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Apple's Cloud-Based Music Service Ready to Go?

Hardtimes said:
I am honestly not fussed about this.

I would much rather have a physical apple branded itunes server for my house to fit in with my personal eco-system. I just cannot see myself using this - especially with the inevitable restrictions that will come with music I have ripped from my purchased CD's.
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Well you already have time capsule, I agree it's a half arsed solution, but anyway it's not an either or thing, we do need much (much) better cloud solutions and AND home servers. And most of us will be far better off with both of them as neither really replaces the other.

Anyway, as someone said, get on with it, I 'd say the same. We can't wait for it.
 
I know that it's just speculation at this point, but I'm curious what any of you think about which, if any, of the following will be "uploadable" into Apple's cloud:

  • music I ripped at Apple Lossless (metadata? such as playcount, download date, artwork, lyrics, etc.)
  • music in basic MP3 format (metadata?)
  • movies/tv shows I ripped from DVD (metadata?)
  • non-iTunes friendly media, such as AVI
  • text documents
  • photographs

I'm interested in anyone's thoughts. Thanks.
 
AlligatorBloodz said:
You really think apple is going to let you store music that you didn't buy from them for free? My guess is all music purchased from iTunes can be streamed, and mobile me users can upload theirs.

I hope this isn't just for music though. In mobile me you can upload photos which is nice. I would love to see this done for movies. I buy a movie from apple and can forever stream through my apple tv or iDevice. Or a monthly renting plan.

I want my media to take up less space, be easily accessible, and priced fairly.
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Nope, but I am hoping they will.. at least a small portion at the minimum. I highly doubt it though.
 
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GeekLawyer said:
This is getting exciting.

The billion dollar question: just content purchased from iTunes or all compatible (audio) files in one's iTunes library?
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Get real, no way are the music labels going to allow them to do this unless they limit it to music purchased from iTunes.
 
scottdot said:
I would love for it to encompass all iTunes media purchases, including movies and TV shows as well. I'm feeling a crunch with the drives in my Macs filling up with content very quickly. I wish Apple just kept track of what I "own" and let me play it based on a license that floats in the cloud. Should be doable right?
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Amen. I have more than my Mac and external drives can hold.
 
to1986 said:
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Get real, no way are the music labels going to allow them to do this unless they limit it to music purchased from iTunes.
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But doesn't Amazon do this already - without the music labels permission?
 
Every single one of the many thousands of songs in my library is an Apple Lossless file ripped from a CD. Will I be out of luck? Can I store my own music? Will it support lossless? Would lossless be too big to stream smoothly anyway? Lots of questions.
 
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I'll keep my media stored locally, thanks.
 
I have a dumb question.

Why do Dropbox, Amazon, and possibly iTunes not allow video streaming from the cloud? It seems like they all only offer music.
 
AlligatorBloodz said:
You really think apple is going to let you store music that you didn't buy from them for free? My guess is all music purchased from iTunes can be streamed, and mobile me users can upload theirs.

I hope this isn't just for music though. In mobile me you can upload photos which is nice. I would love to see this done for movies. I buy a movie from apple and can forever stream through my apple tv or iDevice. Or a monthly renting plan.

I want my media to take up less space, be easily accessible, and priced fairly.
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Two possibilities:
This service must be part of MobileMe to further push Apple's sync services
MobileMe will go down to $30/year or so.

Apple can fill the rest of the cost with tiny fees from Music Industry, iAds etc. Apple can even make everything free if iAds are placed in MobileMe etc.
 
Right ....

I have to agree with "Hardtimes" here. It's a great feature to have, and some people will do a lot with it. But I'm of the opinion that when it comes to digital music, the content isn't really that big in the first place. (Your typical MP3 file recorded in a good bitrate may be what? 4-7MB in size?) You can cram 16GB worth of content on a tiny microSD flash card that costs under $40, or far more on relatively cheap standard SDHC flash cards or USB memory sticks. If you're willing to carry around a small portable hard drive, you might have as much as 1TB of content on a notebook type drive in a small, thin case, and it's still self-powered off the USB cable.

There's no shortage of inexpensive and reliable ways to take a *lot* of music with you digitally, and no shortage of devices that can play it. What *can* get really costly is lots of high-speed Internet access. You have issues ranging from cellular providers with monthly caps on your data xfers on their networks to wi-fi hotspots that charge fees to use them, to larger caps on your home broadband connections (which while larger, also get used up a lot faster by things like streaming VIDEO you'd be likely to use a lot at home). Not only that, but I hate listening to music only to hear interruptions in the playback. Streaming audio often suffers from that if you lose your wireless connection, even for a moment. Kind of brings you back to the bad old days of vinyl records that skipped due to scratches, or music CDs with fingerprints on them that skipped until you cleaned them!


Hardtimes said:
I am honestly not fussed about this.

I would much rather have a physical apple branded itunes server for my house to fit in with my personal eco-system. I just cannot see myself using this - especially with the inevitable restrictions that will come with music I have ripped from my purchased CD's.
Click to expand...
 
Hardtimes said:
I am honestly not fussed about this.

I would much rather have a physical apple branded itunes server for my house to fit in with my personal eco-system. I just cannot see myself using this - especially with the inevitable restrictions that will come with music I have ripped from my purchased CD's.
Click to expand...

+1

I've been requesting that on the Apple feedback page for years now. I currently have a mac mini running as a htpc and holds all my movies/tv shows. My music and aperture libraries live on my mbp. It wish the mini could hold everything and let me selectively sync to the mbp, like the original apple tv. When I'm on my home network, you can see everything on the server. When I'm remote, everything that was synced shows up.
 
so many questions!

Available over 3G?
Movies and TV shows too?
Bit rate of music?
Includes any music you’ve ripped to your library?
Subscription based or free? (included in the cost of tracks you buy)
If ripped music too, will apple match up tracks to media they have online and just stream, or will we have to upload our library?

I can see an air version of the iPhone coming soon, won’t require same amount of space for storage because it’s ‘always connected’ to your online media. It will be a wrist watch. :eek:
 
I would be more interested in a subscription plan.

With our devices able to hold more and more what's the point of storing it elsewhere ?
 
Comcast Data Cap + lossless music + Netflix + downloads + .....well I can stop adding things right here because 250GB goes a lot quicker than you'd think with a family of 5 computer users. No thanks, Apple cloud. I'll keep my storage local.
 
I don't see why permission is NEEDED??

I have a feeling that the bottom line with this stuff is, a "big player" (or two or three) will have to simply start allowing people to place and stream their music content on the servers and duke it out in court with any of the record labels who protest, after the fact. The record labels are as greedy as ever, and surely WANT to try to retain as much control over usage of the music as possible.

If you can imagine a new way to deliver or re-use the content, they want to find some way to get paid for it.

I don't think they'd win in a court of law, personally -- and maybe Amazon simply doesn't think so either? But until a ruling is made, it's probably still one of those "unknowns" where depending on which side you're on, you claim permission is or isn't needed to do it.

To be fair, there are probably some complications here too, because like it or not, it's a symbiotic relationship between the record labels and the digital music sellers out there. (EG. If someone like Apple says, "Screw you! Nothing in our legal agreement for selling your digital music says we can't let paying customers stream it!" -- then the labels can say, "Ok, fine... We'll make sure that's changed when your contract is up for renewal, and since you're making money off doing it without our permission NOW? We'll either pull your rights to sell the content when the current deal expires, or we'll charge so much for the privilege to stream, you're compensating us for all the unpaid streaming your users did before we made the change!")


Loge said:
But doesn't Amazon do this already - without the music labels permission?
Click to expand...
 
callmemike20 said:
Internet data usage is increasing and internet data caps are decreasing. This doesn't seem good...
Click to expand...

I agree. I'm not interested in using what little bandwidth the phone company gives me to play music I could just transfer to my phone from my computer.

I hope it's more than that.
 
Personally I'm not too interested in this as my music collection isn't that large and I add new songs too far apart to make syncing an hassle. Don't have to worry about being connected to the internet either to listen. I could see it being useful for those who have a huge music collections though.
 
Green Clouds

That would be kind of Green IT. We all store copies of files Apple anyway have spinning on their disks. What a waste of disk space on global scale. I would be happy to release my storage locally on my NAS with 1.2TB of purchased music, TV shows and movies.
Not sure how the watermarking can be solved; to my understanding files are DRM free but still contain individual information about my account. When only a reference in my purache history is stored a redownload could apply the watermark again.

Wish list
  • storage is free for purchased items;
  • when service is started my purchase are already there;
  • only own upload will be charged for storage used
  • not only streaming but also regular iTunes-based sync to iDevices
  • transparent access like iDisk today

Hope the details coming soon ... And hope that for me as just renewed MobileMe user some "cockie" is included; some extra quata.

Beside GreenIT it would also a perfect protection against theft and natural disasters as we just had here in Japan. A big iTunes collection also represents some material value.
 
I fail to see the point. Generally I'm very excited by Apple products. They are wonderful innovators and produce top quality. But MobileMe and this leave me wondering. I don't see how this is going to give me any benefit. There's only so many hours of music in a day. An iPodTouch, iPhone, iPad, etc hold more music than I'll listen to in a year. WTP?
 
Eddyisgreat said:
Just got this in my inbox:

Comcast just decided that internet usage really shouldn't comprise of anything more than 2,3 emails a day MAX. I mean, come on people. There isn't that much legitimate content on the net, so if you're consuming any more than 2-3 mb per data a day with your fat 100/100 Mbps DOCSIS 3 pipe then you're probably a pirate. Infact, you are a pirate. No debate.

Effective immediately all data transfer is limited to 5 Mb daily with a $50 per kb overage, no cap. These caps do not count against content retrieved from comcast.net . We're just sayin!

-CC
Click to expand...


LOL, thats funny.

The average household uses 6GB per month on Comcast.

You would have to use 40 times the average monthly data use to even approach a Comcast cap.
(And yes, all data transfer including that from comcast.net counts against your cap)

You guys act like the majority of people using the internet use significant amount of data. That is simply not the case. If you want to purchase more throughput to support your excessive use, nothing is stopping you.
 
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