Simplify Media- Legally Share Your Music Library with Up To 30 Friends

One of the unexpected benefits of the constant flow of app updates is that, at times, the appearance of an update reminds you of applications you loved but, for whatever reason, stopped using a daily basis.

That was the case yesterday when Simplify Media released an update for their application and service. While the update itself was just a bug update and didn’t add any new functionality, seeing the update reminded me of this wonderful service that, for some reason, I had removed from my iPhone a few months ago.

I reinstalled the software on both my iPhone and my iMac. (While I don’t love needing to have additional software run on my iMac in order to use an iPhone app, in this case it seemed worthwhile.) I logged into my account on my iMac so that the software/server could run, and logged into the application on my iPhone using the same credentials.

For a few minutes the service indicated it was updating and indexing my large iTunes library. It didn’t take all that long. The the iPhone app did the same thing. Before I knew it my entire iTunes library showed up on my iPhone.

Better still, I could select by song, artist, album, or playlist. Tapping on any one of these started the music flowing after just a few seconds of buffering. Amazingly, it worked as well as if the music were resident on my iPhone itself. The benefit, obviously, is that the more than 60 GB of music was now available to me on a device that starts off with less than 16 GB.

But the application wasn’t done there. What makes this service so spectacular is that you can invite 30 friends to share your library and to permit you access to their libraries as well. Creating this network of music sharing — which is perfectly legal in this case — was as simple as sending the stock form e-mail offered by the application to a friend. I sent out late last night and when I woke up this morning Wayne had accepted my invitation.

Now, instead of just having access to my music I also have access to Wayne’s music so long as the computer running the software is online.

A downside of which, is that Wayne and other friends can now see my musical tastes which includes some potentially embarrassing artists. At the same time I was now able to see that Wayne is rocking a lot of AC/DC on his Blackberry Bold. Who’d have thought!

All of this is available for the mere cost of the iPhone application which is just $3.99. It’s a one time fee that is the value of four new songs were less (thanks to new pricing in iTunes) and it that it is a bargain.

A link to our initial review and to the software can be found HERE.