Tick Tock – Tick Tock
The biggest impediment to getting your entire library into the cloud, which Lala offered to do for free, was the interminable amount of time it took to get tens (let alone hundreds) of gigabytes of data uploaded to Lala’s servers. Even at that, tracks were missed or skipped, and sometimes garbled; it was an imperfect, though tantalizing prospect at best.
There seems to be a general consensus that Apple will do better in this regard by foregoing the uploading of any data at all and simply “scan” a user’s iTunes library to create a cloud-based account that mirrors the music and makes it all available to access any time “from the cloud.”
Presumably, this means browser-based access from any computer anywhere (which Lala offered) and likely also access via a user’s registered iOS devices – iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.
But will iOS devices also access iCloud media through browsers only, or will we see new iOS apps unveiled to handle this task? Will tracks stream over WiFi only, or will users be able to listen to their music over 3G?
With a roll of the dice, this player says out of the gate it’s going to be all-browser access and all-WiFi. Apps may soon come along, and when the holy grail of unlimited data returns to this earth, so may 3G access to your iCloud media assets; but not next week, dear reader, not next week.
What is that noise and where did you get it?
Another question many have is whether iCloud will scan and mirror music that isn’t in iTunes’ master database.
Will users have cloud access to rare jazz recordings they have meticulously burned to disk and ripped into their local iTunes libraries? Access to live recordings by unknown, unsigned garage bands featured prominently in their playlists? Access to music the provenance of which is unclear but nevertheless is still part of that iTunes library?
Knowing Apple and knowing the company has already inked licensing deals with three of the four major recording label conglomerates, you can probably forget about cloud access to anything that isn’t in the iTunes master database and which Apple can’t confirm with its scanning technology that you either bought previously through iTunes or ripped to your library from a store-bought, commercial CD.
iCloud promises to be a major step forward in making music universally portable, but it’s not likely to magically put every single piece of music you can conceive of into the cloud for you to access from anywhere. Not next week, anyway.
