Life in the cloud?

[Alan B]

Find out, in this new article on the WebHostingBuzz Blog:
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/blog/2...-in-the-cloud/

All blog posts are available at: http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/blog/

[Tony]

Probably a step in the right direction, especially if they can pull it off at only $25/year. That remains to be seen, supposedly in the fall.

My music folder is about 100gigs now and it sure would be nice to get away from storing and backing that up locally. And, while we've been using the Amazon cloud for a couple years now for smaller daily backups, it's nearly impossible to figure out what 100gigs would cost - I've seen estimates of as high as $1/gig.

I too can't imagine the service picking up on all my tunes - certainly not the ones that aren't stored the same way iTunes stores them. And I'm one of the few that won't touch iTunes - it's like a virus. I don't even like to update Quicktime for fear I'll accidentally install some crapware from Apple.

[Alan B]

Yes, there are many details that need to be clarified.

My digital music collection is over 300 GB, almost all lossless. I can't see Apple recreating that.

[Tony]

I think the concept is they won't "recreate" it in the sense you have to "recreate" it every x months to back it up. Rather, they'll license it and stream it as needed. But my god to keep a copy of every song in lossless format and offer people a choice of streams - compressed or uncompressed - seems a gargantuan task. I don't even have any idea what sort of bandwidth would be need to stream a lossless audio file; less than most video I guess.

I like the concept in general, I just think what we'll get for $25/yr is an iTunes-centric version. If the RIAA even allows him to do that. They're still gloating over how everyone had to re-buy all their albums on cd in the 90's.

[Alan B]

That's my interpretation as well, that they won't back up or upload the music from my drive to their servers. Rather, I think they plan to provide streaming of "matched" music, however they do the matching. As we've discussed, for people like us I think there will be lots of stuff they can't match. Plus the issue I raised in the blog of what, if anything, do they do if what's on customer's drives is pirated.