Winamp Goes Mobile, It’s Like Never Leaving Home

How many of us have wished that we could access our music and movies from our home PC on our mobiles? I know I have. Now the other day I was watching something on my computer and finally got sick of Winamp bugging me to download their latest version. So, I grabbed it from their site and started the installation process. In the process of spamming my way through the first few screens something caught my eye. Winamp now has a feature that you can install called Winamp Remote which is supposed to allow you access to your media library from anywhere you have a broadband connection (Mobile or Computer). I’ll freely admit, I am as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to being able to remotely access your home PC from your mobile phone. I’ve experimented with VPN and Remote Desktop software trying to do the exact thing Winamp is now promising with mixed results. I figured it can’t hurt to try it out though.

The setup process entailed creating an account through the Winamp Mobile site and that’s it. Again, to me this was just too easy for it to do what it promises. Now supposedly once the setup is complete all you need to do from your mobile phone is go to the Wimamp Remote site through your browser (http://winamp.orb.com) and you will be able to access all the music from your system. I played along and pickup my trusty 700p and navigated to the site. What I saw almost knocked me off my chair. All the music and video files from the My Documents folder on my computer were there and available for me to stream. I clicked on one of the files to see what kind of quality I could get and got prompted to download a SpeedTest html file. That made sense considering the site would probably need to know what the speed of the network I was on for streaming purposes.

After downloading, though the file still wouldn’t play, every time I would click on it I kept getting prompted to download the same file. The skepticism was starting to rear its ugly head again until I noticed at the bottom of the screen that there were links to choose your speed. Once I had selected a speed I tried again to play the file. Bingo, my Kinoma player opened up and after a short buffering period the file began to play. I played a 15 minute video and never once did it need to rebuffer during playback. I could jump around in the video and it would quickly re-buffer and continue on. Music files worked just as well. 

Now I was curious as to whether I could get the rest of the files on my computer to be accessible. Like many of you out there I don’t keep many music or video files on my main hard drive, they are all on secondary or external drives. After a quick browse through of the desktop agent which needs to be running on your computer for this all to work I found an area where you can choose other folders to add to the mobile database. The folders I added that had maybe 1-200 files in them were added likity split. My music folder, which has about 12000 music files in it, took much longer. I think I started it at about midnight and as of 8am when I check it wasn’t yet finished.

The software is still in beta mode so it’s not without it’s bugs. There are times when you will click on a folder and it will bring you back to the homepage or you will get an ‘Insufficient Bandwidth’ error even though it’s still buffering but all in all I would say that Winamp has a massive success with this product and I can’t wait until the next version of it comes out.

Disclaimer:  You will have to be careful streaming on phones because this service is addictive and even though you may have an “unlimited” data plan, it may not be truly unlimited.