I'm excited about the new mp3tunes Oboe service. It creates an online storage locker for all your iTunes songs, and claims to do it with the click of one button, via a handy iTunes plugin. The service offers a free version which seems to offer a lot, and a paid version with some extra features. I'm especially interested in the "sideloading" concept where you can move songs from a partner website directly into your storage locker without downloading via a special link. After trying to set up an account, i'm a little less excited. The service, at least the Mac version, seems buggy still. After creating my account it brought me to a download page that didn't work–the download link kept taking me to the front page. After finally clicking the download tab in the menu I discovered the links there worked okay.
I downloaded two files, but there was no documentation included so I wasn't sure what to do with them. This is probably ignorance on my part, but the files have to be moved out of the mounted disk image or they won't run properly. I also didn't know how to install the plugin for iTunes–putting it in the iTunes plugin folder seemed to do nothing.
When I ran the syncing program, I entered my account info and clicked the Sync button, and it began syncing, informing me that it would take an hour per 200 songs. Unfortunately that's going to take about 35 hours. I canceled out of that action and clicked the other button, Preferences. That allowed me to choose a specific folder to sync, so I figured I could do a few albums at a time to test things out. After setting the folder, the Sync button became disabled, and I had to re-enter my password to enable the button, even though my password was still there. I selected only a few dozen songs but the syncing was still cranking away so slowly that I eventually gave up.
I have high hopes for the service, but I think i'm going to wait a couple weeks until they've worked out some of the glitches.
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