Since I started the “It could be a Mac app” series on MacStories I discovered a lot of new web applications. Some have a cool interface but are unusable, some are ugly and useful, some are stunning in every single part. Indeed, I try to focus on this kind of apps, beautiful online services that combine a great UI with great features. Now, I’ve also been talking a lot about “the cloud”. Well, most everyone in the web community is talking about the cloud, as it’s what we call “the future”. Data is moving to the cloud, applications are moving to the cloud, we are indeed moving our workflows to the cloud.
But apparently, what is keeping people to entirely move to cloud-powered apps is the most obvious reason: the reliability and speed of internet connections. How much time would uploading a 50GB media library require? Hours, or days for many people. That’s why people are still skeptical about “the future”, because they can’t trust their means, and sometimes they don’t even trust the services they’re sending data to. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t try cloud apps now at small doses. Or, in an ideal scenario - at large doses.
Today I’d like to talk about a web application that it’s slowly changing my way of consuming music. It’s called Bitspace, and I believe it’s what iTunes will probably look like in a matter of a few years.
Ask yourself this simple question: how do you listen to music today? I’ll tell you: you probably have a huge iTunes library and you sync music with your iPod. You’ve got used to purchase music or download torrents and import those folders in iTunes. Also, it’s very likely that you’ve decided to ditch iTunes as your desktop music player and you’ve started using Spotify. Oh wait, there’s an iPhone app too. Turns out many of you have already abandoned iTunes and moved to “the cloud”: a web service that can stream a huge catalogue of music to any device, whenever and wherever you like. I’m subscribed to Spotify too, if you ask. Great service, no doubt.
What’s the main difference between iTunes and Spotify, besides streaming and local data? Those songs you listed to on Spotify aren’t yours. Those songs are from the label that decided to make their artists available on Spotify. You can’t upload your files, you can’t play real high-quality music - and by high-quality I mean more than 320kbps.
Bitspace is a new web app that lets you upload and organize your music. It supports MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA and Flac files. It’s also based on HTML5: it uses modern browsers’ native audio playback support to stream music to you. It keeps music organized by analyzing each songs’ metadata. It scrobbles the tracks you’re listening to. It has a beautiful interface design.
“But we are not all about storage. We also want to create a superior music experience. We want the way you navigate your music library to feel natural and logical and we want the music you own in digital format to be just as beautiful as the music you have in your bookshelf. We also want to make organizing and categorizing music easy. We will make sure your meta data is correct and kept up to date automatically. So that you can focus on what is really important; enjoying your music.”
When I first read about Bitspace I though it was a joke. It just sounded too good to be true, and even if I knew that such a service would be possible to realize, I didn’t think it could happen that soon. Lucky me, I was wrong and I’m now a happy Bitspace user with a 10GB account. I’ve also talked with the developers, who told me they have big plans for the service, which is due to go public in a few weeks. As you can read on the website, mobile platforms support is already in the works and with HTML5 totally compatible with the iPhone and the iPad, I can only imagine how awesome this thing will be.
How Bitspace actually works is very simple, really: you just have to upload and the app will take care of the rest, Just to try, I’ve uploaded 1GB of music files: sure it took like 4 hours to complete, but once the music was online I didn’t have to do anything else. No wait, no setup process, no organization: I just started listening to music, with rich thumbnails for every artist / album and additional metadata like “label” and “release date” at the right place. Bitspace uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to stream music to you and the guys have various data centers all around the world to assure the greatest streaming speed for every user. I have a sucky 7Mbit connection here and every track starts almost immediately. Guess those of you with 40Mbit connections won’t even notice the difference from iTunes.
Bitspace feels natural and consistent, it’s easy to navigate and well designed. Obviously, you can click around when you’re listening to a song and that won’t stop streaming. The only big difference between a standard desktop music player and Bitspace is that you can’t delete single items: Bitspace is more focused on the concept of “release” rather than songs, much like a real music store. You can buy albums (releases), not a single song from that album. (Obviously, a “single” is intended as a release too). This is perfectly fine to me (when I like a band I purchase the whole album) but I’ve already suggested the devs to implement a multi-delete feature for the people who’ll like to keep only some songs from a release.
Bitspace is a game changer. It’s the finest example of a powerful, beautiful and standards-compliant web application. It shows a huge room for improvement, we just have to give some time to the developers. It is currently in private beta, you can subscribe here and get notified for the official public launch or just take a look at what the pricing plans will look like here. As for the prices, I think 7.99 Euros / month for 25GB is more than a fair offer.
They say some people in history inspire others to achieve great results. I’m sure Bitspace will do the same for the music and tech industry. If this is the cloud people were afraid of, hell - give me the cloud. I’m in.
