What is JukeFly?
If you have a large music collection like I do, you may realize what a pain it is to be able to truly access your music from work or on the go. I have an iPod and it’s a wonderful device and works great on planes, trains and automobiles. When I’m sitting in front of a real computer though, I would rather access my music from that than a tiny 2″ screen. This doesn’t even count the fact that all my music doesn’t fit on my iPod.
So we thought to ourselves, lets create a really flashy interface to access your music in a very clean secure way from any computer in the world with a browser. Sure this has been done before, but always in a clunky Javascript interface, missing lots of features and just down right ugly. So we set our goal high to make a nice looking, highly functional music player that you can use from anywhere and even threw in some social features for those who have friends in the world. It had to be purposeful though, too many web sites lose focus and you are riddled with advertisements and so many links all over, you don’t really even know what it’s supposed to do!
So, in order for all this to work, your music has to stream from your computer. So, we needed to create a server you would install. It would have to be small, secure, use little memory and be cpu efficient. It has to support mp3, ogg and unencrypted iTunes files. We hate bloated software on our computers and even worse is insecure software. So we worked on the server design for a long time and came up with what you can download today which fits on a 1.44mb floppy, is tested to be very secure such that only you can access your own music, uses only a few megabytes more than Windows notepad and uses 0 CPU while idle, 0 CPU when sending music to your local machine’s browser or over the LAN and 3% CPU when transcoding your music on the fly to send it over the internet at 128kbit/s on a two year old CPU. Success!
We set out to make the entire process as easy to setup as possible. You make an account, install the PC Server and select your music folder. The PC Server will synchronize the meta-data artist, title, album, genre of your music to JukeFly. By having the basic meta-data on the backend server, we could then enable the beginnings of our social features such as playing your friends music, browsing their catalog and finding other people with similar music tastes as yours. The social features are being expanded on continually.
Where is JukeFly going from here? Internet Radio support, better access to your friends music, more social features, song lyrics, music videos, and some more radical ideas that we’re keeping a tight lid on until we’re ready!
We’re actively looking for funding.
