Is anyone using the MP3tunes service?

January 4, 2006 8:27 AM

Is anyone using the MP3tunes service for storing their music online? If so , how would you rate the service? Specifically, How does it handle large music libraries (50gig +)? is the integration with Itunes seamless? Any unforeseen pitfalls or pleasant surprises? I was excited when this service launched late last year, but after reading a couple disparaging reviews here (In the comments below), and here I developed second thoughts. Like many, my music collection is precious to me, and no matter how stellar my backup system becomes, I still worry constantly about data loss. The MP3tunes service seems like it would be a nice layer of added protection at a nominal cost, but I don't want to waste my time if isn't ready yet.
posted by moseymose to technology (7 comments total)

My only beef with it is that it is ridiculously slow. My music collection is around 55 gigs, and it will take much longer than a week to get my collection online.

The integration with iTunes is pretty seamless, however. Your library gets loaded as a network library, and you can either sync it with your Oboe library or (theoretically, I haven't tried it yet) use myTunes Redux to pick and choose individual songs or albums. It's a pretty slick setup.

It's slick, but not slick enough to compensate for the upload speed, especially with libraries as large as ours.
posted by charmston at 9:00 AM on January 4, 2006

i have about 150 GB of music and they have yet to get it to work with my library, they keep on promising that they are working on it and it will be fixed very soon but it has been several weeks now.
i did upload just a few albums and can't get itunes to see it, but that may be my issue.
i would love it to work as i don't want to lose the 4000 cds i have ripped, but right now i am very disappointed.
posted by annoyance at 9:10 AM on January 4, 2006

Don't waste your time it's not ready yet.

The software you have to use to upload/download tracks is horrible. I assume they called it Oboe because it's nearly impossible to get a tune out of it.
It is taking me forever to upload my collection. I have connected 20 times since the start of Dec and only managed to upload around 5 Gig. They say that you should be able to upload around 200 tracks an hour but I have never came anywhere near that and I'm uploading from work which has a very fast connection.
The other problem I have is that you have no control over whether Oboe is uploading or downloading. I have files at work and files at home. I don't need the files to be synched on both computers, I just need all files to be in my mp3tunes locker and so it pains when I see Oboe deciding to downloading tracks that are from one computer to another.
posted by oh pollo! at 9:17 AM on January 4, 2006

I'm going to have to disagree, I've found the service amazingly useful, and while at 250gb's to upload between home and work pc's, it is going to take weeks to get it all up there, it is getting up there. oh pollo must not have updated his oboe sync tool in a while; every suggestion I've emailed them has been in place within two weeks. It now supports selecting your own directory for local storage, sync-up, sync-down, or sync-both. It DOES still have a problem with multi-thousand file sets at once, but since I already split my library up as /a/a-albums, /b/b-albums/..., I just move from letter to letter, syncing-up only. I view the hassles as small price to pay for remote backup of my entire collections, but I live in the shadow of a volcano =p
posted by nomisxid at 2:28 PM on January 4, 2006

Completely not ready for prime-time. I have about 120gbs of music and through much effort I have managed to get about half of it uploaded but their software is STILL not nearly good enough, it crashes like a bastard, uses up all my virtual memory and then windows dies, stops if files have data it doesn't like (umlauts and such) and now just doesn't work at all.

Ironically it worked better before the latest updates, I have my music separated by letter as well and I could feed it those folders one at a time and if it choked on one then just go onto the next one however since the latest update no matter what folder I point it to it tries to analyze the ENTIRE music folder and dies.

iTunes integration works pretty well (works on 3 or 4 machines that I use) but since I use Winamp it's not of much value to me.

I have been in contact with Oboe support pretty constantly but they take days or weeks to reply.
posted by Cosine at 12:07 PM on January 5, 2006

I also have had trouble with this service. I paid up front for it but the software just does not work. I emailed them about it and they said they were aware of the problem and were going to fix it. Waited a while, got no news, so emailed them and asked for a refund, yet to have any response from them. Quite frustrating really. Why do these people insist on puting out things that do not work properly.

I am now checking this out - Streamload
which I found at the comments to this post

Anyone tried this yet?
posted by juniorbonner at 1:38 PM on January 5, 2006

Played with it a bit, seemed worse than Oboe.
posted by Cosine at 2:30 PM on January 5, 2006