Play it again anywhere, Sam: MP3tunes Oboe
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.
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.
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