Cloud (Music) Question: iCloud? Amazon? Dropbox? Gulp..Help?

[Blank00]

Hi all!
So I'm a bit new to the cloud game and am getting quite confused with the services provided by all these companies, and the actual services I need. Let me explain my situation.

I have a few old iPods and HDDs filled with my music collected over the years. Quite a few of them are from CDs, given to me by friends, etc. I want to load them in the cloud and delete them from my computer and store them in my HDD to be stored somewhere else. Essentially not connected to my computer.

I tend to pick the songs I like and change the ID3 tag with iTunes to place them in folders organized by genre or types. Or in other cases I change the Album titles and what not for certain multi-disc releases. I don't use the compilation option in iTunes, as I dislike having a huge list of artists with only 1 song. In the song title I have the artist(s) listed. I also have a fair bit of Japanese songs as well.

Instead, my weird organization method goes something like this:
[Artist] ---> [Album] ---> [Song]
ie
[Faster Songs] ---> [0-A/B-F/etc] ---> [Song Title (Artist)]

A lot of my songs are listed like that. If I want to listen to something, I always look it up by artist, I hardly use the Album option (On my iPod/iPhone/Mac).

My question is, what Cloud storage would work with my situation? I noticed iTunes Match and such match my songs and allows me to access the ones they match, while supposedly uploading ones that aren't matched. What about the ones with the custom/messed up ID3/metadata I made?

At the moment it seems like Dropbox in addition to an iOS app which allows Dropbox music playback (ie Soundbeats) would work. How would Amazon fair? Or has iTunes Match finally been overhauled and now works properly? Would uploading movies to Dropbox and playing them back also be a possibility?

For full disclosure purposes, I am living in Japan and my iTunes account is currently linked to the Japan store. I foolishly upgraded my iCloud storage to 200GB, thinking I could just store my music there and play it back on my phone via streaming (Also photos as well). Oh silly me...how foolish and naive I was. 😱

Sorry for the long post! Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

EDIT: Also as far as iTunes management goes, I use the "Manually Manage Music and Videos" option in iTunes. I load the songs I want to transfer in iTunes and transfer it to my iPhone/iPad. Then I delete the songs from the iTunes library, but sometimes I keep the songs in the iTunes folder, other times I delete them. It really depends on if I change the metadata/ID tags or not. Or I just move them to a separate HDD so that I don't take up room on my computer.

 

[Rigby]

My question is, what Cloud storage would work with my situation? I noticed iTunes Match and such match my songs and allows me to access the ones they match, while supposedly uploading ones that aren't matched. What about the ones with the custom/messed up ID3/metadata I made?

Not sure I fully understood what you "messed up" (tl;dr 😛), but iTunes Match normally does not touch your metadata. It simply uploads them to the cloud, so the songs will appear just as they do in your local iTunes library.

As to your "weird organization", I'd suggest trying playlists and smart playlists rather then using metadata to achieve a sorting. It works really quite well once you have learned how to do it.

 

[Blank00]

Thanks for the response! Really appreciate it! 🙂

Not sure I fully understood what you "messed up" (tl;dr 😛), but iTunes Match normally does not touch your metadata. It simply uploads them to the cloud, so the songs will appear just as they do in your local iTunes library.

As to your "weird organization", I'd suggest trying playlists and smart playlists rather then using metadata to achieve a sorting. It works really quite well once you have learned how to do it.

Ah! I see! iTunes Match doesn't touch the metadata! But does it read it in order to match the songs that I have to the ones that are available in iTunes?

Yeah, I guess I just got stuck doing the same thing for years and haven't really considered changing my organization method. It's been the same since the first iPod came out. Switching to Playlists eh? Sounds promising! Perhaps I'll give it a try. 😎

By the way, how is iTunes Match now? Did it get better compared to before? I've been reading up on it and there seems to have been quite a few problems with uploading and such. I'm currently leaning towards the Dropbox solution, but it does seem to be quite expensive and such just for music. I guess I can put some movies up as well...

 

[Rigby]

Ah! I see! iTunes Match doesn't touch the metadata! But does it read it in order to match the songs that I have to the ones that are available in iTunes?

As far as I know, the matching is done purely by comparing the audio data, i.e. it should match songs it recognizes no matter what metadata you have attached.

By the way, how is iTunes Match now? Did it get better compared to before? I've been reading up on it and there seems to have been quite a few problems with uploading and such. I'm currently leaning towards the Dropbox solution, but it does seem to be quite expensive and such just for music. I guess I can put some movies up as well...

I really don't have any major issues with Match. It has a few quirks (sometimes it fails to update album art) and the handling of cloud songs in the iOS 7/8 Music app has some issues, but the service itself is working quite well for me. But then, I do everything "by the book" and let iTunes manage my music. 😛