MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson’s post-MP3.com venture, today launched a music locker service called Oboe. Michael tells Boing Boing:
You can store all of your own music, making your entire music collection playable from any browser in the world. Plus you can also sync that entire music collection and playlists to multiple computers with a single mouse click. Oboe is the jukebox in the sky that can store all library for safety, playback and move your music to any location for offline playback as well.
Here’s some things which I think make Oboe interesting.
– Oboe is the only online music locker. There are photo lockers, email lockers, general purpose storage, even video lockers but no music lockers and music is ideal for lockers because it’s used repeatedly from multiple locations.
– $39.95 per year for unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth. No per gb billing for either storage or bandwidth.
– Works on Mac/Win/Lin with MP3, AAC, WMA and Ogg files.
– First of its kind iTunes plug-in so iTunes users will be able to sync their entire music collection from within iTunes with one mouse click. This makes it ideal if the user just wants a simple backup of their music. When they realize they can now access their music from any website or zap it to other computers they will be amazed.
– Last time I launched a locker system called my.mp3 it triggered a hailstorm of lawsuits. Hopefully we can avoid them this time, but you just can never tell with the music industry.
– I’m personally a big advocate of open formats and open APIs which Oboe has. So today we’re announcing syncing to PCs of all flavors, but tomorrow those same APIs will let you sync your music collection to any phone, PDA, car, tablet, etc.