1. Sign-up and upload all your music. It’s stored and backed up
2. Listen to your music collection anywhere on any computer using just your webbrowser
3. Using the MediaMaster widget you can post your collection, playlists and radio stations to your blog

So far, there’s no limit, it’s free and totally legal.

Here’s a screencast of it:

There’s a bunch of formats supported. Just select your file and it will figure out the format. Then you select output format and except for format you can also have some options such as resizing, changing FPS, CODEC and so on.

Except for videos it does documents, texts, archines (zip etc), images and sounds.

Zamzar e-mails you a link to the converted files but Media-Convert starts processing online and will provide you with the link to the file directly. During the conversion, it just shows you:

Some testing shows it just takes a few minutes.

Just see yourself which one you prefer. Downsides with both Zamzar and Media-Convert is that you have to upload the file and there’s a limit of 100 MB. It’s pretty common that files are more than 100 MB, but still, you’re limited of the time it will take to upload because of your upstream speed. And since I only got 1 Mbit – I guess I’m stuck with some local tools.

If you think about it, many of use the tools online to share stuff and many of the services out there have the philosophy to share. YouTube, Flickr and all the other big ones are made for sharing your files. Social bookmarking such as del.ico.us also focus on sharing. And if you look at any of the Office suite such as ThinkFree, Google Docs, Zoho – they all have the ability to share and make that a huge key feature. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love sharing!

But data that reside on your PC – you consider that personal data – you don’t want to share that with anyone. And since many of the services focus on sharing – people directly think of terms like privacy, personal integrity, “- Will someone be able to read my files?, “- Will they index my files and send them to the government if they ask to”.

So why do I think Zamzar in some way is different? Because it involves YOUR data. You will upload your file, they convert it just for you and lets you download it and then deletes it (OK, the converted files are saved for anyone to download if they just have the link – but let’s forget that for a second even though the UID is pretty hard to figure out). There’s no question about sharing it – that is not what the tool is made for.

And I think, for the “online revolution” to happen, this has to become more common sense for some services because otherwise, people will keep using the online tools for some stuff, but as soon as it involves the users’ personal data – they will keep it offline and locally on their PC.

Me on the other hand – don’t care. I just upload everything I got and hope they won’t share it or send it to someone else :). Ok, I admit I have some directories that contains personal stuff, but I keep that on a USB-stick encrypted with the excellent open source software TrueCrypt.

What you do is simply choose the source file that can be in many different formats – document, image, music and video. At the moment, 25 source formats are supported. There’s a complete list of supported formats here. They encourage you to send in example of unsupported formats which is good! Also, the maximum source file is 100 MB. After choosing source, you select the destination format, enter your e-mail address and the upload starts which will take some time depending on your uplink bandwidth.

After uploading, the file will be converted and a link to the completed file will be e-mailed to you and the file will be available for 24 hours.

So how does it work in reality? I’ve tried a few different formats and it works very well!

But let’s take it to a real-world scenario: Below you’ll see a screencast on how Zamzar works. Let me tell you how I did it.

I usually record all my screencasts at My Uninstalled Life . Then I Let’s go through the steps:

1. Record the screencast with the excellent CamStudio Open Source software using their downloadable Looseless CODEC which gives good quality but still small filesizes
   BTW: Do you know any online tool for this step – let me know!
2. Tried to upload it to YouTube right away – but they don’t support this CODEC
   
3. Upload the file to Zamzar – luckily they support the CODEC. On my 1 Mbit uplink it took 14 mins.
4. 1-2 mins later I received an e-mail with the link to the converted file
5. Downloaded the file. On my ~24 Mbit downlink it took less than 1 minute (4 MB)
6. Upload to YouTube
7. Finished

Before Zamzar, I used either SUPER or VirtualDUB to convert it to a format that can be uploaded to YouTube but still keeping the quality, for example the XViD CODEC.

Here’s how Zamzar’s interface works – EASY!