detail in a bit as to how well Oboe performed these functions with the Premium Service (the $40 service). Here are the added features that you get for that $40 annual fee:
Infinite music file storage to back up your music collection
20 MB audio file limit per song
Infinite playlist backup capability
Syncing to devices and PCs (Linux, Mac and Windows)
Higher speed streaming at 192kbps
Support for these file formats: mp3, mp4, m4a, m4p, aac, wma, ogg, aif, aiff, midi. ALAC,
FLAC and WAV files are not supported in this version
Locker stats tool: tracks total music files in locker; breaks it down by mega bytes and
minutes, and webloads versus total locker size
Each of those features listed above are, of course, in addition to what the free service offers. In the weeks since I have had the Oboe service, I have found that I use it primarily for the convenience of streaming a song or two when I take a break at work, and for syncing my music
playlists across all of my PCs. I don't tend to listen to music all that much with MP3players, and I don't really like the iPod, and so didn't test the service with the iPod. I also didn't test to see if
the service will work with really massive music collections, because I don't have any illegal music files, and I'm too cheap to plow serious money into CDs. Based on my personal use of Oboe, I don't see issues for using Oboe for large music collections. As I discuss later, a few major users have reported on the Oboe forum that they have had a few problems with massive collections, but let's leave that discussion for later in this review.
Comparing the free Oboe service to the paid Oboe service, it seemed to me that the free service is good for basic compatibility testing, but not much more, unless you are on a limited budget. Teenagers on a budget might find the free service worthwhile. In fact, for teenagers who do have cash flow problem issues, I would recommend trying the free service. If you have a teenager who is in the habit of illegally downloading music, you might try to encourage them to try this service instead, because there is a lot of good music legally available for free out there that teenagers can webload or sideload into their lockers.
Details of my testing platforms
Most of my testing and actual use of Oboe was performed on SUSE Linux or Linspire Linux running Firefox. Oboe will stream music with Konqueror and Opera as well, but you can't use Konqueror or Opera to sideload music. You can webload music with both Konqueror and Oboe. I
didn't test Oboe with Internet Explorer, simply because I avoid IE like the bug-ridden virus bag that it is. For all of those reasons, Firefox was my browser of choice for testing Oboe. The machines with which I tested Oboe ranged from 1.2GHz chips with 384 MB of memory to a 2.0GHz chip with 512 MB of memory. I didn't have any speed problems on any of these boxes. My operating systems varied from Windows XP to SUSE Linux 9.2 to SUSE Linux 10 to Linspire Linux 5.0. I
didn't test it with any Live CDs. Nor did I test any Macs. My desktop in all Linux platforms was KDE.
