Sorry about the Ghostbusters reference, I just came off a sweet Peter Venkman halloween costume, so I'm still in the zone.
I've
been going on and on about wireless streaming music, so I thought I'd
give an example of something that is currently workin' it on the
iPhone. SeeqPod.com has had an
mp3 farming bot scouring the interweb for mp3s and aggregating them
into a searchable database for you and I to peruse. It is surprisingly
thorough - I was able to find at least a few tracks from relatively
obscure bands as well as a number of non-album versions of some of my favorite tunes.
The site offers both a desktop interface with a
search column and a player/playlist column with a decent UI, and a Pandora-esque "discover" tab for finding similar music you may not have heard. The
coolest part about this site, though, is that because the bot is simply finding
web addresses, the files are just played in their current location.
This allows you to stream files from the servers they live on already and (more importantly) gives you the option to save files to
your desktop. They even have a fancy embeddable player (that is currently playing a song you should all take a few minutes to listen to):
So let's continue onto the really innovative stuff. SeeqPod.com offeres an iphone/ipod touch friendly search and play service through WiFi or AT&T's EDGE network. Basically, follow the link to the iPhone friendly page (http://www.seeqpod.com/iphone) and start streaming tracks! The playlist features are not implemented yet as the service takes advantage of the iPhone's built in QuickTime player rather than a proprietary application. Here's what it looks like:
Results:
The service is relatively unrefined, the filenames are often mislabeled and unintelligible as there is no quality control (it's simply a bot searching for music), but it can be amazingly helpful if you want to find pretty much any track by any artist immediately and download it. There's no guarantee of quality or data integrity, but who cares - it's really COOL!
Overall, SeeqPod.com on the iPhone using WiFi is very usable. The downloads are as fast as they would be on your desktop, and the site is well designed to mimic the iPod interface and is easy to navigate. However, on AT&T's sluggish EDGE network, downloads are painfully slow and impractical for recreational usage (i.e. with current technology, this doesn't have the capabilities to take the place of your beloved iPod).
We aren't looking at the "next big thing" here in current form, but it definitely shows that there is incredible potential for streaming media to mobile devices. Now if only this were available in a controlled and streamlined way with guaranteed access to all the music you wanted and a fast enough mobile connection, this could be the wave of the future. An infinitely large fully stocked iPod that works anywhere your phone works.
Pretty sweet if you ask me!