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Comment by aviswanathan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I dislike a few things about Spotify.

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.

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