I sat in a coffee shop today and browsed the music on a friend’s laptop. I browsed by albums for a while but eventually found Ben Folds new album by an artist search. I queued up the music and sat there listening to the tracks while sipping my Splenda-filled jolt of caffeine.

Of course all I had was my iPhone. The laptop in question was about 578 miles away.

I downloaded the Simplify Media iPhone app a couple days ago for free. (It’s free for the first 100K users and $3.99 afterward.) Install the SM app on your PC / Mac and it uses iTunes, Winamp or just directories to share music. Sync it up with your iPhone and you can listen to your entire music collection without having to transfer it to the iPhone. It streams the music through the net and the quality is superb. You can add up to 30 friends and share your entire music collection online.

It works great on the 3G network or Wi-fi. Don’t bother using it on Edge though. It also downloads album art, lyrics and artist info. One downside is that it takes a really long time to archive huge collections on the computer. If you have more than 5000 songs, go watch a movie while it indexes the music.  Simplify Media is also having some growing pains due to the massive popularity of the iTunes app as well.

I’m also starting to enjoy Stitcher.  It’s a neat app that organizes a ton of podcasts and broadcasts them in a radio format.  I don’t like the little ads at the bottom of the screen though.  It makes the app seem overly sluggish.  I’ll take a few more days with it before sending it to the App graveyard.