Come to My Window

Vibe Software Lets You Share Photos and Music Files With Friends

By Walter S. Mossberg
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Sharing your digital media-photos, songs and videos-can be a hassle. People typically use e-mail to send these files around, but they often exceed the permitted size for attachments on many e-mail systems, or make mailboxes max out.

There are Web sites that allow you to post photos for viewing, and of course you can join one of the big file-sharing services, if you don't mind giving thousands of people access to your hard disk. There have been some services that allow sharing of documents, but many of the past attempts were too business-focused or techie-oriented.

Now, a small company called XFormx is offering a supposedly simple, consumer-oriented file-sharing service called the Vibe Internet Media Pad. Vibe allows friends that you invite to view selected contents of your computer's hard drive from a remote computer. Vibe works by turning the host PC into a server of sorts, then compressing and streaming your media onto the remote PC through a private Web link. Multiple friends can share your files simultaneously over this link.

Drag and Share

We've been testing Vibe, and it works pretty well, if you have the right setup and don't get stumped on some technical details.

You can download Vibe for a free 14-day trial period, after which it costs $39.95 a year, or $99 for life. The program requires a high-speed Internet connection on the host PC, which must operate on Windows 2000 or XP. After downloading Vibe, an installation walk-through instructed us to create a username and password for logging on to the Vibe account, as well as a Web address that reads http://"yourname".vibeuser.com. Once this was finished, two icons automatically appeared on the desktop, one labeled "Vibe Stuff" and another "Vibe Login."

When my assistant, Katie, clicked on the "Vibe Stuff" icon, four empty folders appeared, for music, photos, videos and other documents, which Vibe also can handle. Only files you drag into these folders can be viewed by your invitees. They can't see the rest of your hard disk.

She dragged a few MP3 files from her hard drive into the "My Music" Vibe folder, some digital pictures into Vibe's "My Pictures" folder and a Word file into the "My Documents" Vibe folder. Next, she was instructed to set up preferences. Unfortunately, one of these preferences was a techie exercise: identifying your e-mail servers.

Then the sharing began. Katie invited me and others to view her media by sending a link that permitted us to view her Vibe account. This invitation can be sent either by using an e-mail program in Vibe or by copying the link and pasting it into your e-mail or IM program.

When I clicked on this link, my Web browser opened up a special Vibe control panel-a square window that has a circular, green Play button in the lower right-hand corner, and a view of the folders I was allowed to peruse on Katie's Vibe-equipped PC.

I clicked on the "My Music" folder and was able to open up songs that Katie had dragged into the Vibe music folder on her PC and listen to them in great sound quality.

Clumsy Design

One big drawback to Vibe's music- and video-streaming process is that the files don't play right in the Vibe panel or the browser. Instead, Vibe launches the Windows Media Player to play them. This extra step of opening another application on top of Vibe is a clumsy design that crowds the screen and creates confusion as to which interface is controlling the playback.

When I opened photos in Katie's "My Photos" Vibe folder, I didn't need any other program to view them. I could see the images right in the Vibe window. This is a much easier, cleaner process. Vibe automatically configures photos to display in slide-show format.

I was able to access the files on Katie's PC from several other machines in distant locations. However, I had trouble installing Vibe on my home computer, which connects to the Internet through a router and is networked to several other PCs. XFormx says that Vibe will work on any home router as long as it's configured properly, and that the version of Vibe I tested automatically configures eight home routers. The more recent version will automatically configure 15 additional routers.

Vibe also becomes problematic if you try listening to songs remotely from an Apple computer. Vibe streams songs in the format in which they're saved, and all of mine were MP3s. To listen to the music on a Mac, however, you have to use Windows Media Player for the Mac, which plays files only in Windows Media Audio or Video format. So even though Macs are perfectly capable of playing MP3 files, Vibe requires a lame program that can't do so.

Vibe's idea has the potential to be a useful tool for a lot of people who share digital media on a regular basis, but the program needs to make setup simpler and lose the need for Windows Media Player.