The web-only challenge: tackling audio & video entertainment

Foxytunes

My temporary attempted boycott of desktop client apps enters the fourth full day today. Since I constantly have background music while working, one of the first items to tackle was entertainment. There’s no way to cover every option out there in a single blog post, but I can share what I’m doing at the moment. Up to now, I was alternating between free, online music streaming and occasional playback of music I’ve purchased. The online streaming obviously continues and my long-time favorite service, Pandora, is getting a heavy rotation right now. I have a tab in Firefox always set to Pandora and they have a nice New Age Mix station that works for me.

Although Pandora is a web service, I wanted to have a little control over it and not have to leave any other tabs in my browser. Enter the FoxyTunes Firefox extension (a 562 Kb download) that resides in the bottom of the browser full time (shown above). From here, I can stop, start, pause and generally control everything I need in a media player. The best part? You can use FoxyTunes with many audio client players and web services, so if Pandora’s not your thing, that’s no problem. It works with WMP, iTunes, Last.fm, Musicmatch Jukebox, RealPlayer, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Jukebox and many more services.

I thought about folks that own a bunch of music, even though I don’t. I did see some successful efforts at storing an iTunes music library online with Amazon’s S3 service and then streaming, but that can get pricey in terms of bandwidth. The most promising approach I saw was with Lala. Using their Music Mover, you can upload your music library to their servers and stream for free. If they already host the title, you won’t waste time uploading a duplicate, which is nice for the initial set up. The major drawback is that tunes with DRM can’t be streamed. Luckily for me, the majority of my purchased music is DRM-free thanks to CD ripping over the past several years and due to purchases through Amazon’s MP3 store. I may try Lala yet, but again, I don’t have tons of purchased music. I’ll do a follow up if I go this route.

FlytunesAnother option is that FlyTunes service for the iPhone we covered before. Since you can preview and use it on the web to simulate how it will work on your phone, it’s not a stretch to just leave it running in a browser tab. Some channels are optimized for slower EDGE connections, so this might be nice for Sony UX device owners that have integrated EDGE.

Sometimes, music just isn’t enough and I need to take a break with some video. I don’t need to tell you that there are a ton of options out there, so I won’t go into that much. YouTube is fun every now and again, but my current fave is Hulu, which offers many full-length television episodes for free. Unfortunately, Hulu isn’t available world-wide, so it’s not even an option for many of you. Since I’m not traveling the world much these days, maybe some of our foreign readers can offer some options here.

Again, there are mulitude of web-only audio and video options so there’s no point in my trying to cover them. I’m simply sharing what I’ve settled on and I have to say, it’s working quite nicely. With connectivity, a minimally powered netbook or UMPC with very limited storage capacity, you can easily enjoy digital audio and video media. No client app needed!

Update on the video front: news just came across my feeds about the NewTeeVee station, a site that cuts through "noise" on the zillions of videos out there and offers what they think is the best of the best. Sounds like a useful bookmark to me. Sadly, none of our jkOnTheRun videos made the cut just yet. We’ll have to raise the bar, I think.

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