Audiogalaxy Music Streaming App

I’ve tried a few different apps for streaming music from my computer to other devices.  The latest is Audiogalaxy.  Once a file sharing peer to peer service, Audiogalaxy now offers what some are incorrectly calling a cloud music service.  What Audiogalaxy does is stream music files from your computer to any remote device, such as my Android phone.  How does it compare to the others?

Some others I’ve tried have had shortcomings.  Either their online web application does not work well, or the sound quality suffers.  Audiogalaxy makes use of the Ogg Vorbis codec, and the streams I’ve heard sound very good from any source, whether it be my WMA10 Pro files, FLAC, or MP3.  The garbled sound quality of the others is absent in Audiogalaxy.  Still not perfect, as an already compressed file such as WMA or MP3 will be lossy compressed a second time, but the application must use higher quality settings than the others do.  (Your device will pre-buffer the downloaded file, so you should not get dropouts during playback.)

On your computer, you choose which media directories to point Audiogalaxy, and it will update the online website application in the background over a period of time.  (I believe it took a couple of days to fully upload the 41,000+ song library from my computer.)  The online version needs some help:  I sometimes have multiple versions of an album on the computer (as FLAC, and as WMA 10 Pro for the Zune library), and it will show a 12-song album with 24 songs, each song duplicated once.  If this flaw were fixed, and some of my own file tagging were honored, the web application would be much better.

The web application, which you an log into from any computer with a web browser, is also a player.  Playing back your library through speakers or headphones is as easy as dragging files to your playlist and pressing the Play button.  One neat feature they have in addition to a shuffle feature is a “Genie.”  After your playlist runs out, the Genie will choose similar songs from your library to play back.

The Android application is rather straightforward:  you can easily browse your entire library on the phone.  You select which songs to add to what amounts to your “now playing” playlist, and it then buffers the track and begins playing.  The playlist is easily edited, and is just as easily cleared out to create a new one.  You can also create playlists on your web application and use them in the Android player.  I believe the player also supports Last.FM scrobbling as well.