May 31, 2000

9:39 PM

My Winamp Lockerappears to be a free online storage space for your music files, hosted by Winamp. At 3Gb, and the offer of sharing and listening to your songs anywhere, how on earth do they expect to A) make any money back from all the server hardware they'll buy to support this, and B) not get sued by the RIAA? I thought it'd be a great service to exploit for my personal 2-3Gb collection, but it turns out you have to upload your files one at a time. ugh.
posted by mathowie (6 comments total)

If you go to xdrive.com, you can upload five songs at a time for people to download [assuming you give them your user/pass], but I think you can only store like 15-20 megs. Free, tho.
posted by dhoyt at 10:25 PM on May 31, 2000

From what I heard, though, if Winamp already has the song you're trying to upload, it recognizes that and just makes a local copy, saving all the upload time. That's just what I heard. Your mileage may vary.
posted by flestrin at 10:28 PM on May 31, 2000

Man, I love the folks at Nullsoft. First Gnutella, then InfraSearch, the distributed search engine, and now this. They are continuously bucking the interests of their corporate parents and doing cool technology for it's own sake. Huzzah for hackers!

Now to see what the RIAA (and Time-Warner!) thinks about this.
posted by billpena at 10:55 PM on May 31, 2000

There is a plug-in/software that can be used with My locker- called My Dropbox- it's an icon that sits in your system tray and when you need to upload MP3's you open it, and drag and drop your mp3's onto the dropbox, and it takes care of uploading them for you. It also has a feature that will allow you to download items directly to your RIO 300 MP3 Player.
posted by TuxHeDoh at 7:31 AM on June 1, 2000

There was a nice piece in The Register a few weeks ago (and yes, I am too lazy right now to link it) on MyMP3.com. One speculation was that MyMP3 could have kept seperate copies of files for everybody, and maybe that wouldn't have been against the law. Guess this is a test case.
posted by harmful at 2:34 PM on June 1, 2000

"Our apologies... "We are down for scheduled maintainence. Please enter your e-mail address below so that we can notify you as soon as myplay is available."

Oh this looks so promising...
posted by ZachsMind at 7:05 PM on June 1, 2000