[New YC startup] Listen To Your Music anywhere on the web with Anywhere.FM | Hacker News Reader

[New YC startup] Listen To Your Music anywhere on the web with Anywhere.FM

techcrunch.com

40 pointsimmad39 comments

Thanks for the comments and feedback everyone! We've had a few rough patches over the past 12 hours, but we're up and running again (special thanks to the Dropbox team for their help). As a random aside, it turns out we're getting far more traffic from del.icio.us than TC right now.

Yay, dropbox. They're good guys.

PS: http://getdropbox.com

Unfortunately, your post was knocked off the top spot on TechCrunch pretty quickly with other stories. Congrats on the launch - this is a great product.

Thanks for all your valuable feedback and comments, it is really motivating :). Now some advice I wish I followed... sleep a LONG time the day before you launch ;).

Things to do: -Support other media formats -Open a long-tail store, i.e. letting people upload and give out their work -Make a better uploader (mine seems to be blocked at work)

Looks great. My one complaint so far is that I can't just choose a directory to upload. (yes, I know why this is impossible with browser features, but it's what I expect from a music player) Oh, and it only seems to accept .mp3 files -- I've got a fair number of .ogg, .wma, .aac, etc. That's probably my computer's doing, though, since it wouldn't be a very good iTunes clone without insisting on .aac.

Actually, upon further investigation, it doesn't seem to let me upload anything at all. The response seems to vary between remaining at 0 progress indefinitely and crashing firefox. I'm guessing this is another no-linux site for now, probably because of flash.

Oh well. My laptop goes everywhere, anyway.

Same problems using The Linux, which is my desktop and laptop. Although I'm happy to have it finally Flash 9 for The Linux has all sorts of issues. Adobe's to blame.

Yup, file upload works in IE6 under wine, though. I used IEs4Linux, which you can get at http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page . I also use this for web development work, and it's great, besides the obvious.

I wonder whose credit card is on the Amazon S3 account. They must be very brave.

"Fortune favors the brave" and all that. They're setting themselves up to be wildly popular and in a deep financial crisis at the same time. I guess it beats obscurity.

Let the VC gods lift up their countenance upon them!

Seems like a good strategy for raising money quickly. The Techcrunching certainly doesn't hurt. Of course, the site is down as a write this.

oh i absolutely love this app. fantastically well executed.

i had implemented a version of this - nowhere close to as pretty - for our internal use at CMU (our group still actively uses it), but i am going to switch now. please, please allow bookmarking of songs soon (just noting the metadata of course.) cause there's lots of quality stuff to be discovered soon!

Wow, this is really sharp-looking stuff. I like Flash for this kind of one-window interface - very responsive. Certain other sites have a UI that's like slogging through mashed potatoes. Good work.

Say, I'd like to experiment with Flash stuff but I have to admit I am totally Macromedia-illiterate. Does anyone know what tools are used to build apps like this?

Adobe Flex.

See, I didn't even know that -- you can tell how ancient I am for even referring to Macromedia. Thanks.

Open Laszlo is another choice.

For maximum flexible development, use Adobe's Flash IDE itself. Flex is a watered down version of Flash IDE for quick development.Using Flex is recommended only if you cant afford an Actionscript developer. [Actionscript 3 is written almost like Java ]

One of the techcrunch comments said that the itunes UI is patented.[0] Any thoughts on this?

Anyways, it's very cool and useful. grats.

[0] http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?IDX=WO02061563&CY=gb&...

probably just the music store -- and probably just some small part of it.

there are plenty of good interfaces

The three pane browsing interface is patented too if I remember correctly

Songs are being uploaded by the second already. Looks like a winner!

Damn. I had an idea for this a year ago and never went through with it :( Even bought a .dj domain and made a javascript player. Good luck to AFM.

When this was posted, ~50,000 songs were uploaded. Now it is at 75,800. Nice

I've has some trouble uploading though.

80K

Sorry to hear about your upload troubles. We've heard that the Linux Flash Player isn't quite prime for handling uploads, and we've gotten a small handful of people who have trouble uploading particular files in any OS. Hope to fix this soon!

85k and not stopping :). In fact we had to start capping people's upload speeds because we're afraid of affecting our other users.

broke 150k one day later... this will be interesting... :).

Looks amazing. And not a single negative comment on Techcrunch?!

We've re-enabled using the client uploaders to bulk-upload music.

Cool. Is legal precedent such that this is definitely legal?

Yeah, this seems to be the only question. The interface is wonderful and it's instantly useful to me, but I can't imagine this will be allowed to stand as is.

Though I would have said the same thing about YouTube...

Hey guys - This is Sachin chiming in from the Anywhere.FM team. So we are a legit service. There are several digital music locker services that allow you to upload your music and play it anywhere. This model has been followed by all these companies and is allowed because you are playing your own music online. In terms of the sharing and Friend Radio features, we are actually paying radio station licensing fees to the music industry.

How do the new internet radio fees effect you guys? If they nail you by claiming each person listening is listening to a unique radio station, the fees could become insane.

Not only that but a vast majority of people use pirated mp3's. If you guys explode in popularity the RIAA will absolutely come after you regardless of how great your service is. How are you going to deal with that?

It is not really a valid argument to claim that everything is legit because other companies are doing it.

I love the site and look forward to trying it out when I get home. Your UI is beautiful.

Well, how is your model different from my.mp3.com? As you might recall, they did a website where you could upload your own music and play it from any Internet computer, but were sued and eventually settled for $200m.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#My.MP3.com

MP3.com stored all the music online. You gained access to a CD MP3.com had ripped by proving you owned the CD. There was no uploading involved.

The question is whether Anywhere.fm has a responsibility to police their network for illegal MP3s. It's logistically impossible to do so, but that doesn't mean the courts won't come down hard on them if they are successful.

I am in love. this is making my life better. thank you.

Amazing site, beautiful interface. Great work guys!

great work guys. my comment on TC got blocked (they must have our IP on some spam list or something), but it basically said: awesome.

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