This could be interesting. Businessweek:
Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars.
Sounds good, but of course price is going to be the key factor. The article suggests that it might be rolled into MobileMe, the£60-per-year cloud sync service Apple currently offers. That makes sense: MobileMe’s been due a revamp for a long time, and the rumours have been suggesting a music angle for a few months now.
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0 responses to “Apple’s cloud music service sounds good”
That might encourage me to actually get MobileMe, otherwise I think it doesn’t offer much that I want.
Still, I can carry around 16GB of music on my iPhone – do I really need to stream any?
I think it depends on whether you want to access your entire library, or use multiple devices, or if your iOS device is already full of apps :)
I’m all for cloud computing… most of the time. I can’t help but think that the country’s network infrastructure is totally inadequate to make it a totally-usable option right now.
Plus work block all the streaming ports and that’s the main place I’d want to do it.
I like the idea but perhaps I’d find it more useful/usable in two or three years time
Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between the sunny californian positivity of the tech firms and the grimy, shitey, nothing-bloody-works reality in the UK. I can barely get email, let alone cloud music :)
>>Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between the sunny californian positivity of the tech firms and the grimy, shitey, nothing-bloody-works reality in the UK
You should probably put Scotland instead of the UK, cos HSPDA is pretty much all over the place round these parts and it works well enough that I barely use Wi-fi, whereas go to somewhere like Ayrshire and you can only get 3g (not HSDPA or the like) in small 1m pockets floating about near raoundabouts.
Until I got annoyed by the random omissions of artists for no obvious reason, I used spotify on my android phone for a few months without issues.
I don’t think it’s so much Scotland as rural areas in general. Ofcom’s just completed a survey on this:
“The research also looked at how performance varied by location, by testing speeds across Birmingham, in the M62 corridor between Manchester and Liverpool, in Swansea and the surrounding area, and in the rural and semi-rural areas of Herefordshire and Shropshire.
Urban areas outperformed rural areas, primarily due to greater 3G availability. However, performance was highly variable across urban areas, with no guarantee of good performance offered in a city centre location.”
>>Plus work block all the streaming ports and that’s the main place I’d want to do it.
I’ve found that a good workaround for that it to hijack a line from the internet cafe’s ADSL connection rather than go through the work network. :-)
Last time I was up Glasgow and Ayrshire all sucked. So did the data signal!
Round here it’s much more consistent – that’s including when we go for walks which is often in the middle of nowhere. I usually get better reception and coverage in the peak district than I did in Glasgow.
Yeah. As you know, round here the coverage tends to hug the major roads. There’s not much beyond that.