Those are the facts. Mind you I did add in a little of my own feelings into that post too. But you know the saying
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With iOS 5 Beta 7, Apple is Right: iTunes Match is Not Streaming in iOS
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"If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen". - Saying directed at MacRumors and not you.
Why is the "download is better" crowd so confused? If apple gave the "option" to stream you can still "download" to your heart's content. The "stream" option can be reserved for those who might play a song only once or those who don't mind the tradeoffs.
Personally I would only download, but I wouldn't mind having streaming as an option.
I don't get the argument that licensing deals prevent streaming. First, iTunes on a computer is still streaming. And second, what do the record companies care if the file is deleted automatically after listening? I don't see why they'd object, if anything they'd probably prefer streaming to downloads so copies aren't stored on all these devices. But it doesn't really matter much either way. It seems much more likely that this is at the request of the phone companies than the record companies.
I don't see how this is an advantage at all over the previous implementation for users. Before, the user had a choice of downloading or streaming. If space is tight and you only plan to listen to a song once, streaming is more convenient. If you expect to be out of service or listen to a song repeatedly, download is the better option. When Apple gives the user fewer options, I don't see how that's a good thing other than pro-apple spin.
Personally I think they should leave in the streaming but have detailed prefs. Give users a choice to have the dual interface like before, always streaming, or always downloading. And options based on whether you're 3G or wifi - it would make sense to do downloads on 3G but be able to stream on wifi where there probably aren't data caps. And it would be great to have the option to disable iCloud music completely on 3G and only have it available on wifi (particularly so you don't start a playlist that has local songs not realizing it also has songs that are only in the cloud, and eat up all your data quota). Also, options to have it start removing old/unplayed music automatically once free space gets below a certain point.
I think there's plenty of value in this service and I am interested, but I hope they really get it right and give users enough flexibility to choose how it works best for their particular gear, network connection, and use habits.
So with this new version, what happens when the device ends up full? Does it give an error message and refuse to play any more cloud songs?
I don't see how this is an advantage at all over the previous implementation for users. Before, the user had a choice of downloading or streaming. If space is tight and you only plan to listen to a song once, streaming is more convenient. If you expect to be out of service or listen to a song repeatedly, download is the better option. When Apple gives the user fewer options, I don't see how that's a good thing other than pro-apple spin.
Personally I think they should leave in the streaming but have detailed prefs. Give users a choice to have the dual interface like before, always streaming, or always downloading. And options based on whether you're 3G or wifi - it would make sense to do downloads on 3G but be able to stream on wifi where there probably aren't data caps. And it would be great to have the option to disable iCloud music completely on 3G and only have it available on wifi (particularly so you don't start a playlist that has local songs not realizing it also has songs that are only in the cloud, and eat up all your data quota). Also, options to have it start removing old/unplayed music automatically once free space gets below a certain point.
I think there's plenty of value in this service and I am interested, but I hope they really get it right and give users enough flexibility to choose how it works best for their particular gear, network connection, and use habits.
So with this new version, what happens when the device ends up full? Does it give an error message and refuse to play any more cloud songs?
Good question...remember that I was saying a few pages ago about how it's an inelegant solution?
LeoSmith
I'm simply dumbfounded on why Apple just doesn't give the option to automatically delete the song after it's played, which would mimic streaming. What's the friggin' difference to Apple? It makes no sense unless it's a licensing issue, and even then it makes no sense.
I'm simply dumbfounded on why Apple just doesn't give the option to automatically delete the song after it's played, which would mimic streaming. What's the friggin' difference to Apple? It makes no sense unless it's a licensing issue, and even then it makes no sense.
It's hard to know how elegant it is until all the facts are out there. Also, it's still in beta so more changes are possible (including the possibility that they change it back, although my guess would be that it's not likely).
Devs can give feedback, hopefully many will tell Apple that this is a step back from the previous beta and they'll reconsider if they get enough of a reaction.
Devs can give feedback, hopefully many will tell Apple that this is a step back from the previous beta and they'll reconsider if they get enough of a reaction.
One more thing....
The one thing I don't see from the "downloaders" is an answer for the question "How are those of us that have librarys larger than the biggest iPhone supposed to put them on a phone ?"
The "old" way fixed that. The "new way does not. Not without me having to go through the phone and removing tracks BY HAND, because when your phone is subscribed to iTunes Match you can no longer manage your music on it from iTunes.
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I agree with your first part...I'm talking about today.
I also agree with your second part...I'm a dev and you can bet they will hear from me.
The one thing I don't see from the "downloaders" is an answer for the question "How are those of us that have librarys larger than the biggest iPhone supposed to put them on a phone ?"
The "old" way fixed that. The "new way does not. Not without me having to go through the phone and removing tracks BY HAND, because when your phone is subscribed to iTunes Match you can no longer manage your music on it from iTunes.
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I agree with your first part...I'm talking about today.
I also agree with your second part...I'm a dev and you can bet they will hear from me.
You can't? Doesn't it still use iTunes to sync music and playlists? Seems like it would sync the same way it does now (plus wirelessly, which will be nice), and match/cloud just lets you grab extra songs that weren't included in the iTunes sync. Although I don't know how it handles those extra songs when you sync back to the computer, does it add them to playlists somewhere or otherwise keep track? I would think there must be some way to choose whether to keep them on the device or remove them from the computer. Can someone with the beta check out how that works?
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)
Those are not facts.
No one lied. It was clearly stated that it was an issue if semantics.
Then the build changed.
the8thark said:
Those are not facts.
No one lied. It was clearly stated that it was an issue if semantics.
Then the build changed.
iTunes Match is for people with large personal music libraries. Not for people who have tiny or no music libraries and want to stream random songs all the time. That is a different/product and service.
Plenty of people have very substantial music libraries of their own and will find great benefit with iTunes Match. That you don't enough any or enough music to make it useful to you does not change that.
Also a streaming service is worthless if you are in a place with no service or not with wifi and you have bandwidth limitations.
Please stop acting like Spotify and iTunes Match are in any way shape or form the same sort of product. If you actually believe that, then you really do not understand what iTunes Match is at all.
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Since ATT and Verizon would get paid for the data, and Apple would be providing their OWN bandwidth and not be getting paid for it, your suggestion that this was to help ATT and Verizon does not make any sense at all.
As someone else noted, they always said this was not a streaming service, but a downloading service.
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That you can not figure that out suggests you should bow out from just ignorantly bashing on Apple in this thread.
If you can not figure out how a download and streaming model would be different when it comes to bandwidth consumption, seriously, you should just drop out of the discussion.
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Are you trying to set a record for saying the most ignorant things in one thread? Some people have much bigger music libaries than will fit on their device.
Do you even own an iPhone or iPad? Do you even own any music? It does not sound like you own any of those things.
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Google music has no agreement to do any of the things they are doing. It is a matter of when not if things change drastically for them. Especially since they decided to ask for forgiveness instead of permission.
Apple could have devised a service that ignored the legal rights of the content holders, but that would not have been a wise long term strategy.
I agree, it seems like limited value to me. Sure, you get to upload and store music you already own, or get 256kbps AAC versions if they match. But the real beauty of the system is if we could stream content without filling up our devices.
Streaming is obviously supported in Mac OS, and did seem to work previously in iOS, so maybe they're just playing it careful with the network bandwidth of their carrier partners (and their data center). I work near a very busy mall, and I bet there are a few hundred iPhones playing music at any given time. The local cell towers don't even support web access for that many devices, much less streaming.
What are we debating here? I think Apple's goal is to save data. I think the majority of people will listen to a CD or a song more than once if they really like it. If that is the case then the downloading...which I will refer to as cache...is perfect because you've downloaded it once and can play it 10,000 times without using up your data. That's great for when I'm on a plane. Most airports have wifi so you can "plan ahead" by downloading what you think you will want to hear.
Sure streaming is fine, but the con is that streaming serves those with unlimited plans best, not those with data caps.
The way I see it is I will be playing songs as I go not worrying about what is or is not downloaded already. The only time I WILL worry is when I have run out of space. At that point I will be deleting songs/albums.
I think Apple's next step would be to automatically delete cache when an allotted amount of space has been reached. Take the picture I've attached as an example. It is from an iPhone app called iSub that does all this already. It's used to stream music (and movies soon) to your iPhone from your subsonic server at home.
Sure streaming is fine, but the con is that streaming serves those with unlimited plans best, not those with data caps.
The way I see it is I will be playing songs as I go not worrying about what is or is not downloaded already. The only time I WILL worry is when I have run out of space. At that point I will be deleting songs/albums.
I think Apple's next step would be to automatically delete cache when an allotted amount of space has been reached. Take the picture I've attached as an example. It is from an iPhone app called iSub that does all this already. It's used to stream music (and movies soon) to your iPhone from your subsonic server at home.
Attachments
I agree with the rest of your post, but Apple never said it wasn't a streaming service. They were vague and I don't believe they ever used the word "streaming" at all, hence the speculation both ways. And in the case of iTunes on mac, the current implementation is a streaming service. Obviously that can change, but the mobile version could also change back to streaming. Apple hasn't been clear either way and we may not know for sure until the final version ships to the public.
If you really want streaming only, here is your solution:
1) Listen to iTunes songs from iCloud
2) After about 60 hours of streaming (to fill about 6GB), clear the music library
3) Repeat
They can't comprehend because they still think this is a streaming service, and can't let go of that idea. They can't fathom that this is the same thing they've had for years, but they simply can now manage it without iTunes on their computer and a USB cable.
Yeah, no kidding. I can't imagine who has so little room on their device that they can't allocate any for a few dozen songs, leaving them the only option of streaming. For users where this is the case, they must currently have to get by without putting any music at all on their device (because if they actually currently have music on their device, then they have room to do just what you suggested, and the difference between hitting 'just stream these six albums' vs. the isolated case of 'download and play these six albums and I'll delete them if I want to change it up and my phone is busting because there's no room on it' strikes me as insignificant).
EDIT: Who replaces this much music at once anyway? I'd rather just leave some reasonable amount of space free so when I'm traveling or even just out of the house I can grab the odd song or album I want to hear. This is a problem only if you constantly max out your device's memory.
iOS Beta 6 = Streaming on iOS, Mac
iOS Beta 7 = Not Streaming on iOS, Streaming on Mac
arn
Why does the title say iTunes Match when clearly this is about iTunes in the Cloud. iTunes Match is the service for giving you high quality versions of your napster MP3s.
Because it's about iTunes Match. iTunes in the Cloud lets you go to the iTunes store on your iPhone and redownload past purchases. iTunes Match is what replaces your entire iTunes library with a cloud library consisting of songs that were Matched along with uploaded to Apples servers.
This is such horrible logic here. The point of iTunes Match SHOULD be to allow you to maintain a library of music on your iOS device, files stored on that device, AND additionally have access to many more songs through iCloud/match.
I have 80,000 songs in my iTunes library. Not all of them are going on Match. My live shows certainly won't be matched, or music I've made, isn't going onto Match. So I'd like to free up space on my iPhone and/or iPad for that music, or for more Books, Apps (and all the data that comes with any magazine's half assed bandwidth hog), Movies, whatever!
Let's be real about this: Beta 6 wasn't a streaming service. You can call it streaming plus, or whatever you want, but it still downloaded each song. It's quite preferable over streaming when you are using 3G and at the mercy of shaky internet conditions. 10 minutes down the road you may have no service at all, and that downloaded song will save you the pains of streaming services right now when the track cuts out on you because it's buffering a very small portion of the song and streaming as you go.
The BIG issue with this Beta 7 implementation is that it's confusing to the user and puts the burden on the user to manage their device in a VERY haphazard way. Let's review here:
1. I start off with no iTunes Match songs downloaded to my iDevice. Thus, I fill up my iDevice, probably close to the max (save a GB or two). Maybe it's with more music, or apps, movies, books, whatever. Doesn't matter.
2. Now I start playing songs through Match. They start eating up that space. In an afternoon at work, that could run through my 1-2 GB of free space in a matter of hours, or if I skip some songs, maybe even an hour or less. What happens when my iDevice is now full, out of space? Does the service stop working? Does it start deleting the earliest played Match songs? Does it tell me, the user, that I need to free up space to listen to more music from Match? Whatever the outcome, this burden shouldn't be put on the user. That's poor implementation however you cut it.
3. Let's say I have 10 GB of free space, and I start eating away at that. How is going album by album (remembering what I have listened to), and swiping over each song a reasonable solution to free up more space on my device? Once I start impeding on my ability to use the device in other ways, i.e. downloading the latest issue of Wired magazine that I have a subscription for (or maybe it's 2 months? Or maybe I just want an older issue?) I now have to go into my device settings to see how much space I have to work with. I have to ACTIVELY MANAGE space on my device because the iTunes Match service, with 25,000 songs available to "download", eats up my free space.
There's an inherent conflict between how your iDevice works and how you currently manage the amount of data on it vs how iTunes Match works because it is in the cloud and is essentially 15-20 GB of data sitting up there for you to pull down onto your iDevice.
The previous implementation dealt with this pretty well. It downloads one song, and when you go to the next one, it replaces the previous song in the cache. Thus, it never eats up more than 30-40 MB at MOST. It solves all the issues with managing space on the user. It frees the user from all of the burdens I've just mentioned.
Even if the cache becomes 1-2 GB (which would probably be more reasonable on the server side than a song-by-song caching mechanism), the user would have a pre-defined amount of space to manage for. "Okay, iTunes Match takes up 1GB of space. I can plan around that." The user is still not trying to balance free space with the physical motions of deleting song after song.
I haven't even touched upon the syncing issues, though I would hope Apple is smart enough to place these iTunes Match songs outside the same folder as your synced iPod/music tracks on the iDevice, in the way it adds purchased items from the iTunes store when you purchase them from your iPhone or iPad.
From a usability perspective, it just makes simple sense to have a cache of a fixed, not variable/expanding size for iTunes Match. The size, as I mentioned, doesn't matter as the implementation is still the Beta 6 version (streaming+ if you will). Once you hit that cache threshold, it should just begin to push out the oldest cached items, and yes, you will have to download them again. But as we know, that's not a real issue unless you have no Internet access at all.
I'm sure the ignorant, lowest common denominator response will be something regarding your data plan and how the more songs it stores on your device the better. But anyone who brings this up is a.) an AT&T/Verizon loyalist who has their head up their butt or b.) too ignorant to realize that even AT&T offers wi-fi hotspots in many areas. Many of us will use wi-fi at work, wi-fi in public places, wi-fi even at home to download songs from Match (and I say at home because if you've tried connecting to an 80,000 song library at home on the iPod/music device, you know it will time out before it ever loads up to listen to music from).
Apple's implementation of these features shouldn't be at the expense of the user's ability to manage the music and at a larger level, the rest of the device. Certainly not to offset bandwidth consumption from a mobile provider. Bending over backwards in UI design and implementation so that AT&T isn't burdened at actually providing you with service you're paying out the wazoo for is simply unfeasible and as someone who shelled out the money for the device, should make you disgusted.
I have hope that because this is a beta it will not release like this, and I have backup hope that a jailbreak plugin can easily address the caching issues so that users don't have to manage their devices in such a fundamentally different way if they decide to shell out the $25 for iTunes Match. But if you think this method is GOOD, you just aren't thinking properly.