Do you have an MP3 of the time we played that slow song really fast?

March 14, 2009 8:16 PM

Recommendations for free private digital accommodations for a retired band's media?

Our band has been broken up for many years -- its members are now scattered across the USA. But, of course, we have a ton of recordings that we're slowly digitizing. We'd like to find an easy online way to share our digital archives with each other. (Mostly MP3s, but some video and pics.) There are hundreds of songs plus many live recordings. Probably a dozen or so videos.

Looking for:
* Online
* Free
* Private

I've looked at dropbox, but the free version has a prohibitive file size limit.

(I'm trying to find a solution that doesn't involve me setting up an FTP server at home.)

Thanks.

posted by bodega to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I'm a fan of Wetpaint for invite-only wikis and doc sharing of the sort you describe.
posted by mykescipark at 8:26 PM on March 14

Have you looked into setting up torrents? It seems perfect for what you're doing.
posted by sanka at 9:09 PM on March 14

Amazon s3 as a torrent server?
posted by acro at 9:55 PM on March 14

Jungle Disk. It stores stuff on Amazon S3, but it's simpler to get started - it looks like just another drive, Windows, OS X, & Linux. It's cheap but not free. It is private & online.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:34 AM on March 15

Take a look at dropbox. It's free up to 2 GB, but you get 250MB everytime someone accepts your invitation to join, so if one band member joins and invites the others, you could get an extra gig or so pretty easily. You can set up shared folders that everyone has access to, and it automatically updates their computers when something new is added. Pretty nifty. I just found it last week and love it.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:13 AM on March 15

Crap! Sorry--I didn't read the more inside well enough. Sleep deprived new-dad is my excuse.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:14 AM on March 15

We aren't going to be able to meet anything that meets all your requirements, at least not unless you get more specific. Anyone who is offering what you want for free is doing so because they are hoping either to make money off of ads, or because they hope to upsell you to something. Either way, they are going to create various barriers to encourage monetization.

What, exactly, are the limits on free dropbox service that you find prohibitive? What limits would be practical? How large are the files you want to share? How much space in total do you think you'd need? How many people are you planning on sharing with?

Given what you've told us so far, I think your best option would be Windows Live Sync (formerly known as Foldershare). There are both Mac and Windows clients. It is completely free & as private as you want. Files can be quite large (1GB or more), you can have up to 20,000 per shared folder (including subfolders).

Its a sync service, so once you are all set up with a shared folder, any one of you can throw something in to a folder and it will end up synced to all of your computers. Transfers are peer to peer, so the sender and receivers have to be on and connected to the net at the same time, but once the file has been synced to at least once receiver, it will be available from multiple sources. Once it's set up, it requires very little user intervention.
posted by Good Brain at 11:46 AM on March 15

Update: Not ideal, but using drop box until we hit 2GB. Well, replacing home PC first... : - (
posted by bodega at 2:01 PM on April 14