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CTA RATING: ★★★★★★★★★☆

Are you one of the Early Adopters who bought an iPhone on June 29th, 2007?  Did you get a 4GB iPhone?  Are you regretting that decision now?  Even if you just purchased a 16GB iPhone, most users always want more space for music, videos, podcasts and whatever else you can imagine.  Simplify Media has revolutionized the way I use my iPhone through streaming media… and yes, it works (read: very well).

Let’s talk about what this app does…  First off, you must download the app and install it on your iPhone.  Before you do anything else, there’s some free software that you need to grab on your mac box, windows box, or even your linux box.  Major Props go to the developers for including all three Operating Systems!  After you have the software installed on your box, all you have to do is sign-in or create an id that the software will use to connect each device, then define what the software is allowed to share.  In this step you can choose a music folder or iTunes Library.  After everything is setup, it begins examining all of your files and starts building a database that will be shared with every connected device.  Sharing works with your screen name or with that of your friends.  You can share one source with 30 different devices simultaneously, but we’ll be quick to note that this would greatly effect your overall bandwidth and sharing abilities if you truly had 30 streams going at once.

A couple things to note before I get into the iPhone app: if you have a large library of files, it could take tremendous amounts of time for it to build your database.  My main media source has about 100GB of information and took the better portion of an afternoon to build the database.  Once the database is fully built, it does not need to re-built every time you launch the application.  It takes a continuous look at your database and the folders it has been told to monitor and adds any changes it can to the database.  For obvious reasons, you would also have to keep your “media server” running any time you want to access it.  This wasn’t a problem for us as my Windows box server stays running all the time recording my favorite TV shows already.  Lastly, it cannot stream protected media like .m4p because Apple does not have an API (Application Programming Interface) for such files.  I noticed that all of my Apple purchased music didn’t stream, so I went straight to the developer for answers.  To put it simply: Apple doesn’t allow it.

I had a lot of questions about the app to begin with but have since come to sincerely enjoy the capabilities it brings to my iPhone, and my laptop for that matter.  As long as I have an internet connection, I have my whole music library just waiting to play through my device.

The iPhone application itself is very straightforward: you’ll setup your account when you first open the app, and then — as long as your libraries have finished building — you’ll be able to browse and play your music just like you would in the iPod app.  Of course, they made that part better too.  

Let’s say that I want to listen to some obscure album that I just don’t keep on my iPhone: Arctic Monkeys’ Favourite Worst Nightmare for instance.  I tap All Artists, Arctic Monkeys, Favourite Worst Nightmare, and Shuffle.  A few seconds go by for buffering, and I’m listening to “Old Yellow Bricks.”  That’s on 3G where I have 5 bars.  I live right next to a cell tower here in Denver.  (Don’t you wish you were me?) Anyways, the experience does get slower over EDGE, but in full reception, I was able to keep the buffering to under 10 seconds in all of my tests.  That seems pretty reasonable to me.

While each song plays, you are shown the artist, track title and album title.  You also have the ability to tap the artist button and read information about the artist as listed from Last.fm’s database.  The last button is the lyrics button: it displays the lyrics for each song in your library as detailed by LyricWiki.  These options are awesome!  I’m the kind of guy that challenges his wife to lyric battles.  She thinks it’s one thing, and I think it’s another…  I have an easy way to prove her wrong now. (Yes, I’m on the couch tonight.)

There’s not a whole lot more as far as functionality goes… it’s very simple and to the point. What it does, it seems to do very well.  I actually spent a good portion of time working with the developers before I wrote this review, because I wanted to make sure I got this right.  I do this with every application I write about, but this app caught my attention, and I decided to give it the third degree.  I must say that it wasn’t without its glitches, but I’ve been assured by the developers that they’re working on them and will have a new release available in a reasonable amount of time.  I will say that everything I found was minor glitches that didn’t seem to affect the app’s crucial functionality: playback.

Lastly, we’ll leave you with a hint that I received from one of the developers: video.  I don’t have a clue how they’ll do it because I’d imagine it would take a lot more buffering time… but I’ve been impressed with the app even on EDGE.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the video streaming works well.  This is definitely a company that seems to have its act together.  We can’t wait to see what they dream up next.

There have been rumors that Apple will allow streaming of media in the next revision of iTunes: iTunes 8.0.  We’re not sure if we believe these rumors, but we’ll wait and find out sometime in September.

Simplify Media Support