bandwagon blog

GMail to increase attachments to 20MB from 10MB&so what?

On one of our earlier posts, we considered the possibility of using GMail as a storage platform using libgmail. One of the issues is of course attachment size (besides possible TOS issues). Increasing the attachment size to 20MB does not actually help us substantially because we would still face the possibility of chunking items > 20MB. Most music items are less than 10MB to begin with and most movies/tv shows/music videos are greater than 20MB so status quo still rules the day.

So what’s the point of this post? A reminder that we still want to incorporate GMail as one of our storage clouds. Let us know if anyone is interested in helping us code this feature.

[via]

Bandwagon Deconstructed IV: Setting up iTunes as online central server

One of Bandwagon’s main objectives besides backup and syncing is the ability to centralize all of your iTunes items on your online storage.  This allows customers with multiple Macs and multiple iTunes libraries to “share + sync”.

Example: My wife has an iBook.  My dad has an iMac.  I have a PowerBook.  We all have different libraries and we all recommend music to each other.  With bandwagon installed on all 3 Macs, I can search for what is on my wife’s and on my dad’s Macs and download what songs I want.  Under DIY+, I will be able to sync playlists among all Macs.  From their perspective, they will be able to search what I have.

All of this runs seemlessly in the background and doesn’t take additional setup or work.  You just install Bandwagon and it’s all there.   Btw, my wife and I are currently in Manila, Philippines and my dad resides in Silicon Valley.

The downside (as of the moment) is we only allow one Amazon S3 account for each Bandwagon account, which supports up to 5 Macs, which means that my wife and my dad would have to use my S3 account as well.

If you are in a similar situation, Bandwagon provides a pain-less and simple solution.

Support for up to 5 Macs

We had mentioned this before, but we wanted to make it clear.  Bandwagon DIY and DIY+ will support 5 Macs upon launch for no additional cost.  Based on feedback, most of our beta testers and early customers have at least 2 Macs so we think this will add considerable value.

Launch will be May and June, respectively, a one and two month delay due to continued testing.

New Bandwagon screenshots

Enjoy it on flickr!

S3, then ftp, then OmniDrive, then Gmail?

In our last post, we discussed Bandwagon’s storage agnostic approach.  To that end, we want to share some of our upcoming plans and get feedback.

We define Internet-based storage as cloud types.  S3 is one cloud type, ftp is yet another, etc.  We futher define each cloud type with a cloudid, a one-to-many approach.  Logically, S3 should only have one cloudid…how many people will have different S3 accounts?  A similar argument could be made to OmniDrive.

However, with ftp and Gmail, customers could have multiple ftp accounts and (most definitely) multiple Gmail accounts to store their stuff.  To that end, how do we approach the relationship of which items/files to store onto which cloud type and/or cloudids?

For example, let’s say I have 1 S3 account, 2 ftp accounts and 3 Gmail accounts.  Do we store the Celine Dion song on the S3 account or ftp or Gmail account?

One approach is to just randomize.  Another approach is to ask the customer which cloudid to “fill up” first with a max storage setting.  However, asking the customer would require an additional interface/step.  Is the tradeoff worth it?  Is there a better approach?

S3 has a permancence to it.  OmniDrive as well.  But ftp accounts can be changed or Gmail accounts deleted.

Bandwagon Deconstructed III: Storage platform agnostic

Ever since the launch of the Mosaic browser (approaching its 14th anniversary), users have become more sophisticated and demanding, resulting in an unprecedented period of product innovation specially for the Internet consumer.

With user-generated content, our digital bits (photos, music, etc.), multiple devices, more broadband to the home (some will complain it’s not fast enough, I’m one of them) and cheaper hard drives, this convergence has started a mini evolution/innovation in backup/restore and sync services.

There has never been a time when we have more digital stuff spread over our work computer, home computer, mobile phone, laptop, web sites, etc. Our target audience, music geeks, share a common problem with their growing digital collections of music, videos & tv shows, mainly backing up their various libraries to their own storage cloud and being able to restore to multiple machines, all painlessly and hassle-free.

Bandwagon was built for this very purpose and as such we support S3 (REST API) and ftp with the intention of supporting other storage clouds that use different transport protocols.

Most music geeks already have an S3 account and/or a web hosting account. By supporting S3 and ftp, our customers will be able to choose which storage platform they want to use without the need for a separate solution.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will be offering some form of online storage for mass consumption sooner or later. By building Bandwagon to support all these storage clouds, the customer, as the cliche goes, wins.

We are tempted to build Bandwagon with Gmail support using libgmail. If people are interested in this, let us know. That’s 2GB+ of free storage :)

Bandwagon Deconstructed II: Multiple libraries

I have 2 Macs, a Powerbook G4 (work) and an iBook (home). I have different music on both laptops and my wife occassionally rips her CDs on the iBook rendering me with two totally different libraries.

Bandwagon understands this common situation and will be introducing a feature that solves it: backup/restore from/to 5 different Macs.

Backup from 5 different Macs

For most busy professionals, it is not uncommon to have a work computer, a home computer and a family computer (even your spouse’s computer). With one BW account, you can backup all the iTunes on these different Macs to your own storage cloud. No need for separate licenses for each Mac.

Restore to 5 different Macs

The subheading is self-explanatory but there is a “hidden” feature to this unique restore. Let me illustrate from a personal example…

During downtime, I download psy-trance tracks to my Powerbook and find myself wanting to listen to them on my iBook at home. But I forget to email them or am too lazy to download the same track on the Web when at home.
Bandwagon resolves this issue by giving you the ability to share/sync music via the Restore pane. There you can browse and “restore” items from your different machines.

Since it is your storage, the item is saved only once (saving you space) but metadata for the “two different” items is saved thus preserving any smart playlists on either Macs. Now you can listen to the same song on 2 different Macs. It’s restoring with a sharing twist!
This is a cool and useful feature and would love to hear from others who have a similar problem.

Bandwagon Deconstructed I: Restoring

Members of the team will be posting a mostly weekly blog post on Bandwagon. We’re calling it Bandwagon Deconstructed and its aim is to educate people on what we are doing.

This is the first in the series.

“Bandwagon Deconstructed I: Restoring”
A backup service is only as good as when the sh*t hits the fan and it’s time to restore. For most files on a person’s hard drive, restoring is a very manual process of selecting (files and/or folders) and choosing where to restore it to (original directory or on the desktop).

In most cases, the metadata (data about files) to be restored is included with the actual file (e.g. EXIF data for JPEGs). And most “normal” files don’t use metadata in a meaningful way (e.g. emls, .doc, etc.) so most people don’t realize that metadata might not even be restored.

In iTunes, this is all different. All file types on the Mac OS X that support Spotlight have a metadata store and the actual file index store. This is a sample of that metadata store for a .mp3 file.

Jaruko:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Bee Gees/Unknown Album jolo$ mdls If you leave me now.mp3

If you leave me now.mp3 -------------

kMDItemAttributeChangeDate     = 2006-09-03 03:20:23 +0800

kMDItemAudioBitRate            = 128

kMDItemAudioChannelCount       = 2

kMDItemAudioSampleRate         = 44100

kMDItemAuthors                 = ("Bee Gees")

kMDItemContentCreationDate     = 2006-09-03 02:09:35 +0800

kMDItemContentModificationDate = 2006-09-03 03:20:22 +0800

kMDItemContentType             = "public.mp3"

kMDItemContentTypeTree         = (

"public.mp3",

"public.audio",

"public.audiovisual-content",

"public.data",

"public.item",

"public.content"

)

kMDItemDisplayName             = "If you leave me now.mp3"

kMDItemDurationSeconds         = 236

kMDItemFSContentChangeDate     = 2006-09-03 03:20:22 +0800

kMDItemFSCreationDate          = 2006-09-03 02:09:35 +0800

kMDItemFSCreatorCode           = 0

kMDItemFSFinderFlags           = 0

kMDItemFSInvisible             = 0

kMDItemFSIsExtensionHidden     = 0

kMDItemFSLabel                 = 0

kMDItemFSName                  = "If you leave me now.mp3"

kMDItemFSNodeCount             = 0

kMDItemFSOwnerGroupID          = 501

kMDItemFSOwnerUserID           = 501

kMDItemFSSize                  = 3777109

kMDItemFSTypeCode              = 0

kMDItemID                      = 874396

kMDItemKind                    = "MP3 Audio File"

kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2006-09-03 02:11:45 +0800

kMDItemMediaTypes              = (Sound)

kMDItemTitle                   = "If you leave me now"

kMDItemTotalBitRate            = 128

kMDItemUsedDates               = (2006-09-03 02:11:45 +0800)

But iTunes keeps an “extra” set of metadata in its XML read via iTunes Library (ITL file), a binary representation of the XML (the XML is really just an iTunes backup in case ITL gets corrupted). Beats per minute, last played, play count and my rating are just a sampling of this “extra” metadata.

Before we wrote a single line of code, one of the things we did was ask music geeks what was important to them. Updating and backing up this extra metadata was on the top of their list. It is used to create smart playlists, among other uses. Most generic backup providers (if not all) do not utilize this metadata when restoring to iTunes (they might save the XML file as a consequence of selecting the ~/Music folder) so all those hours spent cleaning up your iTunes items and playing will be all for naught (unless you restore all the changed XML files and manually corrupt the ITL file so that iTunes can use the revised XML to re-create the ITL).

One of BW’s mantra is ease of use so we built restore automation that doesn’t involve any manual intervention. This added code but presented a one-click restore that allows for seamless individual restores and all restores (and media-type only restores in the future).

Btw, when choosing the “all restores”, you can start playing restored items, no need to wait for all 10,000+ items to be restored. Both types of restores are unique to Bandwagon and gives users a sense of comfort and security that if the sh*t does hit the fan, they’ll be in a different air conditioned room.

From a bandwagon tester: “The other day I accidentally deleted some music from itunes and got it back!! whew!”

How cool!

Bloggers wanted for beta testing

Bandwagon DIY and Bandwagon DIY+ will be launching sometime in April 2007 and we are looking for some bloggers to help test. To qualify:

* Must have your own Amazon S3 account
* Must participate and contribute bug reports

You will receive a free six-month Bandwagon DIY or DIY+, depending on which version you test. If interested, leave your email. Thanks.

Revised bandwagon application service

After feedback and conversations with bloggers, customers and Mac aficionados, Bandwagon will re-launch as a DIY online iTunes backup + sync application service where you provide your own storage cloud!

Syncing support will cover 2 Macs (maybe 3 in the future :)). Sorry, no screenshots yet for the Sync pane.

Initial storage cloud support will be Amazon S3, with others to follow. Available on April 2007

We apologize in advance that this revised Bandwagon service won’t appeal to everyone but the market has spoken. The “unlimited” version is currently not economically feasible. We hope to re-launch some version of it in the future.

Pricing info:
http://ridethebandwagon.com/buy