

Audiogalaxy acquired by Dropbox - revorad
http://www.audiogalaxy.com/blog/2012/12/hello-dropbox/

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morsch
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.

~~~
ilja
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.

~~~
tommyd
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!

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sgdesign
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.

~~~
pretoriusB
> _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.

~~~
ciupicri
And who says that (all) drugs should be illegal? Marijuana is legal in a
couple of places and so are coca leaves.

~~~
tejaswidp
He isn't commenting on the legality of drugs. He is comparing drug cartels to
the above mentioned websites.

~~~
ciupicri
How is he comparing them? From what I understand he's saying that both of them
are illegal therefore should be shut down.

~~~
pretoriusB
> _How is he comparing them? From what I understand he's saying that both of
> them are illegal therefore should be shut down._

No, I'm saying that both of them are illegal, thus both of them ARE shut down
in a similar manner.

When you assume...

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jcrei
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.

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lysol
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.

~~~
alaithea
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.

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aviswanathan
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.

~~~
graue
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?

~~~
aviswanathan
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.

~~~
graue
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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Jagat
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".

A week after that: "Dropbox buys Vimeo"

~~~
ALee
I would not bet on the increase in revenue. Music is a loss leader, it's
primarily to increase customer acquisition.

------
flurpitude
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.

~~~
cincyreds
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). :)

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jpxxx
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.

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jimeh
Seems like yet another aqui-hire to me :(

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.

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nodata
It says "our team is joining Dropbox", emphasis on the team, not the service.

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steele
Had a great IRC network. (which interestingly enough was also used for online
RPG chat)

