Simplify media for iPhone/iPod touch does anything but
By Jonathan Schlaffer
Simplify media is a duo of applications that allow your PC or Mac to stream your entire library (videos, music) to your iPod Touch. If only it worked perfectly and I so wish it did.
The software was (may still be) a free download as the first 100,000 to download it got the application and future updates at no charge. But, after that it will cost $3.99 but updates will still be “free” or rather, included with the price.
As far as setting it up, you must download and install the application on both your Mac or PC and iPhone/iPod Touch. Then, set up an account with a user name and password which must be entered on the iPhone or iPod Touch you wish to use it with.
Simplify Media must first be running on your PC before you can connect wirelessly to your library. On the first run you must set which libraries and playlists to share and then allow it to scan your hard drive.
Depending on the size of your library, it may be a few minutes before all your shared songs show up. This is where I ran into problems.
All my songs are either MP3 or non-DRM AAC files which should all show up in Simplify Media. They don’t. There was between a 10 and 100 song difference when I allowed it to scan.
To some this may or may not be a huge deal, it is to me. In a 2004 song library (exactly), I don’t want 1994 shard songs and I don’t want 1904 shared songs. What I want is 2004 shared songs to show up and they don’t.
You could say this is iTunes for not reporting the right number of songs, it wouldn’t be the first time iTunes was wrong. However, other media players show the same number of songs in my library. I’m willing to concede that it may still be a problem on my end but I do not think that is very likely.
My iPod shows 2004 songs, iTunes shows 2004 songs and so do various other players. That’s what I want to be shared and Simplify Media isn’t cutting the mustard. I guess I’ll have to be happy with mundanely putting files on my iPod and not doing anything cool like wireless sharing.
Perhaps you guys over at Simplify Media could come up with a software fix for this?
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Stumble It!
August 18th, 2008
Jonathan, thank you for taking the time to try Simplify Media and to introduce it your Blorge. We do appreciate it. Since your concern, the missing 10-100 songs, is actually our top support request right now, I wanted to add some information to help your readers.
This is usually a timing issue. It can take a while to scan and index all your songs the first time, especially with a large library or an external drive. If you look at your computer’s own Simplify Media reflection under Shared in iTunes and another batch of songs is showing up every few minutes, the indexing process is still underway.
Your reflection is a view of what remote computers see, so once Simplify Media is running for a little while on a remote computer or iPhone, this same list will appear. Playlists load last, but the good news is that once we’ve indexed the songs once, we it is cached so it should come up much faster in the future. Reset starts the scan all over, so it is not recommended for this problem.
Sometimes, though, people have multiple versions of their iTunes Music Library file. If we seem stuck, one things to try is to Preference and select the Sharing tab. From there you can switch from library sharing to folders. It will restart the search for music, but hopefully will find all of your songs.
As you’ve noticed, Simplify Media isn’t always as simple or perfect as it could be, but we are trying.
August 18th, 2008
grow up! boo hoo! i am missing 100 songs….
like 1904 is not enough?!! what is that u r missing Stars-track sound track???
August 27th, 2008
Okay, so like Jonathan, I too am experiencing issues with retrieving my entire library. I assumed it was becasue at lot of the stuff was bought on iTunes and therefore was not DRM-Free. Perhaps someone can clarify for me… does Simplify Media allow me to access even DRM encoded music from my iTunes library to my iPhone?
Thanks!
September 2nd, 2008
I like the software so far. When I did a search for all *.mp3 in my music folder, Windows reports 10,124. In the Winamp plugin for simplify media, it finds 10,157! It doesn’t find any oggs, and I only have 3 .wma’s. I don’t know what the extra 33 files are. But honestly, out of 10k, I’ll never know.
September 3rd, 2008
Does any know or set up a place to exchange screen names for Simplify Media?
Add me to yours and I will exchange other names to big libraries.
yogaschool is my screen name
Thanks
December 2nd, 2008
is there anything the ipod touch can do that the iphone cannot
December 2nd, 2008
Recent tests have revealed that the second-gen iPod touch’s CPU is 2.2X faster than the iPhone’s. So, the touch has been tweaked to provide better performance for gaming, whereas the iPhone has been tweaked for better battery performance.