What's Your Take on Apple's iCloud Announcement?

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Music from the Cloud

Postby O.D. Yeo » Tue Jun 07, 2011 2:37 pm

The summer heat is not very conducive to serious listening. Deciding to warm-up the amp and cool-down the listening room (while the rest of the family suffers the heat) is not an easy one. More often, I find myself deciding to share my a/c with others and turn on the bedroom system instead, with internet radio in the background.

To date, I have not invested any time and megabytes to downloading music and building up my own digital library. However, rather than getting started on that road, streaming music over the Internet and listening to my own playlists (instead of the internet stations') via websites like Rdio.com, Pandora.com, Last.fm, Maestro.fm seems to be the way to go these days.

Do any of you have experiences with any of these cloud-based music sites? I know Pandora is good but is not available outside the US. Are the others available here? If so, which ones have you tried and like best?
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Re: Music from the Cloud

Postby rtsyrtsy » Tue Jun 07, 2011 3:03 pm

I dabbled with these for a while but the offerings on Squeezebox didn't really latch on as a habit. Not that they were bad, I've just not turned it into a habit.

Apple's announcement of the iCloud service could change your attitude towards creating a digital library of your own music. By striking a deal with the music labels, we can soon have whatever songs we have on our iTunes library available from the cloud for distribution to any connected device.

This is a big improvement over alternatives from Amazon and Google, both of which require that we spend hours uploading gigabytes of our music (and multimedia) files.
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What's Your Take on Apple's iCloud Announcement?

Postby rtsyrtsy » Tue Jun 07, 2011 3:19 pm

I saw on TV some journalists bashing the last Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as below expectations. I guess Apple set the bar really high with their past "and one more thing" announcements.

I've not had much time to digest the impact of the myriad of announcements made at the WWDC but I think there are a few that are relevant to music (and gear) lovers like WS members.

One of the more interesting points I came across is that with iCloud, Apple found a way to monetize pirated music for the music labels (and take a rumored 30% cut doing so).

One of the features of the iCloud service is that in conjunction with iTunes (more specifically, a new feature called iTunes Match), it can scan our music library for all the music we have (not necessarily just purchased from Apple iTunes and in fact, not necessarily purchased legally!). If the songs that we have is one of hte songs in the multi-million iTunes catalog, those catalogued songs will be made available to us for access via any device. This means we won't need to do time-cponsuming uploads that iCloud's alternatives like Amazon and Google require us to do.

The downside is that music from iCloud only supports 256kpbs AAC which can arguably be good enough for background listening.

As for non-music tidbits, what interested me are:

-the photo editing features that will now come built in iOS5. If I owned stocks in companies that make photo editing apps, I'd sell and short them ASAP.

-iMessenger is potentially the logical evolution (and murderer?!?) of BBM and SMS.
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Re: Music from the Cloud

Postby O.D. Yeo » Tue Jun 07, 2011 4:10 pm

Hi Russ,
Apple's announcement is really what triggered the thought that streaming music from the cloud is the way to go. But reading up on my options, it seemed that subscribing to a cloud-based "juke box" such as Rdio will make much more sense than limiting myself to iTunes. Paying $5 per month to gain access to Rdio's library of over 10,000 tunes is very tempting, speciallly for one like me who has no investment in an iTunes music library.
Last edited by O.D. Yeo on Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Music from the Cloud

Postby rtsyrtsy » Tue Jun 07, 2011 6:12 pm

Yup, if you've not invested in a digital library till now, indeed a subscription-based service is better suited.

In fact, iCloud, I just learned won't let you stream. It will let you download content into a device then play it. But it won't stream.

I hope fld chimes in. He's been enjoying internet radio, last I heard.
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Re: What's Your Take on Apple's iCloud Announcement?

Postby muypogi » Tue Jun 07, 2011 9:29 pm

Actually the whole point of iCloud is the notion of a PC-less IOS 5 device, not on streaming. Apple's take on cloud computing is to have all your stuff available anytime to all devices, synced to the latest version. Indeed, why stream if you can have the device update your library in the background, and have it ready when you are going to use it.

Unless Apple goes ahead with rumoured hi-res versions of its music, most audiophiles will likely continue ripping their music to hi res files, or at least compressed music at higher bitrates vs the standard 256kbps in iTunes.
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Re: What's Your Take on Apple's iCloud Announcement?

Postby rtsyrtsy » Tue Jun 07, 2011 11:35 pm

muypogi wrote:Actually the whole point of iCloud is the notion of a PC-less IOS 5 device, not on streaming. Apple's take on cloud computing is to have all your stuff available anytime to all devices, synced to the latest version. Indeed, why stream if you can have the device update your library in the background, and have it ready when you are going to use it.

Unless Apple goes ahead with rumoured hi-res versions of its music, most audiophiles will likely continue ripping their music to hi res files, or at least compressed music at higher bitrates vs the standard 256kbps in iTunes.


To me, what's significant about iCloud is that Apple got the labels to play ball--something neither amazon and google achieved. This said, yes, I agree, for serious listening, ripping or hi res downloads, or good ole spinning discs is still for mow the way to go.
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