It is not cost effective to have just 1000 people using a system of audiosafe (from a cost per user perspective)
It is not cost effective to have just 1000 people using a system of audiosafe (from a cost per user perspective)
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
Oh... too bad, AudioSAFE seemed like the ideal place to back up a music collection: unlimited space for audio files and you'd only pay should you need / want to restore the collection.
But I agree with Tisogro, I think it was a problem of visibility outside this website. I think it would have been great to contact known tech blogs about it, just to let them know of the service, not to actually make them blog about it; that'd come by itself given the characteristics of the service. I had envisioned a great future for a service like this.
Given the time (Aug. 2013) maybe this approach can still be taken to get it going.
Or even adding a "play anywhere" feature that'd allow you to listen to your collection in any (any is pretty loose, maybe some) of your devices to dress it up and appeal to even more people.
That is sad news, Spoon.
From the outside looking in, with no visibility into your business, I have to agree with the others who've suggested that there would have been many more users if only the service had been more widely advertised or publicized. I mean, it's such a disruptive technology -- even Amazon Glacier charges more for storage, and MUCH more for usefully rapid retrieval -- and it fills a need that nearly everyone has. While iCloud/iTunes Match provides (imperfectly) some of the benefit of AudioSAFE for people with small, lossy collections or whose music came mostly from iTunes, it's worthless as a backup service for anyone who has a lossless collection or a large collection of songs not purchased from Apple, or for anyone who has significantly edited his files' tags.
Now that AudioSAFE's initial bugs have been worked out, I don't think it would be hard to convince a large audience to give it a try. The benefits -- limitless free storage, your files at your quality with your tags, and simple unattended background uploading -- easily outweigh the one complaint, which is the slow upload time. And even that wouldn't be a problem for people with huge collections, if you still offered hard-drive shipment as an option for 700GB+. And the upload times would decrease with usage, anyway.
Plus, for people who have no music backup now, anything would be better than nothing, even if it took months to get a complete copy to the AudioSAFE servers.
Your business is, of course, your business. But I wish there had been more of an effort to promote the service. I'm going to move to Glacier, I guess, but I won't be happy about it.
Hmmm. I received an email today telling me that my AudioSAFE account was about to be terminated because I hadn't logged in for 6 months.
TBH, I'd completely forgotten that I'd signed up because when I first looked at it I saw that I'd have to have my windows PC (which happens to be in the room I sleep in) on 24/7 for it to work as there was no client for my Linux server or my NAS. For this reason I put it off.
Perhaps if I'd had a nudge before now (i.e. any time in the last 6 months!) I may have used it.
I've got to agree with others on here. You need to advertise firstly. Also you need to engage with users who have shown an interest but may need a nudge (like me).
If you're keeping the servers to re-purpose, then why not keep some of the capacity for AudioSAFE and increase that proportion as the users increase, after some decent viral marketing?!
That's like a more reasonable idea than just terminating the service. This service has great potential. But I'm starting to think it's not just because lack of marketing, but also suddenly lack of motivation from the responsible team. They have advertised just on dbpoweramp.com and are already giving up. And this point is strategically not being mentioned. Goddammit, just because I don't have "dBpoweramp Guru" written below my nickname doesn't mean my opinion doesn't matter.
Spoon, at least tell us what you will be doing with "more than 2% of world's audio" that many of us spend months uploading to your servers just to receive this notice.
The servers will be wiped, we have no need for the audio.
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
I must say the way this subject is being treated with total lack of interest from the responsible team greatly disappoints me. Spoon, I've send you a PM requesting a bit more care to the replies in this thread and to be more comprehensive.
But if I can't get your attention to write a few more words than one or two-liners responses, I will not pay attention to your products.
For now I will stop using and recommending any dBpoweramp products and tell my friends and familiars to do the same.
We have made a decision, if you cannot accept that decision then I am sorry. It is not possible to scale back audiosafe, as 200 users still require $100K worth of hardware + $30K a year to host that hardware...
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
fwiw I think Spoon does amazing work in addressing concerns and replying on these forums (it's hard to believe he is only one guy). Given his success with dbpoweramp, I'm sure he considered the possibilities and there was no clear way to make audiosafe feasible. And of course he had the most at stake. (--With some posters, I'm amazed at how cranky and unreasonable people can get in their demands.)
Also it is assumed there is no on going behind the scenes work to keep audiosafe operating.
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
I'm sad to hear about the termination of this service. But its not cost effective, so there is no other solution....
Switched to crashplan now. It's not free like Audiosafe, but it's unlimited in storage Space and accepts all data.
We had a hardware failure of the main hardware firewall (this is a 1Gbps filewall), we have plugged in our lessor backup hardware firewall, but have left audiosafe off because this firewall does not have the through put.
It will be restarted once the proper replacement arrives.
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
I'm sad to hear AudioSafe did not work out. As one of the 300 loyal users, I want to thank you for providing the service and daring to invent and build such a system. The small number of users explains why so much of my collection wasn't deduplicated though - almost paradoxically, more users would have led to a better upload experience and perhaps more interest in turn. I learned about AudioSafe on the HydrogenAudio forums - definitely a good place to look for early adopters and beta testers, but not necessarily to get a mass of users.
I suppose the decision has already been made, but I wonder how things might have gone if there had been a "proper" homepage and some actual advertisement. It's good to hear that you can re-use at least some of the work and equipment for other projects. Maybe you could sell the code / technology to some company which already has the userbase to use it profitably. In any case I hope you will recover well from this setback.
AudioSAFE will be brought back online in the next 4 months, the design showed some limitations which require about 2 months of work to correct, there is the opportunity to do this now and correct these limitations (which would hinder AudioSAFEs ability to scale).
Existing data on the system will be migrated to the new design.
Spoon
www.dbpoweramp.com
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