Apple mulls 'virtual iPod'

To the music lover, the iPhone and the iPod Touch present a problem.

Being equipped with a built-in iPod, both devices - better known as a phone and a web-surfer - can in theory assume a side role as music players.

The snag is that in comparison with some of the 'no-frills' iPods out there - witness the iPod classic, with its gargantuan 160GB hard drive - the storage is relatively meagre: 8GB or 16GB on the iPhone, and a maximum 32GB on the iPod Touch.

Apple may well be hatching a solution to this problem: it has filed a patent application for a technology that would allow both devices to stream media that is stored on the owner's PC via a wireless network. In short, it's what might be called a virtual iPod.

Apple's patent application is for a piece of software that would store only what is known as a song's 'metadata' - the bare bones of the song file - on the iPhone. When the owner pressed play on a track, the device would - via wi-fi or the phone network - command the owner's PC to stream the full track, meaning that the song could be heard remotely.

The metadata of a track consume only a fraction of the space of the track itself - their main purpose is to identify the song file to the owner's computer when the owner requests to play it. If an iPhone owner were to store only songs' metadata on the device, he or she would in theory be able to play a far greater range of songs than the memory is capable of storing.

As described on a patent application filed by Apple and seen by the AppleInsider website: "A personal computer can be turned on and connected to the internet to enable a portable device to access the media items stored on the personal computer." After being played, the songs could be deleted from the iPhone, the patent application suggests.

Some big questions remain. iPod Touch owners would have to be in a wi-fi area to listen to their music - and there are hardly enough of them to think this could be anywhere near a dependable service.

The iPhone, of course, has the benefit of connecting to the internet via a 3G connection, but again, the network is intensely unreliable - even in built-up areas such as London - and genuine, spontaneous streaming of media such as video and music via 3G remains a far-off dream.

There is also an environmental issue: namely that turning the iPhone into something which slurps content wirelessly from a remote PC encourages the owner to leave the computer on constantly. (And PCs already account for a significant chunk of the energy wasted in the information, communications and technology sector.)

Still, it confirms - if there was any doubt - the vision Apple has for the iPhone: not just as a phone or a web browser, but as a device which delivers all kinds of content and services to a user via a wireless connection.

Comments

[Josh Guilfoyle]

There are existing solutions that already offer this functionality on phones and even other devices as well. I have written one called Five for the upcoming Android platform, which is already fully functional as of April, found here: http://five.googlecode.com. My project is free of vendor lock-ins and uses an open architecture to hopefully operate on a wide array of phones, platforms, and networks.

Commercially available options also exist. The most well known is probably The Orb [http://www.orb.com].

This patent is unlikely to be enforceable as it is easy to demonstrate prior art in this case, though Apple's introduction into this market may ultimately be helpful to all of the similar projects (such as mine) hoping to launch soon.

[Dom]

There is a multitude of software and hardware apps that have being doing this for years. Yet i have no doubt the the Apple sheep who can only cope with what they are spoon fed will be like well done for inventing this apple, here is my cash. Its a funny old world.

[Oli_F]

@Dom.

Why do you need to insult people who like Apple products? Sometimes people just like well designed things. It's a shame that upsets you so much.

Perhaps you could mention one or two of these 'multitude of apps' that you claim have had this functionality for years. Why haven't we heard about them?

The only really popular ones I can think of are: Last FM, Pandora and all the other net-radio apps on, er, the...iPhone.

[Paul Webster]

One possible example of prior art ... the old TurtleBeach Audiotron worked something like this.
The metadata was called a table-of-contents. On power-up, the Audiotron looked for the file - and if present it read it into memory on the device ... which it then used to drive the menu (e.g. to provide searching for artist/track etc).
If there was no TOC then it scanned all of the media files. given the length of the scanning process when working with a large library, I expect most users were generating TOCs, either using the media manager software from TurtleBeach or one of the handful of 3rd-party tools that could generate the same format.

The Reciva-based internet radio devices have something similar - the radio can write out a metadata cache file to the LAN. A difference here is that the radio generates the metadata file rather than an external app.

Also - don't the Sonos devices replicate meta data to the playback devices to provide faster access?

Is it sufficiently novel to have the metadata stored permanently on the playback device? I'd have thought not.