I don’t want to repeat myself, but I can’t help mentioning everything is moving to the cloud, including our music. With Bitspace out of the closed beta and Apple building a massive data center in North Carolina, it seems like we’ll be choosing between 3rd party cloud music apps and iTunes Air in a matter of a few years. But as we’re waiting for Apple’s ultimate solution to be announced, we can already test cloud powered music players - Bitspace is a great example.
Today I’ll talk about a new webapp I discovered some weeks ago, it’s called Audiobox and it’s already been featured by sites like Lifehacker. The development team is entirely Italian, the guys are based in Milan and I had the chance to talk with them about the creation of the app - which is really promising and somehow different from what Bitspace offers.
Audiobox isn’t just your music in the cloud, it’s “your web cloud player”. This means you can upload music and videos (your own music and video files), have them backed up on a remote server and streamed to you with a fast content delivery network.
Audiobox is different from Bitspace both in the concept and the realization: it’s very similar to iTunes as far as the user interface design is concerned, it’s not focused on “releases” but on single files - songs. Indeed, the developers still haven’t implemented the video upload feature, but the video tab is there in the sidebar and they’re considering it. Anyway, Audiobox is meant for music, at least now, so let’s talk about that.
The interface is very desktop-like: there’s a left sidebar which allows you to navigate through your Account (Dashboard, Upgrade plan, Messages, Support and logout) the Library (Music, Videos, Featured and Bin) and your Playlists. The design is very clean and minimal, which is good. You can collapse and close menus with the standard arrows, animations are fast and fluid. You can upload stuff, create playlists, toggle shuffle and toggle repeat by hitting the buttons right below the sidebar. The uploading process is handled with a flash instance, while the rest of the application is based on recent and standard compliant technologies like the latest version of the jquery framework.
The tracks you’ll upload will go into the music section of the app and they’ll be visualized a simple list. There are no other view methods yet (like thumbnails) but I’m sure the guys are working on it. You an double click to play a song, skip to the next / previous with the top toolbar controls, edit the info by pressing the edit tags button in the rightmost corner. You can love tracks, scrobble them to last.fm (powered by audioscrobbler), add them to playlists (drag & drop is supported), view a counter of your most played songs and artists.
Now the main question is “What’s gonna happen between Bitspace and Audiobox?”. They both are great services with lots of functionalities. They are fast, secure and reliable. But overall, I suppose Audiobox is more promising than Bitspace and the team is working on far more features. The guys are already working on full mobile support for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android, APIs for 3rd party apps, a desktop audiosync tool and multiformat support. Also, take a look at the pricing plans - they’re just insanely good. (free= 1GB)
Audiobox is really intriguing, and works perfectly. Maybe it’s the nearest thing to iTunes Cloud (yes, another fake name) I’ve seen so far. Now we just let the team behind it work on the new features, refine the UI, enable video and iPhone support and we’ll have the best cloud player of 2010. I’m sure of that.
