If you have a large music collection like me, you suddenly realize what a pain it isto cart your library around so you can listen to your tunes at work or on the go.  I have an 60gb iPod full of stuff, but that’s only about 1/6 of my music. Not only does it take me forever to move that many songs on to an iPod, it even takes longer for me to whittle down the songlist to make sure the essential stuff gets on there.  The end result is that my iPod song list never gets changed and it is hopelessly out of date.  It’s also a pretty big pain to find the music I’m looking for using the iPod’s user interface.

A couple of my old work colleagues started their own company several months back and now they are finally coming out of stealth mode with their new free web service, Jukefly.com, which lets you listen to your music from anywhere that you have an internet connection.  At this point, I basically have an iTunes style user interface built into my web browser, and I can play any of my songs at work as if I were on my computer at home.  

What’s cool about Jukefly is that instead of uploading your music to a server, you simply download a small app that sits on your home computer and communicates with their service. There is no uploading of music or messy configuration and with your music just stored in single location, all you music and playlists are always in sync with the service. Within minutes of signing up, I had access to all my songs and could play them on any computer that has an internet connection.    It’s really handy, and even at this early stage of development, it seems to work seamlessly.

It also has some cool social features that I think will be cool as the site grows.  While you are playing any tune on your computer, you can comment on the song or artist, or see what others have said about it.  It also lets you see other users who have that song and browse their collections to see what other music they have that may be interesting. You can also make other people your “friends” similiar to other social websites, and by doing so, you can play their “shared” playlists.

I think Jukefly has a lot of potential over other music sites I’ve encountered.  I like the idea of having one repository for all my music, playlists, etc. so things are always in sync, and from what they’ve said, they’ll have an open api available in the near future which I think will potentially make it something like the flickr equivalent for music when it comes to widgets.  Potentially, developers could create widgets for facebook and the like that compare and contrast music libraries, playing patterns, etc.

You can check it out here. 

A while ago, we reviewed ReplayRadio which will record internet radio programs similiar to a Tivo. Having a long commute, I still use it regularly to dump my favorite news and talk radio programs on to my MP3 player which connects to my car stereo, and it comes in handy to keep me calm while the traffic is snarled. It works great for recorded shows, but to my knowledge, there is no solution for live radio in a car.

Given the relatively small data rate that is used in audio broadcasts, I can’t understand why no car stereo manufacturer hasn’t added time-shifting features to one of their products. Add some inexpensive RAM and some added logic to the circuitry, and you’ve got a hot new feature to beat up your competitors.

I can understand that many features of a DVR don’t make sense in a car radio like recording programs on a schedule. It would require some complicated user interface on small device. It would also require your radio sucking up your battery power while the car is off to record in the off hours. For many reasons recording programming on a car stereo is a bad idea.

The ability to rewind and pause live radio, on the other hand, would be really useful without adding much complexity to the user interface. I don’t know how many times I’ve missed a traffic report by a few seconds because I’m pre-occupied and a rewind button would make that a thing of a past. Perhaps with a small additional battery, a feature to continue to record for 15-30 minutes with the car turned off would make it possible to pause a radio show while I run a quick errand. If I hear a new song I really like on the radio, it would be cool to rewind it to give it another listen, or rewind it further to hopefully catch the disk jockey mention the performers name. Fast forwarding radio commercials would kind of nice too.

So what’s the deal, car stereo manufacturers? Get to work!

Satellite radio provider, Sirius, is planning to add video as part of it’s offering in 2006. According to AP, the content will be targeted at children as a result of the increase in video equipment in automobiles to entertain kids. Sirius has struck a deal with Microsoft to use their technology for mobile products.

Chief Executive Officer Mel Karmazin said:

“We will take the DVD experience to the next level, offering the best content easily available to families and consumers.”

Having two young daughters, the portable dvd player has been a godsend for long trips, and while the devil is in the details, this kind of service makes sense to me.

As a follow-up to our review of ReplayRadio, here’s an excellent chart on all the products that are available for time-shifted radio. The I Love Radio site also seems like a good resource for tracking these kinds of products.