Michael Robertson certainly had the guts to provoke the mighty music industry when he founded the popular MP3.com portal some years ago and now he's at it again with a music storage locker service which offers syncing and streaming capabilities.

Amusingly the programmer behind the new service, dubbed Oboe, is famed DeCSS hacker Jon Lech Johansen - aka DVD Jon.

Anyway, for a $39.95 yearly subscription you are given unlimited storage for your digital music collection which you can share between multiple computers.

It even works with iTunes.

But it's unlikely the music industry will approve of this.

"Five years from now, lugging around your entire music collection and plugging it in everywhere will seem as outdated as carrying around a pocketful of nickels," said Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3tunes. "It makes more sense to safely store your music online and sync it or stream it to all the places you listen to music, which is exactly what Oboe makes possible."

Oboe is a sophisticated online music service offering individual user accounts that can store an entire music library of files in .mp3, .wma (Windows Media), .aac (iTunes), and .ogg format. Registered users are provided with a personal account and the Oboe Software Suite, which installs software tools to easily load online music lockers using Macintosh OS X, Microsoft Windows or Linux computers.