stream to yourself

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was working out of my father’s office. This is working well, but I have a minor issue with music. I had tried burning DVDs with MP3s to listen to, but I got tired of them by the third day and wanted access to my entire library as well as the latest, newest stuff I was getting.

I’m skipping a ton of details, but basically I needed a solution that would work over the Internet to stream my own music collection to myself. Normally I would have used iTunes streaming over Hamachi, but the firewall here blocks Hamachi’s native mode and SSL mode is not reliable enough for my tastes.

I found a couple choices so far:

1. TuneVine. I won’t bother finding the link because although this is the right idea, it is no where near ready for prime-time and that is coming from a die-hard bleeding edge kinda guy.
2. Izimi. I just found this the other day and I was optimistic based on the sign up experience, but as far as I can tell you can only “publish” one song at a time. I certainly am not going to do that 64,476 times.
3. Orb. My current choice.

Orb’s main features are around streaming video to yourself. A bit like SlingBox, but implemented in software. If you have a media center PC, you can watch your video from wherever you are, including mobile clients. I’m just using the Audio portion of it and so far I’m pretty happy.

You install a small client on the server, set the folders you want monitored, poke a hole in the firewall and you are ready to go. The Orb web client has most of the library tools you’d expect like playlist, search, browse, etc. Once you’ve selected what you want to play it will launch in either their built in flash player or externally (Windows Media, iTunes, Winamp, Real). Performance and audio quality have been great. I haven’t needed it, but I installed the mobile client on my BlackJack and it works great as well.

This isn’t Orb’s fault, but it appears that Last.fm’s audioscrobbler isn’t picking up my streamed tracks. I’ve got an email out to last.fm support on that.