Online music locker
The Oboe service has launched. It’s a project that Michael Robertson of Mp3.com and Lindows/Linspire fame has been building interest in for the last 6 months or so. (Maybe a bit longer). The idea is that for a $39 per year subscription you can have an unlimited amount of space online to store your music files (.mp3, .wma, .ogg or .acc are autodetected in download links by the firefox plugin.) Then you can stream them anywhere. What’s interesting about the browser plugin is – let’s say you’re buying a track at the web site of whichever online music store, an icon appears next to the download link, you click and it “sideloads” the file into your online storage locker (bypassing the step of downloading to your pc, then uploading to the storage locker.)
Neat service from the sound of it. The pay version let’s you stream at 196kbps. There is a free version which limits streaming to 56kbps and doesn’t allow syncing of a collection between a pc and the locker. The software runs on Linux, Mac or Windows. There are no additional bandwidth charges (except I suppose if your ISP does that…)