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Although the memory capacity of mobile devices is getting ever greater and memory cards ever cheaper, there will always be a class of user for whom the storage on a mobile device is just never enough. Be it obsessive music collectors, those with huge archives of podcasts or even audio-book aficionados. 8GB, 16GB, 32GB. It doesn't matter. We have a few hundred GB of music and we just can't carry it all around with us. So, we can either take the iTunes approach and create endless play-lists and keep syncing these back and forth to our devices or....?
Or we can use a streaming service like Didiom Pro. With Didiom a piece of server software sits on the PC at home and makes available all the music, podcasts, play-lists and everything else on our PC to anyone logged into our Didiom account. Then, with a simple piece of software on our phones, our entire music collection is always with us - anywhere in the world. So, how does it work?
Supplier: DIDIOM Pro
Mobile Platform: Windows Phone and Blackberry devices
Desktop Platform: Windows 7, Vista, XP SP2. Mac OSX available in 2 months
Price: $0.99/month or $9.99/year
Device used for review: SE XPeria X1i
Introduction
Didiom Pro is both a piece of software to stream all your music out onto the Internet and a service to manage this stream securely as well as the client software on your phone to select the music you want to stream and control it just like any other MP3 application.
Installation and Activation
First off, you need to create an account and select a payment plan. There is a "free" option but this limits you to five tracks at 64kbps as a trial. Once you have an account there are two things to download. One is the server software for your PC (Mac OSX version available in a couple of months). This is a standard windows .exe file and installs a small piece of software into the windows system tray. You then have to sign in to this with the account details created earlier and tell it where your music is. Didiom is set up to use the default location but if you have moved your music library off to another drive or a server you'll need to tell it where to look. You have three spaces to enter a location so if your collection is spread around a bit you should be okay. These are nominally called "Music", "Podcasts" and "Audio-books" but it doesn't really make any difference. All that done and the server software will now set off scanning your folders to build up a library of your music collection etc.
The other download from earlier is the mobile client. You can choose to download a .cab file straight to your device or use an exe. You will have to launch the exe from your desktop and allow it to install to your device over Active-sync or WMDC. With either method you end up with the Didiom client software on your mobile device. The first time you run it you will need to set the user-name and password from your account but you can tell it to remember these, to save having to enter them every time. You are now set up and ready to go.
Finding Music
Of course, the whole point of Didiom is that it gives those of us with massive music collections access to it all. So, it's pretty much going to live or die by it's ability to allow you to manage huge libraries of complex music collections. The Didiom interface could be described in one of two ways. If you were feeling harsh you might call it spartan but lets stick with simple. It certainly doesn't let fancy graphics or transition effects get in the way of you finding your music and with just four buttons across the centre of the screen, finger friendly it certainly is.
The browse button takes you to a screen asking you to pick from a fairly standard list of categories. Albums, Artists, Podcasts, Audio-books and Play-lists. I'd like to see genre or composer in there myself but it keeps down on the clutter and makes life simple. Besides, the larger your collection gets, the less likely you are to have sensible genre tags in your MP3 meta-data. Selecting, for example, albums brings up a list of the first few albums in your collection. My X1i fits on 11 - different devices with lower screen resolutions will have fewer. Arrows at the top allow you to scroll back and forth through screens of album names and the refresh is pretty quick. Two to three seconds even over an EDGE connection. There is no album art as this would, presumably, slow things down massively.
One slight annoyance is that the albums are always numbered 1-11 rather than representing the real number of albums. Then again, if you got into the hundreds or thousands the number would start to take up too much space leaving less for the album name so maybe it is a sensible decision. It just feels a little odd. However, browsing is useless for large collections. We need to search.
So, back to the main page with those four buttons and this time lets tap search. We are presented with the same list of six categories as last time so lets go with Artists. Now we get a fairly standard "googly" search box. I typed in "Leo" and tapped the search button. As expected, this brought back results for "Kings of Leon". However, I wasn't expecting it to also return "Eric Clapton" (turns out Leon Russell played on "Let it Rain"). The more hits the better and the speed with which it returned results for partial string matches was very impressive.
Tapping the name of any of the artists gives me the choice to either stream everything by that artist or to list their tracks. This is a bit strange. I want to see their albums. Yes, I know I could have searched for the album name but what if I can't remember it? This seems like a fairly obvious omission so hopefully it will be remedied in a future update. Anyway, clicking stream takes us to the player and lists all the tracks by that artist. In the first version I was sent this list was alphabetical. However, a recent update seems to have changed this to album order - although you still can't see the album titles so it is difficult to tell.
The Player
The player is incredibly basic but does the job with one minor omission. There is a large Play/Pause button in the middle and well spaced back/stop/skip buttons around the outside of a graphic that bares a remarkable resemblance to the iPod click-wheel. The current track title is displayed along the bottom (though not the artist or album) and that is it. For me, the big omission is a random or shuffle button. If I'm not going to be allowed to listen to artists by album then at least let me shuffle the tracks. Even I'm not sad enough to want to listen to my music in alphabetical order.
Formats
Didiom Pro lets you stream and download audio files in the format of WMA (both DRM-free and DRM-protected), MP3, WAV, AAC, M4A and Ogg Vorbis, as well as iTunes play-lists, and play-lists in WPL, PLS and M3U formats. It does not support DRM-protected iTunes tracks or audible audio-books as these are also DRM-protected. Didiom Pro will stream music at 64, 96 or 128Kbps or can download your music direct to your device keeping the original format and bit-rate.
Settings
There is only one Settings screen in the client. This allows you to select the streaming bit-rate and choose a downloads folder. That's it. The server side is only slightly more interesting. Here you can choose whether or not Didiom Pro will auto-start when Windows does, ask it to sign in for you automatically and choose whether to use UPnP or port forwarding. If you choose port forwarding you will need to select a port. Didiom definitely don't believe in fussy interfaces and pages of complicated menu options.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Easy, cheap access to your music
- Editable entry list
- stream or download
- very simple interface
Cons
- Requires unlimited data plan
- PC needs to be left on
- No shuffle function
- Lacking album access via the artist
Conclusion
Didiom Pro seem to have taken inspiration from an old set of British TV adverts for a product called Ronseal - it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a great combination of software and service that provides quick, easy access to your music collection from anywhere in the world - as long as your PC is switched on and, for me, that is its one major down-side. I have switched all my music onto a NAS device. This comes with an account which allows me to stream the music from any internet connected device with a browser - and all I have to leave switched on is the NAS. Leaving the PC switched on all day every day would just send shivers down my electricity bill. On the other hand, the idea of being able to access all my music from anywhere in the house DOES appeal. Every room on our house has some kind of music device. All bar one of them has a 3.5mm line-in (the shower radio being the exception - in case you were wondering). With Didiom Pro running on the PC in the study I can quickly call up some music on my phone, connect the headphone socket on the phone to the line-in on the stereo/radio/TV etc. and I can have my full music collection anywhere in the house. The interface is simplicity itself, at $0.99 a month it is dirt cheap and, if you have an all-you-can-eat data plan and a decent sized music collection it really could prove to be just the thing you were looking for.
(Thanks to Didiom for the review account/software and Tom Adler for his help in answering questions etc.)
