UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

Thought I better post something that wasn’t a website rant (don’t worry there may be more of that soon). A post on cruftbox.com led me to a nifty bit of media streaming software called Orb.

You install the software on a computer that has access to your media files (pictures, music and video) and has Internet access. Once the software’s on your server you can just navigate to my.orb.com from any machine on the Internet and stream all your music and video.

Thanks to this I’m now sitting at work streaming music off my home server. All in all took about half an hour to set up at home and less than five minutes to log in from here. It does have it’s downsides, I’m lucky that I have a computer I leave on all the time anyway and I have reasonable upstream bandwidth (certainly more than enough for CD quality music). The major problem I have is that both the server and the web based client have lousy interfaces, which becomes a problem if you’ve got a lot of media files. The system does import any playlists you have so the solution is just to build playlists with your favourite software and play them rather than trying to navigate to what you want to play.

All in all it’s a pretty impressive piece of software, not 100% stable but pretty good, I know it’s not the only way to do this but it’s the setup is really simple and it has the ‘it just works’ feel to it that’s lacking in other solutions. Well worth checking out.

And it means that anywhere with a ‘net connection, I’ll have access to my music collection. Be afraid.