In the old days, Audiogalaxy was one of the early successful P2P mp3 sharing networks. This was 1998 to 2002. It was groundbreaking because it was, AFAIK, the first one which let you resume an interrupted download from peers other than the one you initiated the download with. The fingerprint used for that was the file's hash, I think, so the filename didn't matter thouth ID3 tags did. In a time where lots of people were still on slow dial-up connections, this was huge.
It had a lot of other convenient features (good, specialised search engine, community features, network effects meaning you could find obscure stuff), but the robust fingerprinting and resuming was the big one. I also seem to remember that it had a very odd interface, where you controlled the app through the browser (I'm hazy on the details.)
Of course it was all quite obviously designed to facilitate copyvios and Audiogalaxy was subsequently killed, sold, repurposed and now resold. I had no idea the brand still existed.
I haven't used Audiogalaxy for years. When I used it around 2001 or 2002, I really liked the fact that you can schedule MP3 to be queued. So I would login into AudioGalaxy and tell it that I want a remake from Elvis, I log off. Comeback to it tomorrow and my requested MP3 would be ready to be downloaded. This was heaven when I was using dial-up.
The split client and web interface gui were awesome. I used to leave the client running at home and would use the web interface to queue downloads while at work which would then download to my home pc.
They also had an ftp server search index where you could find even more obscure stuff.
Funnily enough, I was reminiscing about AudioGalaxy over lunch today. Probably my favourite (or at least most fondly remembered) music download service - I used to love being able to queue up a load of music (and there was loads of really rare stuff on there) and then leave the client running while you were out of the house (in the dial up days - couldn't tie up the home phone line for too long otherwise) and see what it had downloaded for you when you got back in - quite often some little gem you'd queued up months ago and forgotten all about, but the one user with it had finally come back online!
The only place I can think of which a comparable selection of rarities (at least for electronic music) is Soulseek, but AG seemed more reliable, and the split client/web concept was brilliant. I'd pay a decent amount for a legal version of it, if they could somehow get record labels to agree that any file (including white labels, bootlegs etc) could be shared and they'd just get a cut of whatever they could match up to a label/artist. Not holding my breath!
Oh yes, I probably got a third of my ~70GB of MP3's via Audiogalaxy back in the day. I loved that you could see what was available even if there weren't any users who had it that were online. You could queue them up and they would download whenever someone who had them signed on. You could find the most obscure stuff and you would eventually get it. Sometimes I'd even do random things like queuing up all the (non-religious) songs with Jesus in the title. Got some really bizarre songs that way...
I never understood why, but on Audiogalaxy I could find more rare items that the ones available on other P2P networks. I am talking about the first Audiogalaxy (circa 2001).
I definitely remember the web browser interface which I thought was way better than Napster or Kazaa or DC was, from what I remember it would understand what an Artist and Album is and you could browse those instead of mostly raw files/folders like most file sharing programs at the time.
I was really sad to see it go, until Spotify came along it was by far my favorite music consuming program.
It's crazy to think of all the energy that went into building great services like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, only to see them shut down by lawsuits.
If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.
>It's crazy to think of all the energy that went into building great services like Napster, Audiogalaxy, and Soulseek, only to see them shut down by lawsuits.
Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.
If record companies had put their efforts into turning just one of these services into a legal alternative (without completely ruining it), they'd be in the position Apple is in today with iTunes.
Actually they tried, and they didn't go anywhere. Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com.
> Sure, though the same can be said for drug cartels too.
This strikes me as an apt comparison, although maybe not for the reasons you intended. In both cases, the illegal services came about only because people wanted things that weren't or couldn't be provided legally. In both cases the laws are purportedly made for the public good, and in both cases it's not clear that they achieve the desired effect, and there are some decent reasons to think that we'd be better off if these things were legal. In both cases, there's behavior we wish wouldn't happen, but criminalizing it isn't really reducing it.
"Napster was turned into a legal service, as was mp3.com"
The legal Napster was created years after the original had died, was completely different and not very compelling. It felt like it was designed to fail.
mp3.com was an honest attempt but they didn't have label support. That's what killed them.
The difference is that drugs are physical goods that require nontrivial infrastructure to produce. Digital media is essentially free to reproduce, and very cheap to distribute. Instituting the death penalty for trading Metallica's songs is unlikely to drive the price of a bootleg copy of the black album into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Dropbox is already betting on Photos storage and sharing, now they seem to be taking some steps into music storage/streaming?
I've been a fan of Audiogalaxy since their P2P days. Back then they were the best at showing me new music based on similar artists.
Today I use it on my android phone to stream my music from my home desktop (Mac). It works flawlessly and the experience is far superior to Google Music (which is limited to 20k songs, my collection is about 22k)
The best feature on their app is the "Genie" mode, which creates automatic playlists based on the current song.
Wondering what's next for them inside Dropbox.
To add another anecdote about Audiogalaxy, I think I wouldn't have the taste in music today if it wasn't for Audiogalaxy. If I remember right, you could also send links to albums/artists to people (hazy on this one) and that was a great way to share new music with friends. I think Grooveshark comes closest to this in spirit, since you can link to just about any artist, album, or track. I imagine Grooveshark will probably last no longer than a another year because of the pirating issue, though.
Yeah, it had a way to subscribe to a community, and then people would send tracks out to the community. Awesome stuff from people would then just show up in a folder on your computer.
Audiogalaxy was one of my favorite ways to listen to music without physically storing it on my iPhone's hard drive (since I have something like 8,000 songs). The only disadvantage was that I had to keep my desktop on (and the Audiogalaxy helper on it on) so that streaming worked, but it was a great solution for a pretty big problem.
I'm very interested in what Dropbox is going to do with Audiogalaxy. Perhaps more of a dynamic cloud solution where content is not only stored but also interacted with? To be honest, I love the Dropbox interface, but I use G Drive because of the ability to edit documents on the fly instead of having to download them, edit them, and then overwrite/save. It would be awesome to see Dropbox incorporate client-side content editing capabilities, and I could definitely see Audiogalaxy helping with the music streaming aspect of it all.
I'm glad you posted this because I just realized Audiogalaxy does something very similar to the side project I'm working on. I want to solve the same problem of streaming music from a desktop (or, even better, a Raspberry Pi with large USB drive) to my laptop, tablet and phone on the go. It's just a personal scratch-an-itch project, but this suggests there's a market for such an app.
How well does their implementation work? Are you writing this in the past tense just because AG is likely to close soon, or did you already find a different solution?
Apparently they aren't accepting any more new users. I have since moved on to Spotify for all my music needs, so I couldn't give you an updated take on AG. It's an interesting platform, but with stuff like Spotify (that quite literally gives you access to every single recorded song in the world), AG kind of loses relevance.
1. Unsustainable financially. They're losing money and will likely have to change the service or charge significantly more at some point.
2. Occasionally it doesn't have a song. Too obscure, too new, or some kind of legal wrangling is preventing it. Spotify doesn't have a good solution in this case. I can't augment it with music in my own collection.
3. With Spotify you have a huge music collection, but it's not portable. If they change the service (see #1) or you want to use a different client, you don't have options.
4. Mobile apps are limited to 96kbps. I want to be able to connect my phone to my (or a friend's) stereo to play music in the living room. The artificial bitrate limit means that won't sound good.
These might all be things only nerds care about, which is why I don't expect the market for my side project to be particularly large. But it's enough to make me want an alternative.
This is great news! I suppose dropbox is building a music streaming layer over their storage solution, so you can store your music on dropbox and stream them using their web music player (like google music).
Now, assuming everyone uses their music service, they would have information about the music taste of 100M users. Why would they not make use of that information? There comes the "you can buy this on amazon", "since you listen to Justin Bieber, you might like Selena Gomez". Amazon? Why redirect users to Amazon when we can sell music ourselves? "Dear Dropbox users, you can now buy music directly from Dropbox Music.". A year after that:"Dropbox revenue increased 10 folds over the last one year".
This is currently the best streaming solution, with which I can stream my whole collection from my PC to my phone, tablet, and any other PC. The audio quality they achieve and the responsiveness are way ahead of any other option out there. And the "pinning" feature that allows you to dynamically control which songs are stored on your mobile device is a great bonus.
It will be a real shame if this all gets shut down just because of this acquisition. I would have paid for this service if they had asked for money. The tone of the announcement does not make me optimistic, but I hope Dropbox can see the value of Audiogalaxy's assets and open the service up again, even if it becomes a paid subscription.
Agreed. I would absolutely pay for the service.
My only interest is to stream my music collection from PC to my Android phone.
Audiogalaxy beats every other solution by far. It's the only one that has a decent mobile UI to be able to browse by artist or genre.
I'm not a fan of cloud based streaming. The responsiveness is usually not good. Google Music suffers from this.
I would guess that Dropbox will rebrand the AG mobile app, remove the streaming service, and force everything to cloud based.
Time to look for an AG alternative, but I have yet to find a single one that even comes close to AG for streaming from PC to phone.
Tonido looks ok, but the mobile app only allows you to sequentially play the songs in a single folder, which is almost useless.
I'd love to hear other alternatives that include a good mobile app like AG has (had).
:)
I never had any real interest in music, and certainly never bought any. Shortly after discovering Audiogalaxy, I was buying CDs, going to shows, and actively collecting and exploring music that I didn't even know existed.
It was a revolutionary service, a decade ahead of its time.
I didn't know Audiogalaxy was still around. But it seems the service was arguably better than Google Music and/or iTunes Match though, so it's a real shame see it die like this, with little over 2 weeks notice to it's members.
It had a lot of other convenient features (good, specialised search engine, community features, network effects meaning you could find obscure stuff), but the robust fingerprinting and resuming was the big one. I also seem to remember that it had a very odd interface, where you controlled the app through the browser (I'm hazy on the details.)
Of course it was all quite obviously designed to facilitate copyvios and Audiogalaxy was subsequently killed, sold, repurposed and now resold. I had no idea the brand still existed.