December 10th, 2006

Introducing Streampad

streampadpic

As this is my first post here at IndieHQ, I’d like to thank Virgil and the cats at Suburban Home for letting me partipate here. My primary focus over at NoRevolution was the “indie music vs. technology deathmatch”, and for my IHQ debut, I’m going to look at a brand new site called Streampad.

I’m a mac user, so I find it incredibly annoying that I cannot use my OSX formatted iPod on my PC at work. The idea of my personal music library, portable and on demand, is important to me. Sure there’s Rhapsody, but that’s a paid service and why should I pay again to listen to music I’ve already purchased? Enter StreamPad, another entry into the social music arena.

StreamPad uses a downloadable Java applet that scans your hard drive for music and creates a tunnel that streams the music from your drive at home to an offsite computer that’s logged in to your account. I just tried it, and it seems pretty good. The only problems I can see are :

  • Opening up a home computer as a web server may compromise security.
  • Streaming quality depends on the internet connection from your home.
  • It plays .mp3 files, not any DRM formats.

A screencast/ demo of Streampad is available here. The Techcrunch blog has a great post about the site, including some dialog in the comments with the owner/ founder.

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Written by Bill Wilson

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Comments So Far...

  1. On December 10th, 2006 at 8:41 am
    Dan said:

    Thanks for writing about Streampad. I am glad that you enjoyed it. One thing I’d like to correct - Streampad can play AAC files, both unprotected and protected bought from the iTunes store. Of course, the computer running Streampad must be authorized to play the iTunes file.

    Thanks!
    -Dan

  2. On December 10th, 2006 at 11:43 am
    Bill said:

    Thanks for the feedback Dan. The AAC file thing is duly noted!

  3. On December 10th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
    Justin said:

    You could easily use your iPod at work if you just formatted with FAT32 as opposed to HFS.

  4. On December 11th, 2006 at 12:28 am
    Bill said:

    I could, but that means doing a reformat, and refilling the little bastard takes forever on my ancient Titanium. Point is, having a portable music library on something other than a device is pretty cool. Also, some offices don’t let you connect peripheral devices, so being able to have remote access is pretty nifty. I’m waiting for the day you can stream on demand to your car via your phone.

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