I have an iPod touch 8GB which I rarely use for music, mostly podcasts and videos. When I listen, I do so at home, so to save space I decided to ditch most of the physically stored music on the player and set up Simplify Media to stream instead.

The app itself costs $2.99 at the time of this writing and the computer side software was free. After importing all my music to iTunes and de-select most of them (so they don’t try to sync to the iPod) the only thing left was to create an account and import the iTunes library.

The software doesn’t need iTuens to be open to work and the background app that runs the server uses just 6MB of RAM when idling but do use a bit of the CPU when streaming. It streams via the Simplify Media account over the Internet, which means you can access your music from anywhere there’s an internet connection as long as the computer is on but it also means it’s a bit slower to buffer than if it used the local network (but then of course it wouldn’t work anywhere else).

It’s really extremely simple to set up and use, any idiot could do it. No tinkering with IPs, port forwarding or anything, it just works. At $2.99 for the whole thing it’s an amazing deal, especially if you have an iPhone and a data plan with a decent cap. 5GB is however the norm for caps these days, which means up to about 80 hours of streaming if that was all you used the data for. The battery would drain quickly though.

Bottom line, it works well and it’s cheap. At last I don’t have to reserve a few GB for music on my iPod anymore, since I very rarely use the music anyways.