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F E A T U R E S

• OFFLINE MODE lets you listen to your music collection without an internet connection.
• MULTITASKING lets you listen to your music while doing other things on your iOS4 device, like checking your mail or browsing the web.
• FAVORITES organizes all your favorite tracks in a single playlist that is stored on our servers and lets you quickly and easily mark tracks as a favorite, even when you are temporarily offline.
• HIGH RESOLUTION ARTWORK makes your music collection come to life.
• LAST.FM INTEGRATION allows you to scrobble the tracks you listen to.
• SWITCH BETWEEN ACCOUNTS by shaking your device and signing in as a different user.
• SEARCH your collection based on title, artist, label, etc.

C R E D I T S

We'd like to thank all beta testers and contributors: Matt Downham, Anthony Mirelli, Andreas Kern, Sam Richard, Scott Shaw and Ola Borgström.

Today we are very proud to announce a couple of much requested new features, as well as a couple of really awesome surprises that is going to take us to a whole new level.

New features:

• New look and feel
• Much improved public profiles, now with full player UI
• Upload custom artist artwork and edit artist biographies
• Download releases as ZIP archives
• Comment, discuss and review releases
• Collaboration with Swedish music label Service

The last item on that list is perhaps the most exiting for us as it is the first step towards something potentially very big. So, let us tell you a bit more about it...

The independent music label Service has been the leading designer behind Swedish pop music in the early 21st century with bands like The Embassy, Jens Lekman, The Tough Alliance, Studio and The Whitest Boy Alive. Together with Service we are today announcing a completely new and revolutionary model for artists and labels to monetize their work and to connect with their fan base.

The idea is very simple. By subscribing to your favorite label for a very low yearly or monthly fee you get all new releases, as well as exclusive members only releases and other benefits directly in your Bitspace library. When the label makes a new release you are instantly notified and can listen to the release from the Bitspace player, or download it as a ZIP archive.¹ In other words: you own the music that you pay for and you get to do whatever you want with it. 100% percent of the revenue from your subscription goes directly to the label and the artists. Compare that with iTunes where the artist only gets $0.94 per sold album, or Spotify where the artist only gets $0.00043 per played album.²

We hope that this new model will help music fans to engage more intimately with their favorite artists and labels, without paying much more than they already do buying downloads at iTunes or subscribing to streaming music services. Our ambition is also to help artists and labels to connect with fans in a better way than what is possible in many other new streaming services where the pay for small and medium sized artists and labels are absurdly low and where music as an intimate experience gets heavily diminished. We have tried to design a model for digital music that actually works and is in some ways comparable to the model for live music, in that you pay for the "connection" with the artist rather than for "access".

Service is the first label that we are announcing this collaboration with and we have worked very closely with Service when designing this new model to ensure that it is going to be a kick ass success. But we are of course already working on adding even more interesting labels to the portfolio. All labels will initially be hand picked and curated to ensure top quality and a long term collaboration, but if you want to know more about how you can get your own label on Bitspace, please contact us at hello@bitspace.se.

http://bitspace.at/service — Browse the Service catalogue and subscribe to the Service clan (€15 per year).

(1) Releases you obtain from subscriptions does not count towards your storage quota. I.e. you can store as many such releases as you want on a free plan. Only music you upload yourself is included when calculating your used storage.

(2) http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

We're heading off to the ATP festival in England tomorrow. It's curated by Matt Groening, the creator of Simpsons and Futurama, and we are looking forward to a great weekend with a lot of incredible music and partying.

Follow our adventures at http://bitspace.at/atp

Ever wanted to know exactly what your friends have in their music collection? Or what about wanting to show off your awesome taste in music and the new cool bands you're a fan of?

With public profiles you can get your own fans. Your public profile is a way for you to share your music taste and to let your friends follow what you upload and listen to. Your friends can follow you on Bitspace, just like they follow you on Twitter and get notified when you upload something new. They can also browse your entire music collection, read about the artists you like and see what tracks you love.

You can find your public profile at bitspace.at/username.

You can of course completely disable your public profile if you want. Just go to "Profile" in your account settings and unselect the "Enable my public profile" option. You can also edit your biography and website info there.

After being public for a bit more than a month we have now collected enough usage data and gained enough confidence to finally open up the Bitspace Free accounts to the public. An invitation is no longer needed, so now you can try out Bitspace even if you don't want to make the upfront commitment to sign up for a 30 day free trial on a payed account.

You still get a lot more storage and features like Last.fm scrobbling and more reliable streaming speeds on the payed accounts, but besides that a free account is a good way to start out.

You can sign up for a free account here.

We just published the first version of the Bitspace API. This first iteration lets anyone write tools and applications that upload music to Bitspace using the Upload API.

An official reference implementation in Ruby is available as well as an unofficial libbitspace library written in C++ by Casey Link.

bitspace-upload.rb – http://gist.github.com/321964
libbitspace – http://github.com/bitspace/libbitspace

We are very exited to see what cool new stuff you people will create using the API. To learn more about the Bitspace API head over to our new Developerland.

For commercial uses of the API please contact us at hello@bitspace.se.

We have finally caved in and added support for Firefox. So now you can access and play your Bitspace library on computers that does not have Safari or Chrome installed.

The Firefox support uses the Flash Player plug-in instead of the much nicer HTML5 audio tag. That means that you can only listen to MP3 and AAC files in Firefox. There is no support for Ogg, Flac or WMA. The Flash Player can also be a bit moody and buggy from time to time. It is known to hang or crash your browser if you try to play tracks that are very long. It is also very memory hungry. The HTML5 audio tag does not have these problems.

The reason we have avoided implementing Firefox support until now is simple. Mozilla have for political and ideological reasons only supported the Ogg codec for native audio playback in Firefox. Simply put, their opinion is that because the MP3 and AAC codecs are patent encumbered and requires licensing fees to implement they are not suitable for use on the web, which should remain a free and open forum.

The basic problem with that reasoning is of course that the web has never actually been neither free nor open when it comes to media formats. The GIF patent is just one example. The proliferation of Flash and other proprietary plug-ins is another.

The only sane solution to the holy HTML5 codec war seems to be a pragmatic solution that all parties can benefit from and that results in the best end user experience. Which in the end is the only thing that really matter. There simply is no point in fighting over something that no one in the end wants to use.

The pragmatic solution is of course what Webkit and Safari has been doing all along, to simply use the underlying codec support in the OS instead of implementing a full codec stack in the browser. Safari uses Quicktime to do that and doing it like that has many benefits. One is that it becomes very simple to support more obscure media formats. That is how we can support native playback of Flac and WMA directly in the browser for example. You simply install a Quicktime codec in your system and voilà.

John Gruber recently wrote an excellent analysis of the problem over at Daring Fireball that I really recommend that you read if you're interested in the politics behind of all of this.

If you have a payed subscription plan you can now invite your friends to Bitspace Free.

• Bitspace Basic accounts get 2 invitations.
• Bitspace Standard accounts get 4 invitations.
• Bitspace Premium accounts get 8 invitations.

Spread the love!

Today we are announcing our official public beta launch. That means that Bitspace will now be open for anyone to try out!

Bitspace is completely free of charge for the first 30-days and you can cancel your subscription at any time without incurring any further cost. We believe this is more than enough time to try out the service and if you decide that you want to continue to use Bitspace you won't have to do anything more, just keep using it and we will charge you automatically every month.

We have three different subscription plans that only differ on the amount of storage that they allow:

• Bitspace Basic - 10 GB - €3.99/month
• Bitspace Standard - 25 GB - €7.99/month
• Bitspace Premium - 50 GB - €14.99/month

All payed accounts also include...

• A worldwide professional Content Delivery Network (CDN) for low latency playback and very high streaming speeds.
• Last.fm integration - scrobble your played tracks to your Last.fm account.
• Personal technical support during office hours (central european time).

Thank you for your interest in our service,
The Bitspace Team

If you haven't already read the stunningly great review of Bitspace on MacStories you should do that right away: http://www.macstories.net/reviews/bitspace/

We have a new cool feature that we want to share with you.

Helping you to find the music you want to listen to is one of our primary goals. We want it to be as easy and effortless as possible and we devote a lot of time and design work to making the experience perfect.

The most obvious and powerful interface for finding things is of course the search box and therefor we have decided to make the search box in the Bitspace player as useful, beautiful and fast as possible.

All the music that you upload to Bitspace gets processed and analysed by our system. Using some smart algorithms and a diverse set of data sources from around the web our system is able to intelligently categorise and index your music in ways that are practically impossible for an ordinary media player like iTunes to do. We try to figure out as much as we can about the music you own and we are constantly improving and fine tuning our algorithms to get the best possible results. All of that work is directly available to you through the search box that lets you search your music collection. You can for example try queries like "japanese", "2009", "soundtrack", "k records" or "canadian electronica NOT pop" and expect to get correct results. Isn't that great? :)

Our latest improvement to the search feature is the addition of what we call "suggestions". Suggestions is a very simple yet useful feature. When you start to type in the search box the releases most likely to match your search query will immediately popup in a beautiful looking list directly below. If the release you are looking for appears in the list you can click on it and be taken directly to its page.

The search box also support a very powerful query language that is not very different from how Google and other search engines work. You can for example use AND, OR and NOT in your search queries to combine keywords. Stay tuned for more blog posts about the query language!

The image above with the interconnected music genres is an excerpt from a wonderful artwork by artist Ward Shelley called "Rock Genres, ver. 2". You can find the full artwork on his site, along with even more beautiful and fascinating visualizations.

A popular "myth" that has been propagated since the early days of digital music is that the album as a format is dead. That in "the future" people will only listen to tracks and won't care about buying albums. The thinking is that the album format as a bundling of tracks curated by the artist does not add any substantial value to the experience of the music. And as the only natural way to represent music digitally on a computer is as individual tracks in individual MP3 files that way of looking at music has gotten more and more traction in certain circles. Especially among record labels focused on hit songs and radio time and among internet radio (or psuedo-radio) services where "playlists" seems to be the prevailing metaphor.

We think this is wrong. We believe the death of the album is greatly exaggerated. Most music was intended to be listened to in a context. By killing the album format you also largely miss out on wonderful things like album artwork and the sense of owning an "artifact" and a personal library of full length experiences, rather than a random mess of three minute hit songs.

This philosophy is the reason why Bitspace has such a strong focus on "releases". We are convinced that what the artist intended to be released as a coherent package, be it an EP or an LP or whatever, is always superior. That of course does not mean that the "radio" approach or the "DJ" approach to listening to music should be ignored. There is a place for that as well, just not as a fundamental guiding principle in how I organize my music collection.

This design decision has some important implications on the UI of the Bitspace player and how we handle your music library. We don't have a way for you to delete individual songs from your library, for example. Most interaction is centered around the concept of "releases". A release is something that is put out by an artist, and sometimes a label on a specific date with (usually) beautiful artwork meant to be associated with the music and to set the mood. In the Bitspace player we organize your music based on when it was released under the "Years" section and based on what label released the album under the "Labels" section. All the meta data required to do that is automagically fetched and handled by Bitspace when you upload songs. So you don't have to worry about tagging your files or anything like that. It just works.

I think this way of looking at music resonates very well with most people that has more than a fleeting interest in music as a creative expression, as opposed to music as a way to make money. And it is a point of view that has been largely missing from the digital music experience. We hope to change that.

There is no volume control in the Bitspace player, which might strike some of you as kind of odd. It can be argued that a volume control is a basic feature of almost all media players, it is fairly easy to implement and there seems to be no good reason not to include one. But the exclusion of a volume control from the Bitspace UI is in fact very intentional.

When we work on the UI and feature set of a project we like to apply the basic rule that all features - no matter how elementary they might seem - needs to earn their place. And to be honest, how often do you actually use the volume control in your favorite media player? And on the rare occasion that you do, how do you tend to use it?

Well, personally, 99% of the time I use to volume control buttons built into the keyboard of my MacBook to control the overall system volume. I very rarely find any use for adjusting the volume in specific programs. Sometimes I pause or turn the volume down while watching a YouTube clip in another window, but that's pretty much it. I never use it to fine tune my overall listening volume. Then again, why would I, when I can do just that much more easily by simply tweaking the system volume? And I bet that I'm not alone when it comes to this usage pattern. Which brings us to the mute button...

Mute buttons (as they have conventionally been implemented) could perhaps be among the most useless feature to ever have existed. When you think about it, why not just pause the playback if you want the sound to stop? Having a completely separate UI element doing pretty much the same job as another seem very wasteful to me. Sure you could argue that the pause button actually pauses the playback, while the mute button just silences the sound, but lets the playback continue unheard. So there is a subtle difference in function. But not in anyway enough to motivate the overhead of another button. The last thing we need is UI:s with *more* buttons.

So, with that in mind, we set out on the mission to re-invent the mute button. Actually, mute doesn't mean complete silence, as conventional implementations might lead you to believe, but rather refers to a feature of some musical instruments (like pianos) that allows the artist to dampen the timbre and volume of the sound produced by the instrument. A feature like that is actually really useful and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it. So why not take that idea and apply it to the UI of a media player?

That's just what we did. So instead of completely muting the sound our mute button will fade out the sound to about 10% of the original volume, making it possible to for example take a phone call or watch a YouTube clip while still having the music playing in the background without having to fiddle with the volume control or killing the music entirely.

10% might seem low, but we have done extensive testing before deciding on a value and 10% seems to be the sweet spot. Of course we might be wrong on this and would very much appreciate your feedback.

The new and improved mute button is available to all beta testers to try out right now. So give it a try and see what you think.

PS. Trivia: Mute is also a very nice record label with wonderful acts like Fad Gadget, Einstürzende Neubauten, Depeche Mode and Sonic Youth in their catalogue. You should check them out! DS.

We are moving away from Facebook Connect. In preparation of the public beta launch that will be announced soon, we are asking all of our beta testers to add a username and password to their account. You will be using this username and password combination to sign in to Bitspace instead of your Facebook account from now on.

The next time you sign in using Facebook Connect you will be greeted by a page asking you to add user credentials to you account. Fill in a username and a password that you want to use to access Bitspace and then click on "Save credentials". After you do this the upgrade process is complete and you will be redirected to the Bitspace player as usual. You will only have to do this once!

Facebook Connect will continue to work until the public beta is announced and the feature will then be removed in favour of the traditional username/password sign in method. To sign in using your new username and password you use the "Sign in" button next to the "Connect with Facebook" button in the header above.

If you have any questions or feedback you can always contact us at beta@bitspace.se or using the support forum.

We apologize for any inconveniences that this might cause and hope that you will continue to use and enjoy the service.

Thank you!
The Bitspace Team

Hi everyone! We have some new exiting features we want to share with you.

• Last.fm scrobbling - We are proud to introduce full integration with the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler service. Scrobbling has become an integral part of the way you listen to music and a world without the personalized recommendations and community features that Last.fm offers would be a much duller world. Simply click the big grey "Last.fm" box that is on the lover half of your dashboard when you login to Bitspace and connect your account to Last.fm. There's not much more to it. The process is completely secure (you don't need to give us your Last.fm password) and the Bitspace player will start scrobbling the music you listen to immediately.


• MP4 support - We now have full support for MP4/AAC/M4A files (the kind of files you get when you rip music with iTunes or buy iTunes Plus tracks in the iTunes Music Store). Uploading MP4 files work exactly the same as when you upload MP3 files. We have full support for meta data like album artist, compilation and album covers, just as you would expect. The meta data not found in your files will be downloaded from third party databases like MusicBrainz, Dicogs and Last.fm. So don't worry if your tags are incomplete or incorrect, we'll fix 'em for you!


• Other file formats - We have also added experimental support for other file formats like Ogg Vorbis, WMA and Flac. Uploading these kind of files should work without problems, but you will need to install special Quicktime codecs for the playback to work. Also, the meta data that we read from them will not be as rich as what we extract from the MP3 and MP4 files, but that will definitely improve in the future.


• Improvements all over the place - We have also made a bunch of minor improvements and fixes based on feedback from our beta users that we hope will make the overall experience of using Bitspace even better.

Please be aware that all new features are still considered a part of the beta and as such can be expected to change or be improved without further notice. All new features are well tested and should be stable enough for daily use, but if you happen to discover anything that resembles a bug or have any usability concerns we would very much appreciate the feedback. Please use Get Satisfaction to report your findings!

Live long and prosper,
The Bitspace Group

Bitspace is a completely new product that lets you store your entire music collection online - in the "cloud" - and listen to it from anywhere at any time.

We are very proud to finally announce the Bitspace private beta. We have worked hard to create what we believe will become your personal music hub. A way to store almost infinite amounts of music both cheaper and more conveniently than any other solution.

But we are not all about storage. We also want to create a superior music experience. We want the way you navigate your music library to feel natural and logical and we want the music you own in digital format to be just as beautiful as the music you have in your bookshelf. We also want to make organizing and categorizing music easy. We will make sure your meta data is correct and kept up to date automatically. So that you can focus on what is really important; enjoying your music.

The purpose of the private beta is to gather feedback on the service and to stress test the technical infrastructure before the official public beta launch sometime early next year. The private beta will be limited to a few select people that will all receive 1GB free storage space and full use of the service. The free accounts will remain invitation only during the public beta, but we will send out a lot more invites. To get further ahead in the queue and get an invite before everyone else you can become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. We will also open up the payed account types which will allow you to sign up without an invite.

We hope you will enjoy what we have created!

Regards,
The Bitspace Group