Simplify Media
Simplify Media
I came across Simplify Media while reading “Mac|Life” magazine today (issue: March 2009 No.26). I’ve been personally looking for the functionality that this app provides for some time now. Basically this app (free for all supported Desktop platforms) allows you to stream your music library across the internet to designated PC’s/Users. As of writing this Simplify Media is available for the Mac, iPhone, iTouch, Linux, and Windows platforms (Not sure about the ability to compile source on other *nix flavors), making it an extremely versatile application for any media junkie’s arsenal. Here are my initial observations of the mac app:
Installation
Installation proved to be overtly simple. Similar fashion to most well developed Mac apps, a simple drag and drop to the “Applications” (shortcut included in .dmg) folder does the job. After that’s done, only account setup and initial config left. Account setup doesn’t require any lengthy forms, or EULA’s to read. It was a short, on the fly username and password registration included within the app interface. Configuration was simple….maybe a little too simple, but this is a ver. 1.0 app, so there’s room for new features in the future. You’re given the options:
- Not to share anything
- Share your iTunes library and playlists
- Share your Music folder, and specify additional folders/playlists to share.
The only feature that I’m really missing at this point is the ability to set time limitations to user sharing (i.e. the user “jmsearcy” can access my music from 10:00am-10:00pm Mon.-Fri.).
Usage
Usage is pretty much the easiest part; Install the client app on other machines and log in, or invite your friends (via e-mail) to download the app and begin sharing as well. At this point, you’re allowed to invite up to 30 users. The dev team was nice enough to include a quasi-audit system that logs remote usage reports so you can see how long your users are connected, as well as what they’re listening to. I haven’t had a chance to test the stability, streaming capabilities yet, but will try to update this review to include that information within the next week.
Update————————————————————————————————————————
Yesterday evening I finally had time to test out the app a little more aggressively. I ended up installing a client app on two other machines ( Windows Vista Ultimate x64 & Mac OS X 10.5.6). The installation procedures were virtually identical (factoring out Vistas UAC prompts!). After I logged into the app on both machines with the same credentials I used when I was first testing the app, it took about 5-10 seconds to complete what looked like an indexing process, and then both machines showed as “available” within the Simplify Media UI. I only enabled Itunes Sharing for scope of this test, so I can’t yet account for sharing other individual folders. I fired up iTunes on the Vista Machine and could immediately browse my music and playlists form the remote Mac. Also, a point to note, I did NOT have to have iTunes open on the remote system (A definite plus!). I began streaming a song, there was around a 2-3 second buffer before the song started, but once it started there were NO hiccups, static, or heitations. I was very impressed with the app at this point. I logged into the rmeote machine and began to monitor the System Processes and Network Usage while a song was streaming. The app was taking up anywhere from <1% up to around 10% at any given time, so not so process intensive. Network Usage was a different story. I expected there to be a major hit in this area seing house your streaming a multi-megabyte file across the Information Highway! Network usage stayed between 70-100% while streaming, but did not seem to affect any of the other networked based systems (I was remoting into the Mac via VNC, and I also had a webserver running on it which showed no degredation as far as serving pages as normal goes). Another thing I noticed is this app works around firewalls (I haven’t researched it at all, but judging by how our corporate network is setup, information has to be sent/received on a pretty standard open port (TCP 80, 443, etc.)
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Conclusion
I assume this feature set is a convenience for some, and a necessity for others. I personally see a huge benefit in this application considering the inconsistencies in manual configuration of VPN connections, and port forwarding as an alternative to share only your iTunes library. The fact that there this is a free, easily installed/configured, secure app, and scalable to most platforms, it’s a winner in my book!
-Phenix
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