January 5th, 2005

One of the first things I do when I go to someone's house is check out their CD shelf. I think that tells a lot about a person. You can often tell how old they are by identifying the cluster of time that accounts for the most CDs and then subtracting 19 years, since the teenage years are typically the most active musically. And you can often tell when they had kids by when they stop buying new music. But mostly, it's fun to compare CDs and size to see if the tastes overlap, and to see who has the biggest music collection.

Browse through the top locker users

I thought it would be interesting to compare Oboe lockers on MP3tunes.com, so today we're launching Lockerenvy.com. Here you can examine a list that ranks personal music lockers by several characteristics.

One list ranks each locker based on size. I have the 307th largest music locker with about 900 tracks, but I have a few more I need to sync up to my locker from a computer at home. If I can get to 1000 I will graduate from a "Back Stager" classification to a "Roadie." Even after that I'll be nowhere near the leaders, who have thousands of tracks and who have classifications
like Frontman, Superstar and Legend.

View the most popular sideload tracks

Another list shows Sideload rankings. Sideloading is a quick way to load an audio file you find on a web page directly into your locker by simply clicking a small music note icon. Software included with Oboe adds this music note icon next to audio files on web sites. Clicking the icon () will load the music file to your Oboe locker directly from the web site you are viewing. Instead of having to first download the track and then upload it, you just click once and the track is moved sideways across the internet. There are millions of legal tracks from artists, labels and online music sites, and amazingly the
largest Oboe lockers have sideloaded thousands of tracks.

All the Oboe lockers listed on Lockerenvy.com are anonymous unless the owner wants to add a nickname through their Preferences to reveal their identity (or taunt others!). My nickname is MR. Future versions of Lockerenvy may allow for browsing actual artists and song titles in other people's lockers. Let me know if your locker is bigger than mine, and tell me in the forums of any ideas you might have for the future of Lockerenvy.com.

-- MRThe Michael's Minute Meter

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