If you’re like me and have been collecting digital music since the early 2000s, you might want to listen up. Style Jukebox is launching a new Web app and a revamped iPhone app to stream all your tunes in the same format you uploaded them.
While Style Jukebox was previously available only on Windows desktops and mobile platforms, the new Web-based player lets users upload and play tracks from their browser on Mac and Linux, without the need to install another app.
Meanwhile, the new iPhone app sports a fresh look and notable features including on-the-fly transcoding that maintains the bitrate of your music files during playback. You can also download tracks to your iPhone for offline playback.
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Here’s how it works: upload your tracks (MP3, WMA, AAC or OGG; premium users can also upload lossless FLAC or M4A (ALAC) files too) via Style Jukebox’s Windows desktop app or the Web player, and you can then access your music library to stream or download tracks at their maximum quality on another desktop or device.
The free plan lets you save up to 3,000 songs and link two devices to your account, while the premium plan at $24.99 per year adds room for up to 25,000 songs, each up to 1GB in size, and supports 10 devices per account.
Style Jukebox isn’t really the first service of its kind: Amazon’s Cloud Player lets you store up to 250,000 songs for the same premium price — but it’s only available in select countries and transcodes your music to a lower bitrate and smaller file size, even when you download tracks.
At present, Style Jukebox’s desktop app includes more features that are standard on other music players, including an equalizer and song metadata editing, while the Web and mobile apps are fairly basic. However, they do make good on the promise of delivering your music library via the cloud, just as you uploaded them.
Founder Ionut Antiu, who began working on Style Jukebox back in high school, says that the company has plans to team up with hardware manufacturers, and is working to support Qualcomm’s AllPlay streaming platform this year too. In addition, Antiu hopes to offer a native Mac app and the option for mobile users to stream music at a lower bitrate on cellular data.
If you’ve got a large collection of digital music scattered across hard drives and backup disks, Style Jukebox is certainly worth a look.
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