
Apple iCloud - acrum
http://www.apple.com/icloud/
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jokermatt999
Honestly, this is attractive enough for me to consider reinstalling iTunes.
I've ranted a number of times on the numerous issues I've had with it, but
this service is amazing, especially as someone who doesn't buy their music
from iTunes.

Why's that? Because for $25, all those older CD rips and music which was
certainly acquired legally can now be obtained easily in 256 Apple lossless
(edit: not lossless, duh). I don't know if I'd keep using the service, but
that alone is, to put it bluntly, fucking awesome. I wonder if there will be
some sort of limit on this to prevent abuse.

Edit: Any of the downvoters care to explain why I was downvoted for this post?
Tone, mentioning piracy/abuse, hating iTunes? I'm genuinely curious here.

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teilo
Your rips will not help you. The iCloud music service does not work with rips.
You need to have the actual CD. iTunes will scan, it, identify it, and
identify the individual tracks.

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joeguilmette
Do you have a source for this? The blogging community seems to disagree with
you...

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dreamdu5t
I want more control over my music with the cloud, not less.

* iCloud will not offer the ability to access content outside of Apple's devices: No web-based access has been announced or hinted at.

* Locked into music formats only Apple wants to support: No lossless format, no advanced tagging, no support for open audio standards, the list goes on.

* Forced to use iTunes: Forcing everybody to use iTunes prevents alternatives from being developed or brought to market. iTunes sucks but there's no alternative not because they don't exist, but because Apple's vertical integration prevents alternatives from gaining any ground.

The iTunes Store is great. The iTunes application is horrible. Media lock-in
is bad for consumers.

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tptacek
The world before iTMS involved me going to tiny record stores and thumbing
through physical CDs. In today's world, within 4 minutes of reading a review
of a new artist, I can have the track on my phone.

Over the long term, maybe iTMS lock-in is bad for consumers. But when you say
that, I personally (just me) think you have to account for the fact that over
the short term, it's been a huge win.

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dreamdu5t
False dichotomy. You can have an online music store without waging a format
war and trying to control how people use their music.

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Steko
"You can have an online music store without waging a format war and trying to
control how people use their music."

You _can_ do this today only because Apple went to bat with the labels, won a
bunch of freedoms, had a crapton of success and the labels (fearing Apple's
leverage) gave even more freedoms to Amazon et al.

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mishmash
Exactly and some time down the line when Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Canocial
inevitably offer an equivalent service/price it will be because Apple
validated the model. The only interesting part will be if the labels make the
iTunes clones pony-up the large upfront fees Apple did.

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TomOfTTB
On the music I have to give Apple credit. At first glance I was kind of
annoyed at "download again" being their solution. But the more I think about
it the more I think it's better than streaming. You get unlimited downloads so
you can adjust for device storage space as needed and being able to download
the track means you aren't subject to connection problems.

Add that to the fact that all your songs purchased in iTunes are available for
free and I think you have a pretty stellar service.

Plus from their perspective it actually saves bandwidth. Since the number of
downloads most people make will be limited to the number of devices they have
(as opposed to streaming where you have to serve the song up every time it's
played)

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siglesias
I think it's as simple as, consumers don't want to deal with the latency. I
pick a song, it plays instantly, within half a second. Online players for now
seem naive.

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erikstarck
You obviously haven't tried Spotify. It's instantaneous.

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tptacek
Rdio is so fast I don't bother syncing music over to my phone anymore. I think
I agree, that normal people aren't going to care about the "latency" here.
Price, branding, and integration are huge clubs Apple is wielding here though.

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siglesias
On mobile or on your desktop? I think we need to make a distinction here.

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hussam
It seems to me that as far as photos go iCloud is only a temporary home while
you sync your devices up (the so-called Photo Stream
<http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html> ) . So it is still a
very device-centric view of the world, with the cloud as a backend assistant.
Did I misinterpret what they said?

Obviously it is too early to know now, and we'll only know for sure when it
comes out, but still, thoughts?

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HaloZero
I am honestly curious how they are going to prevent pirated music from
appearing unless by "ripped from CD" they ripped by iTunes from CD. But they
mention support songs purchased elsewhere in their blurb.

Maybe they just don't give a shit.

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jasonlotito
_This is all just a guess, but..._ You aren't seeing this the right way. That
money? Part of that is going to the labels. That pirate stuff you are adding?
Apple will keep track of it, and the labels will get a cut. So yes, the labels
know people are going to upload pirate music. At least now, they get some
money from it.

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brosephius
which is a pretty progressive decision by music companies. it's like they're
accepting that people will pirate music no matter what drm scheme or lawsuit
wave they throw out there, so they're trying to find a way to live profitably
with it.

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mikeknoop
I have heard that Grooveshark started under similiar pretenses.

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brosephius
would be awesome if there were an android client :) but seriously, I think I
need to see more details on how this works. can I choose to download just one
song at a time? can I create a playlist of my cloud'ed music, play it, and
delete it?

currently with itunes you have to manually select which artists/albums you
want to sync if you don't want to sync everything. this would be laborious to
manage with multiple devices, especially if you've got 100gb of music on your
macbook, and a 32gb iphone and a 16gb ipad. I'd much rather be able to
selectively stream my music.

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spullara
You don't need to manually select them, since the shuffle was released you
could always have iTunes select them for you to fill the remaining space on
your device.

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nextparadigms
This is not cloud music. It's a file locker.

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BusinessType
Sounds like both to me! As well as a data locker for my own apps!

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joebadmo
So, is there no web access to iCloud content? No way to share, for example,
photos or documents publicly (or in the case of docs, between apps)?

These seem like remarkably device-centric solutions for an increasingly web-
centric world. Which is not surprising, I guess, for what is essentially a
hardware company.

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cubicle67
I didn't see any web access mentioned, but mobile me has always had web access
for photos/email and the ability to make photo albums public or to password
protect them (for group access). I don't see why they'd remove this

we'll know soon though

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pistacchio
wandering what they'll do with those who paid (recently) for mobile.me

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mishmash
My MobileMe renewed... yesterday afternoon. Chatted the support up and he
offered a full refund, however it would take 4-6 weeks to post, a partial
refund in the next week or two, and no guidance beyond that because the
MobileMe team didn't actually learn that they had been discontinued UNTIL THE
KEYNOTE.

He was cool, and only made a few comments, but in the few he did, you could
absolutely feel the repressed steverage.

:)

