There’s a real depth to the innovation happening within mobile music – and not just from the usual suspects.

Last week it was announced that Didiom, the mobile music place-shifting application, is being introduced to the Blackberry Curve. For those not familiar with ‘place-shifting’, this simply refers to the process of moving content from one device to another via an internet connection. In most cases this involves taking content from your home PC and throwing it at a remote PC or laptop.

There have been variations on this theme around for some time, and many of you (especially our US readers) will be familiar with the Slingbox. This little unit hooks up to your TV and “slings” the channels over the internet to any remote PC, allowing you to watch all those cable or satellite channels you’ve already paid for from just about anywhere you can find a broadband connection. I hear this is especially popular with homesick Road Warriors who have grown tired of 30 second YouPorn, er, YouTube clips whilst sitting in hotel rooms, digesting their club sandwiches.

So, bringing the place-shifting concept to digital music could prove to be a very interesting development. Didiom, a mobile music start-up, lets music fans access their PC-based music library from their mobile broadband device (which now includes the Blackberry Curve). Now, this will require a few things in order to work properly, including a) an unlimited mobile data plan, or b) a mobile device with WiFi, and most definitely c) a mobile device with a battery able to power a 3G or WiFi connection for more than, say, 15 minutes (Samsung Omnia owners will know what I mean here).

Ran Assaf, CEO of Didiom, described it to The Music Void this way;

In any case, music place-shifting might just offer an attractive alternative to all manner of Operator and Handset Manufacturer music services. The Didiom deal is also further evidence that Blackberry is really going after the iPhone and attracting the very best application developers in the mobile music space.

But what if your mobile data connection or price plan leaves something to be desired? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few side-loaded tracks as back-up, just in case the streaming suddenly stops (or becomes prohibitively expensive)?

Well, how does having your entire music collection on a chip the size of your fingernail sound? Yep, this is the news from memory card maker SanDisk that their new 32nm technology has the potential to create fingernail-sized flash storage chips with 500 Gig to 1 terabyte storage capacities.

To lend some perspective to this, my personal digital music collection has about 6,000 tracks, generally encoded at 192k, and all of that consumes just 25 gig of storage space – or just 5% (!) of a 500G card. Now combine this capacity with SD’s chip-based music formats ‘Slotmusic‘ and ‘Slotradio‘ (both launched October 2008) and the mind starts to boggle. Does this have potential to take us right back the halcyon days of physical format sales? I’m not sure what the download, streaming and subscription music companies think about all this, but personally I’m pretty excited by it.

I’ll be particularly interested if someone clever creates a mobile data app that synchs my PC music files with my mobile 500G SanDisk card Over The Air (OTA). Then I think I will have found an ideal portable music solution (synch just my ‘New’ and ‘Deleted’ files please, I need to save on my precious mobile data allotment). I can always use Last FM Mobile or Pandora for music discovery while on the move, but in terms of lugging my digital music files around, it’s hard to beat a physical format. Is it all too good to be true?

[Chris McLellan writes: I must apologise to doubleTwist and TMV Readers. In my original post, I stated that doubleTwist allows for music file DRM removal/conversions, when in fact it allows for FILE FORMAT conversions. Still very cool. But my mistake. Many apologies].

This thought brings me to the final piece of mobile music news which seems set to ruffle some feathers, namely that our old friends at doubleTwist are back on the scene with a new Media Manager. Never heard of doubleTwist? It’s the media management brain child of Jon Lech Johansen (aka “DVD Jon”) and Monique Farantzos, the makers of some seriously useful software that enables music fans to translate digital music files from ‘FIle Format A’ to ‘File Format B’ (e.g. Apple>MP3) at the click of a mouse, allowing users to manage and listen to their purchased tracks on any device or player they choose.

If such music manipulation all sounds a little nerdy and tedious for the average music consumer, I recall doing something even more difficult to get around Apple formatting (which would not play outside the iTune ecosystem)  for over 2 years by burning iTunes tracks as audio CDs, and then ripping the CDs back onto my PC as MP3 files. I can’t be the only one to have done that. Was I?

The point is that things are getting better. How long before another new mobile-centric proposition really cracks the digital music ‘ubiquity issue’ once and for all?