James Delahunty
1 Dec 2005 18:02
If you remember back to the late 1990's, MP3.com got in a whole lot of trouble with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) over MyMP3.com, a secure "locker" for users to store their digital music collection. Now that service has been partly resurrected by MP3Tunes (from the same founder of MP3.com, Michael Robertson) except this time users will have to upload their own files, not use pre-ripped files from 80,000+ CDs that were ripped by MP3.com.
The Oboe service allows users to stream the music to anywhere they are using an Internet connection. This was the same with MP3.com, though users were only supposed to stream music that they actually already owned. The RIAA didn't have much faith in the honesty of MP3.com users and neither did US District of Southern New York Judge Jed Rakoff, who ruled that MP3.com had infringed the rights of some copyright holders.
The main difference between MyMP3.com and Oboe however is that users have to upload their own music files. The MP3, Ogg, WMA and AAC formats are supported and the service works with the Mac OS X, Windows and Linux operating systems. DRM-protected WMA and AAC files from licensed music download services are not supported yet however, but you can still archive them for now.
Both a free and premium service are being offered. The free service allows music to be stored and streamed at 56Kbps and allows uploading only through the Firefox plug-in. A premium account costs $40 a year. For this fee you can store as many music files as you like and stream them at 128kbps (no bandwidth charges and music locker size is unlimited) and the service can automatically sync your music collection and the locker.
Source:
The Register