Farewell to EZArchive

You may have noticed over the last day or so that a number of blogs have been bemoaning the changes over at EZArchive. If you're not familiar with EZArchive, it is an online media storage site that essentially rents you server space to store songs, photos, or any other electronic media you'd want to store off-site. A bunch of blogs, including this one, have used EZArchive to store songs that we post for readers to listen to.

EZArchive has always been pretty shitty. It would go down for hours at a time, cancel uploads at the very end of a 30-minute transfer, and had what might have been the worst user interface on the internet.

Then, without notice, they announced a couple of days ago that they were "upgrading" to EZArchive 3.0. There's still no explanation as to what that means, except that: (a) the streaming audio quality is going to go down; and (b) all of the existing files that people have are being moved to new servers, and every single link being used by blogs is going to disappear. So if I want to keep a link from a post I did back in May active, so that people could still hear it if they went back to the old post, I would need to go onto EZArchive and search out the new link and then replace it in my original post. And I'd have to do this for every single song post I've done since starting the blog. Let me assure you, this would take forever.

So I, like many others, have decided to ditch EZArchive. Sure, if it turns out that EZArchive 3.0 is the greatest thing since the 3-in-1 raised toilet seat, maybe I'll give it a shot. But until then, I'm in the market for a new file storage site.

Right now, I'm thinking about using Box.net. The functionality is a little different than EZArchive, but it's got a much better user interface, and even allows you to stream songs in a separate player (meaning you can navigate your browser to a new page and the song will keep playing). I think the only negative is that the little play "button" won't come up anymore. Here's an example. Give it a shot and let me know your thoughts:

Josh Rouse and Kurt Wagner, "Somehow You Could Always Tell" (from the excellent Chester EP)