Stream audio to your iPhone…using Windows of all things

With solid digital audio capabilities plus WiFi and a cellular connection, you’d think the iPhone could usurp the love that SanDisk gets with their Sansa Connect DAP. The Sansa Connect uses WiFi to download Yahoo! Music tunes and until the iPhone can do that directly over the air from iTunes, iPhone owners are stuck with the tunes they can cram onto the 4- or 8GB flash drive. Or are they?

I started digging around to see if you could stream tunes over the web right on the iPhone and this led to a bunch of opportunities. I’ll highlight one of them here as it’s a way to access gigs and gigs of your digital collection, thereby overcoming the flash storage limit of your iPhone.

Originally, I was thinking I’d have to put my audio files on a server and build an interface. In fact, I did upload one track and created a link to it on a web page. Using Safari on the iPhone, I was able to navigate to the page and click the link for the audio file; sure enough, a QuickTime player opened up on the iPhone and I was streaming The Beatles at 192kbps. It worked fine over WiFi and I asked Matt Miller to test it for me over EDGE. While in the vanpool on his way home, he said it worked just fine but I figured I’d probably have to limit my audio encodings to 128kbps at most. [Sorry RIAA, please forgive me this one time, won't you?]

I also realized that I could only make this work for .mp3 and .wav formats; Safari wasn’t keen on .aac and .m4p files, which is actually surprising. In any case, as I’m going down the path to build additional functionality into a web-based player, one of our readers proved the point I often reiterate: I learn more from the readers than they learn from me.

I was Twittering about this idea when Rodfather tweeted back "I tried with Orb". Well smack my head with an "I could have had a V8!" moment! Why reinvent the wheel when Orb (or other solutions) already exist?!? It had been about two years since I last used Orb, but when it first hit the web I was using it extensively to stream audio, video and television to my mobile devices. For those not familiar with Orb: it’s a free server application that runs on a Windows PC. Orb provides access to your files and folders over the web and optimizes any streaming based on your connection speed.

Sure enough, I installed Orb on my Vista-based Samsung Q1P UMPC, a 1.0 GHz touchscreen tablet with 2 GB of RAM and 7-inch display. Previously I had used this mighty-mite to stream audio to my Xbox 360, HDTV and surround sound system and it’s where I keep all of my digital audio files as I take this device everywhere. Once you have Orb installed, it’s easy to configure just identify which folders you want Orb to provide access to:

As you can see above, you not only get access to your music and videos, but also your documents and photos as well. Additionally, if you have a TV tuner or webcam in your host device you can stream content from them to your iPhone or other mobile device.

Once Orb is configured and running, simply use Safari on the iPhone to view http://mycast.orb.com. You’ll need to log in and once you do, you’ll see the following interface:

At this point, you can navigate to Audio and see all of the options for searching and playback: Artist, Genre, Album, Playlists, etc….I’m navigating by artist to hear Brad Paisley’s new album; bear with this country music fan, would ya?

I could have hit Play All or Shuffle as I navigated; I’ve skipped a few steps here just to cut to the chase. Once I click Play in the above screen, the QuickTime player will open and begin to stream the audio. You lose the album art at this point because it’s not shown the QuickTime player. However, you do get the typical slider control to navigate back and forth in the stream plus your standard control buttons like play/pause, volume, etc…

As I mentioned, Orb will optimize the streaming based on the connection it detects on the mobile device. Clearly this will work well over WiFi but should be usable over EDGE as well. Now that we’ve shown you the basics of Orb, let’s chat about the current contraints.

1. Orb will not work with DRM’d files. If you’re a happy iTunes customer, this solution as-is won’t help you unless you have EMI-tunes without DRM. While I personally believe that you should be allowed to remove DRM for backup purposes and for listening to your purchased tunes on different devices, this is a definite limitation. ’nuff said.

2. What if you don’t have a Windows machine to run Orb on? Well, I thought I’d be slick and get this working in Parallels. I got to the home stretch because you can use the Shared Folders feature in Parallels to store your tunes. Once you do that, just configure Orb to access that folder like so:

Once I did that, I thought I was in the clear. I have a store-bought CD that I ripped just for this purpose and the iPhone can see the tracks through Orb:

Unfortunately, when trying to play the file, I got an error on the Orb server. It suggested a Firewall issue so I tried opening port 80 for Orb as suggested. No dice. I then *gasp* turned the Firewall off in Vista under Parallels, but again, same error. I suspect this is due to the way Parallels does shared networking: my Mac is on the 192.168.x.x network but Vista under Parallels is under an entirely different scope in the 10.x.x.x range. Additionally, I’m not running the most current 3.x version of Parallels Desktop; I’m on the prior major version so you might find success here.

3. The Orb interface isn’t "iPhone-ized" meaning it can be difficult to navigate without some pinching here and there. Remember: keep your pinching to yourself and your own device; it’s not nice to pinch others. I’d love to see Orb or an Orb user create an interface better suited to the 480×320 screen.

Overall, if you’ve got a Windows box, Orb is simple way to stream audio to your iPhone. I may remove the 500+ songs from my iPhone to free up the memory and just stream them to see how well it works in practice. With the additional storage space, I can easily add another movie to the iPhone, although Orb supports streaming video as well; something I haven’t tried just yet in this configuration.

Remember that you can stream live television and a webcam through Orb as well; you’ll need a TV tuner on the host device for TV and for now, this might be a viable alternative to the lack of a web-based Slingbox client. Don’t forget that Orb provides access to documents and photos as well; you won’t be able to do much (if anything) to them, but perhaps we’ll see enhancements in the future.

Thanks to Rodfather for the simple idea I had overlooked; you saved me a ton of work! I should also mention that Windows Mobile and other devices have been able to use Orb for a few years; this solution is not specific to the iPhone. If you haven’t tried it with a mobile device it should work for Windows Mobile, Palm devices equipped with Kinoma Player 4 EX, and many cell phones. Here’s a list of supported devices.