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Apple Tapping Lala Media Team for Cloud-Based iTunes?
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This topic is a bit confusing for people so I'm thinking what will happen is your "library" is just that. The library not the actual media. Simply transfer the "purchased media" library to the cloud. You get a free account with LaLa. You can customize your own "social--What I have in music" page. Share it with any person.Probably up to five.
iTunes will host the songs in the cloud. They already do. There is no way ANY cloud based media server is going to allow 600GB of media hosting without a huge fee.
iTunes will host the songs in the cloud. They already do. There is no way ANY cloud based media server is going to allow 600GB of media hosting without a huge fee.
People who are doubting this will happen are ignoring the comments about lala.com. This is exactly what the site does and exactly the reason Apple bought it. They check your library (all of it) against their own and then allow you to stream those songs. They don't actually store your library anywhere, except those songs you have that they don't have.
It works great and this is the reason for the lala.com purchase. There is no doubt in my mind that Apple will do the exact same thing.
And just fyi, when you access lala.com from your iphone, the site works fine and you have access to your library but the songs won't play because the site requires Flash to play your songs.
It works great and this is the reason for the lala.com purchase. There is no doubt in my mind that Apple will do the exact same thing.
And just fyi, when you access lala.com from your iphone, the site works fine and you have access to your library but the songs won't play because the site requires Flash to play your songs.
The funniest part about this rumor to me is that it's being spread by Michael Robertson, the founder of the long departed (but early agitator) mp3.com.
One of the first things they tried - successfully for about 2 weeks in 1999/2000 - was allowing a user to pop a CD into a PC, and instantly the tracks would appear in the user's cloud account at MP3.com. YOU DIDN'T EVEN NEED TO UPLOAD IT. Mp3.com had already ripped basically every CD known to mankind, so as soon as it identified the CD in the drive, it automatically added the tracks to your account.
The RIAA came down pretty fast and furious as I recall and mp3.com had to suspend that particular service.
Funny how things come around...
One of the first things they tried - successfully for about 2 weeks in 1999/2000 - was allowing a user to pop a CD into a PC, and instantly the tracks would appear in the user's cloud account at MP3.com. YOU DIDN'T EVEN NEED TO UPLOAD IT. Mp3.com had already ripped basically every CD known to mankind, so as soon as it identified the CD in the drive, it automatically added the tracks to your account.
The RIAA came down pretty fast and furious as I recall and mp3.com had to suspend that particular service.
Funny how things come around...
Cloud = PROFIT!
Has anyone else noticed the coalescing of so many different factors for apple = profit?
server farm + web interface for iTunes + user base of tablets, iPhones, etc + cloud computing + attempted admob purchase = Apple Profit!
just imagine how many ads they're going to serve! HOLY CRUD!
Has anyone else noticed the coalescing of so many different factors for apple = profit?
server farm + web interface for iTunes + user base of tablets, iPhones, etc + cloud computing + attempted admob purchase = Apple Profit!
just imagine how many ads they're going to serve! HOLY CRUD!
Right, they'd just have to work a bit harder. The back-to-back rips (with the same settings) would
have different meta-data (tags), but the majority of the file (the music) would be identical.
The service would need to upload your tags, and point the body of the file at the cloud copy.
Similar SIS techniques are common in backup utilities today.
As far as different CD stampings being different - if you bought one of the 100's of thousands of
stamp.A CDs, and I bought one of the 100's of thousands of stamp.B - it would mean that Apple
would have to upload two versions, not 100's of thousands.
Apple could even check to see if your copy of a file had an error, and point you at a correct
copy instead. (Another SIS option would be to upload the one 512-byte disk sector with the error,
and merge the bad sector back into your song whenever you played it.)
I don't see it being anything other than iTunes Store purchases either. In fact I don't think I'd want it to be.
Apart from anything else, iTunes has always been lacking in the feature to re-access purchases, which is a feature available on many rival online music stores. It would be good for that, if nothing else, but being Apple they will give it some bells and whistles.
Apart from anything else, iTunes has always been lacking in the feature to re-access purchases, which is a feature available on many rival online music stores. It would be good for that, if nothing else, but being Apple they will give it some bells and whistles.
Most of my music is already streamed anyway (Pandora). As long as my music is in my permanent local library AND the cloud, I like the idea. Id use the iPhones own storage for better battery performance, but when I wanted even more music than would fit, Id happily stream online.
The ideal would be that your whole music library would SEEM to be on your iPod/iPhone, and the most commonly-played songs (up to a chosen limit) would be stored locally for battery savings. The rest would still play, thoughtheyd just use the network. (And would be grayed out or hidden entirely if you were offline.) When you were online, there would be no visible difference between local and remote mediait would just be your whole iTunes library.
The ideal would be that your whole music library would SEEM to be on your iPod/iPhone, and the most commonly-played songs (up to a chosen limit) would be stored locally for battery savings. The rest would still play, thoughtheyd just use the network. (And would be grayed out or hidden entirely if you were offline.) When you were online, there would be no visible difference between local and remote mediait would just be your whole iTunes library.
Hmmmm....
It's a good idea, definitely. BUt as to how it would work...
I have approx 230Gb music in iTunes, 85% lossless.
So they can stream my iTunes purchases (all 300Mb of them)... that's a given.
Next, they go through my iTunes library and match my albums to those available in iTunes. I reckon that would be no more than half. However, I can live with streaming of less-than-lossless if I don't have to do anything.
Finally, the remaining >100Gb of audio. No way can it be transferred to their servers, if only due to size, never mind copyright issues!
Another issue for them with my account is that I moved from the UK to the US and bought all my iTunes audio in the UK... so would the local, American servers serve this out, or the UK ones? In which case, how does that affect streaming quality?
I haven't even started on the fact that I have, over 15 years, imported numerous versions of albums or ebayed for better versions, etc. etc. which means the streamed versions would most likely not be the same.
Nonetheless, if I can, for free, stream reasonable versions of approx. half my music collection to any iTunes capable device, I'll use it. If they want a subscription, I'll stick with carrying 80Gb of audio at a time on my iPod, where it is guaranteed to be the versions and quality I want.
It's a good idea, definitely. BUt as to how it would work...
I have approx 230Gb music in iTunes, 85% lossless.
So they can stream my iTunes purchases (all 300Mb of them)... that's a given.
Next, they go through my iTunes library and match my albums to those available in iTunes. I reckon that would be no more than half. However, I can live with streaming of less-than-lossless if I don't have to do anything.
Finally, the remaining >100Gb of audio. No way can it be transferred to their servers, if only due to size, never mind copyright issues!
Another issue for them with my account is that I moved from the UK to the US and bought all my iTunes audio in the UK... so would the local, American servers serve this out, or the UK ones? In which case, how does that affect streaming quality?
I haven't even started on the fact that I have, over 15 years, imported numerous versions of albums or ebayed for better versions, etc. etc. which means the streamed versions would most likely not be the same.
Nonetheless, if I can, for free, stream reasonable versions of approx. half my music collection to any iTunes capable device, I'll use it. If they want a subscription, I'll stick with carrying 80Gb of audio at a time on my iPod, where it is guaranteed to be the versions and quality I want.
They won't upload everything, they'll do the hashing method that Dropbox and other file backup services do. They'll perform hashes of all your mp3 files and copy your library xml for iTunes purchased music, upload any song that they don't have already. They'll only host a single copy of every music. The hashes will mean that anybody with non-iTunes purchased music collection will have their hash match up against other music uploaded by other users and that'll ensure minimal redundancy on the servers.
This "cloud" is an extra feature and a remote backup, not a primary source of your music, do not try to do it, there's no protection against cloud data loss other than a local backup. (Even the big bad MS failed in this area once in a while)
Unfortunately, do expect to see a lot of network issues with cloud streaming. There's a lot of universities banning those type of cloud streaming due to the amount of bandwidth being used on their network, I expect the same reaction from ISPs. Apple will have to drop the bitrate of the music in order to make it work on the cell network as well as WiFi. There's a difference between unlimited bandwidth usage (no caps) and total bandwidth availability (no network in the world has unlimited bandwidth to share between everybody).
So those of you with lossless music, most likely Apple will reencode the music for you into managable bit-rate for streaming.
For those of you talking about copyright issues, Apple will not be held liable for your music, they are acting as a storage provider for your stuff, they can't go into your storage and actually check if your music is stolen or not, there's no way to do that. Fair use does allow you to make a backup copy of music you legally own, so Apple can't enforce the copyright laws against you and nor will they do it. Agreements with music labels can only be applied against licenced music from iTunes, not your personal collection. So the only way for Apple to be the enforcer is restricting the streaming to iTunes music only. So that's the only major question right now, will they restrict it to iTunes only or not.
This "cloud" is an extra feature and a remote backup, not a primary source of your music, do not try to do it, there's no protection against cloud data loss other than a local backup. (Even the big bad MS failed in this area once in a while)
Unfortunately, do expect to see a lot of network issues with cloud streaming. There's a lot of universities banning those type of cloud streaming due to the amount of bandwidth being used on their network, I expect the same reaction from ISPs. Apple will have to drop the bitrate of the music in order to make it work on the cell network as well as WiFi. There's a difference between unlimited bandwidth usage (no caps) and total bandwidth availability (no network in the world has unlimited bandwidth to share between everybody).
So those of you with lossless music, most likely Apple will reencode the music for you into managable bit-rate for streaming.
For those of you talking about copyright issues, Apple will not be held liable for your music, they are acting as a storage provider for your stuff, they can't go into your storage and actually check if your music is stolen or not, there's no way to do that. Fair use does allow you to make a backup copy of music you legally own, so Apple can't enforce the copyright laws against you and nor will they do it. Agreements with music labels can only be applied against licenced music from iTunes, not your personal collection. So the only way for Apple to be the enforcer is restricting the streaming to iTunes music only. So that's the only major question right now, will they restrict it to iTunes only or not.
Wow, mp3.com was the first thing that popped into my head as well, and this adds some real meat to the rumor.
For those with more experience with LaLa--what are the parameters for uploading non-lala music? Does it allow everything? Is it only available to you via your account or all lala users?
Don't artists have to give permission for their music to be distributed online? Isn't that why there isn't Beatles on iTunes?
Video seems even more complicated, as the parameters for tagging aren't really standardized in the way id3 is.
I agree with that--as I think for a lot of music fans, having only iTunes music is not much help since most of us get music from multiple sources. Would really only be a worthwhile effort for me if it was all of my files.
And this would be yet one more step towards a totally digital music world.
according to the lala.com FAQ you can only download once. So it isn't really a backup any more than the iTunes store is.
http://www.lala.com/#help/MP3 downloads
Also as someone mentioned earlier the playback here is all Flash based. [ Sure Apple could change that, but what multiplatform solution do they have? ]
For Apple also. The commentary for this thread points to Apple's data center. Yeah 256-500 kb/s isn't that bad, but if 5-10 million devices are all pointed at a single data center that's in the terabits/second range just on playback.
As with the high traffic websites a better idea is to point folks at several data centers to spread the bandwidth load.
Again highlighting that this isn't really a backup if what storing remotely is the lower rate. [ Again likely not a reencode but a match to what they have and if somehow unique then downsampled. ]
However, they can be subject to a search for stolen property. For those who don't acquire content legally this is a smoking gun.
This is interesting, however I am wondering if it would actually be my library of music, or just songs that I had purchased form iTunes. My current music library consists of 100s of tracks, many from other sources, and some digitized myself from my LP collection.
Exactly my question/worry. My pirate collection is VERY small (15 songs maybe?) and I wouldn't die if I lost those... vast majority is digitized from my own CDs, which I still have, or downloaded free from artists giving away songs. A good bit is iTunes purchased. Planning to get a good tape deck and digitize my old tapes before they get too far gone.
This is going to be interesting, I have like 100+ gigs of mp3 files, and I don't see how anyone could have a profitable business model storing this many files. On the other hand, *** IF *** Apple is using Netapp storage, with deduplication technology bult into it, they could pull this one off, because if 1 million people all have the same song in their storage, netapp only keeps one copy of the file and everyone else has a pointer to that one file. Pretty cool technology, and that could help keep their storage costs down dramatically.
Right now I'm using Simplify to access my library any where. Unfortunately, my room mate doesn't like paying the electricity for me to keep doing this, so I had to shut my PC off at home.. No more Simplify. If this Apple cloud stuff works, I won't need to buy a mini... If it doesn't, then I'll just get a mini which consumes like 1/4 the power my PC does.
Right now I'm using Simplify to access my library any where. Unfortunately, my room mate doesn't like paying the electricity for me to keep doing this, so I had to shut my PC off at home.. No more Simplify. If this Apple cloud stuff works, I won't need to buy a mini... If it doesn't, then I'll just get a mini which consumes like 1/4 the power my PC does.
Streaming through iTunes; handy and probably with a very nice interface on the tablet or iPhone...BUT it is nothing I can't do from my Synology NAS to an iphone already (be it over wifi or 3g), with music from all sorts of sources. Come on Apple - impress me next wednesday!
You are mistaken. Internet does not equal cloud in these specific forum posts. "cloud" here is being used to refer to cloud computing. This is a different idea (although related) than the internet as a whole.
Cloud or cloud computing are just redefined terms for "remote web services mostly via http/https protocol" and "remote servers computation farm in the Internet instead of locally" and it's not the Internet, it's part of it yes but not the whole Internet.
The confusion is that many of the diagraming softwares such as Visio has been using the cloud icon to indicate the Internet in general. But in this case, cloud services are much more specific.
(I use the word redefined because cloud services or computing is not a new thing, it's been around since the Internet. Hell, some might say Web 2.0 was its previous term)
The confusion is that many of the diagraming softwares such as Visio has been using the cloud icon to indicate the Internet in general. But in this case, cloud services are much more specific.
(I use the word redefined because cloud services or computing is not a new thing, it's been around since the Internet. Hell, some might say Web 2.0 was its previous term)
SGU is different... I loved BSG, so SGU is a good mix of the two series. It comes back in April I read somewhere...
Caprica (BSG Prequel) starts Tomorrow (SGU's timeslot)
