• WHAT: A way to take all of your music with you on your iPhone, regardless of storage capacity
• WHY: 16GB of music isn't enough for an entire collection
• COST: Free

I'm kind of a nut about music - I like all kinds from Puccini to the Police, Randy Travis to Radiohead and Mozart to Miles Davis.  I've got an 80GB iPod that's chock full of music and there's always something playing in the background while I work.  I'm a big fan of Pandora, too, and will review that application for the iPhone later, but frequently I want to listen to my own music from wherever I am and don't want to have to haul my laptop around with me to do it.  The 16GBs of storage on my new 3G iPhone is pretty capacious, but it's not nearly enough to store all the music I want at hand after allocating space for photos (I have about 5000 on the iPhone) and applications. 

I viewed this as a severe limitation when I purchased my original iPhone (the 2G version) as it only had 8GB and saw the 16GB as a temporary solution until an iPhone with a slot for an SD card or just more internal storage was available.  Thankfully, shortly after I purchased the 3G/16GB iPhone, a solution that I've been using for over a year from my laptop became available for the iPhone.  It's a terrific way to access your music from anywhere, is free and essentially liberates you from the constraints of carrying all of your music with you stored on the iPhone. 

SimplifyMedia is the solution.  The only way it could be easier to set up and use would be if it was built into the phone.  When I first started using it on my Mac and laptop (yes, you can use it to connect to your home computer from your laptop, too) I installed the whole thing on both computers in about a minute and a half (it took longer to download the small file than it did to set the whole thing up) and launched it.  I had the same experience on the iPhone - installation was just a minute and logging in for the first time not much longer. 

Here's how it works.  First you download a tiny piece of software for your host computer (that's the one that you keep all your music files on) and install it.  Create an account, which is as simple as picking a user name and password, and launch the software.  I've set mine up to launch at login every day so that it's always running; the software seems to be completely benign and takes up a tiny memory footprint.  After a minute or two of processing you're ready to go.  Download the application onto your iPhone using either the App store on the phone itself or through iTunes, launch it and fill in a the ID and Password fields and watch the magic start. 

When you launch SimplifyMedia on the phone you'll see a brief message saying "Connecting to Libraries" while it finds your music via an Internet connection.  The service works just fine using both 3G and EDGE connections, although there are some occasionally pauses in between songs when using EDGE, but works best over a WiFi connection - there's virtually no delay and it's essentially the same as plugging your headset into your home computer.  After the system connects to your library, just tap on the selection in the "Media List" window and every playlist will appear, as will a selection called "All Albums," "All Artists," etc.  In short, all of your music is there.  Just tap on a song, album name or whatever to start the music playing in the same fashion that you would if you were using iTunes. 

The interface is highly intuitive and "just works."  It's like being virtually transported back to your desktop and listening to music from your home collection.  I've used it sitting in one place, in my car, from friends' homes on their WiFi connections and while out walking.  It's set up like iTunes so if a call comes in for you the music is paused and then resumes when you're done with the call. 

SimplifyMedia is an excellent way to access all of the music on your home collection and lift the storage limitation that diminishes the amount of music that you can have with you.  You can use it everywhere instead of even having any music at all stored on your iPhone (although that would eat up some battery, playing music from the iPod function of the iPhone does, too) except while airborne.  And, given the recent announcements by airlines to provide WiFi service at 40,000 feet, even that won't be a limitation anymore.