skydrive music streaming: no hope?

[jim_h]

I recently moved 50 gb of music to Skydrive and was hoping I could stream it to my WP8 phone. I just tried 3 different apps claiming to do that, and none worked. 2 simply crashed right out of the gate. "Cloud Music" at least tried, but couldn't find any tracks; apparently my organization isn't quite what it's expecting (album vs. artist).

Update: make that 4 losers not 3. I just tried "SkyMusic Lite". It lets me log in to SkyDrive, then crashes and exits. Yeah that's "lite". Developer web site is gone.

Update: make that 5. "Skydrive Player" doesn't stream, just downloads the tracks and then won't play them. And where are they stored? No other player on the phone can see them.

I am done downloading apps. The number of broken, non-functional apps in the Store is now appalling.

Does anyone know of an app that actually works and has some flexibility on folder organization?

 

[Jazmac]

Wait, you uploaded 50 gig then test? Sign of a desperate man or a true believer. lol. How did you manage 50 gig when max is 25 gig? Anyway, I haven't tried many of these "cloud players" except for Style Jukebox by DigitalGeek. A really clean looking app. Which seems to work flawlessly but it has a 600 song limit for the free version and it bumps up to 1000 for a buck forty nine. Not a bad price. Works fairly flawlessly.

 

[Jupast]

Yeah i tried most of them too, gave up.

I guess Microsoft isn't interested in doing this because they'd rather push people towards Xbox Music...maybe.

I know there was an article saying some of the SkyDrive team had made this possible, but it was scrapped or something.

 

[jim_h]

Depressing.

"Style Jukebox" requires you to create an account and upload your tracks to them. Not happening.

There's a link on store listings labelled something like "report a concern to Microsoft". In the future I"m going to report dead broken apps - especially ones where the developer site is gone. Microsoft needs to start cleaning house. They're leaving all this cr@p up there because sources like CNET keep yammering about the raw count of apps in the store.

@Jazmac: 25gb limit? You get 200 gb free when you buy a Surface 2. Reorganize my 6000 tracks in hopes of making a $1 app work? Not likely.

 

[gsquared]

Yeah i tried most of them too, gave up.

I guess Microsoft isn't interested in doing this because they'd rather push people towards Xbox Music...maybe.

I know there was an article saying some of the SkyDrive team had made this possible, but it was scrapped or something.

It certainly makes sence from both a business perspective and a network / storage management perspective. Why house the same music in 1000 different accounts when you can store in one location and charge for the right to access it. You also run into the whole sharing can-o-worms.

 

[Ionut Antiu]

You can upgrade to Premium for 24.99 per year and you can upload 20 000 songs (~ 100 GB) including FLAC and ALAC.
- The Style Jukebox Team

 

[Ionut Antiu]

I thought taking a few minutes and creating an account is a fair deal for getting almost 10 GB of storage in the Cloud for free. If you have your music already imported in SkyDrive we will do the transfer for you. And you have unlimited usage.

 

[jim_h]

I thought taking a few minutes and creating an account is a fair deal for getting almost 10 GB of storage in the Cloud for free. If you have your music already imported in SkyDrive we will do the transfer for you. And you have unlimited usage.

It probably is a reasonable solution for many people. In my case, I just have too much music (50 gb) and can't spend the time picking out some subset of it to copy over to a streaming service.


Microsoft has been dancing around the idea of Skydrive streaming for years, dropping hints that they'd be doing it, and I suppose that's prevented serious 3rd party developers from investing time developing products. And in the end MS has delivered nothing, and the available 3rd party "SkyDrive streaming" apps (I'm not talking about Style Jukebox) are just abandoned junk that probably stopped working because MS changed the SkyDrive API. A poor outcome. The percentage of cr@p apps in the store is climbing and is now an actual disincentive to buying apps. Haven't we all had this experience by now: we want an app that does something, search the store, download a few that don't work, and give up....

 

[Ionut Antiu]

For Premium we have 100 GB of storage in the Cloud. What if I give you a month trial of Premium - you will be able to upload all the music and test the service for one month.
If you're interested email me at johnny at stylejukebox.com

 

[pharoahwarrior]

I use "skymusic" and it works flawlessly. However, I only have 10 gigs of music in the cloud.

 

[weaverly]

I recently started using SmartPlayer for this. You can connect it to Soundcloud, Google Drive, and SkyDrive. You simply save folders/tracks as playlists from these sources, and then you can stream them as playlists. Haven't had any trouble with it yet, but haven't been running it too hard, either. You can also connect it to your own servers and play music on other devices (XBOX, smart TVs, etc).

Smart Player | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)