Simplify Media: One Month Later
So I’ve been using Simplify Media for a month now, and it’s worked out great. First, the weird tag issue I was experiencing before actually has nothing to do with Simplify Media and instead has something to do with my iTunes configuration. Though I’ve yet to figure out how to rectify this. I do, however, wish it displayed my ratings.
Paul Joyce from Simplify Media was nice enough to email me after my first write up to let me know they’re working on playlist support. When playlist support is introduced songs and tags will be read from your iTunes library, rather the actual folder they reside in. This would be great since I don’t want all my yet to be organized stuff showing up.
I’ve experienced almost no lag time, only had iTunes crash a couple times, in other words no more than usual. I’ve successfully used it in conjunction with friends, and after having six people install it on various OSes I’ve only seen it (appear to) bork one iTunes install. Since I wasn’t there during installation that could be a user error for all I know. It also works fine in conjunction with my LastFM plugin. (As in they’re not eating up all my system resources.)
I’d recommend this to anyone with an mp3 library. Truthfully for my purposes it’s made having a large (and fragile) iPod obsolete. I suddenly don’t mind so much that the iPhone only has 8g of storage, since I can access my home library. Perhaps someday they’ll even be able to work on some kind of iPhone / iPod Touch support.
If you didn’t see the original post, you can read about my initial experiences with Simplify Media here.
I’ll definately be checking this out once they include playlist support. My poor 3rd Gen iPod is on it’s last legs with about 20 minutes of battery life left. I only use it at work nowadays anyway, if I could get my playlists from my home setup I’d be set.
It’s not a bandwidth/resource hog?
Well it depends how your machine is set up what you determine to be a resource hog. Right now I’m actually listening to my remote files and it’s using about 28,000k. (I think this changes when you’re not actually connected to a remote library.) Not small, but considerably less than iTunes or even Outlook. I have 3 gigs of RAM in this machine so it doesn’t cause any problems. I have 2gigs on my Mac at home and don’t experience any resource issues.
I get around the playlist thing by changing my view settings, so I can view whatever’s been recently added, Recently Added is really about the only playlist I need that isn’t entirely dependent on the genre tag anyhow.
well, i have Windows XP, 1GB RAM, Winamp with Simplify Media, and as soon as I start Winamp, it keeps adding 4MB of ram per minute to usage. I didn’t notice at first, but in the evening it was loaded up to 1,86GB RAM for Winamp + Simplifiy Media alone - you can guess how much swapping was going on.
so i can say, it definitely _is_ a resource hog, because of some bad programming probably. I don’t have _that_ many mp3s that I would expect the program/plugin to fail on dealing with my collection.