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iTunes with iCloud: Finally the ‘frustration’ ends

For years I’ve been rather frustrated every time I think about iTunes. I’ve got 40GB free on my 1,000GB drive. Yes, I’ve got a *dedicated* iTunes hard disk in my main Mac Pro.

It’s flipping ridiculous.

Buy a 2GB movie for £9 and unfortunately it’s now your problem to manage the file. I want to buy the license and not have to mess about managing my own data infrastructure.

If you have a disk crash and you lose all your movies, hard luck.

I reckon you *might* be able to appeal to Apple for the right to download some/all of your purchases in that instance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple declined to assist. Every time you download something they’re pretty good at pointing out that you should keep a backup.

A backup of my 960GB of iTunes content?

No thank you.

I just don’t want that problem.

You know and I know that Apple has a record of my purchase and that it’s stupid-simple for them to enable download on demand. I’m sure the company has wanted to look at offering this for sometime but licensing issues may have prevented it. Or perhaps the sheer data volume implications.

So I’ve been flying fast and loose. I don’t bother to back up all those TV shows, movies or music.

That’s a problem.

But perhaps a bigger problem — or massive frustration — is not being able to access the data because it’s stuck on my primary iTunes library. If I want to watch Top Gun when I’m in Houston next week, I need to plan ahead. I need to put that file on the devices I want now. It’s unrealistic to sit in a Houston hotel room and transfer a 2GB file at 15k/sec from my home machine.

The chances are the Houston hotel will have a pretty good connection to the iTunes server though. So I’d like to be able to pull down that content as I wish.

It looks like we will certainly have this feature enabled next week — although I saw no mention of movies yet. Did you? I might have missed that. Still, the ability to stop having to worry about the location of my data (and the fact that it’s backed-up — or that I have a license to access it as I need) is rather reassuring.

I particularly like the concept of iTunes Match as well: All the other music I have in my library now becomes accessible on any (Apple) device.

What are you thinking about iTunes in the iCloud?

7 COMMENTS

  1. Back it up! Man if I had that much stuff from iTunes floating around I would be very paranoid about backing it up! However, I completely agree with your point of view as well! And in fact until they do do this, then iTunes and the rest of them are not going to be getting much, if any, of my business!

    Are they really going to allow you to buy that much space on their cloud service though? How much would you personally consider paying for 1500GB of cloud space? Or would the size not matter? Would you just upload, say your favourite and/or newest 20GB?

    I like the theory behind having access to every last bit of ones purchases via the cloud but then I also wish they would open the iPhone upto extra storage in the form of microSD cards. After all with the 64GB microSD card announced earlier, coupled with a 64GB iPhone I think I would be willing to make the sacrifice in time needed to ensure that there was an appropriate amount of stuff on there! I do something similar with the N8 I have now. 32GB in the phone on top of the 8GB it came with (I keep that for the camera mostly) and then the three 32GB USB memory sticks that go with me when needed.

  2. Gareth I reckon about 80% of my content is already sitting on the iTunes database — I just need access to this when I want to view a particular movie or show…

  3. Agree I’m looking forward to having a track when I need it. I have all my iTunes content on my home server, rather than locally on my MacBook Air to save space, so I have the same problem as you – a hassle of planning. If iCloud delivers on the promise of access anytime, anywhere I’ll be happy.

    My concern is the UK still has pretty crappy broadband speeds, certainly if you don’t live on top of your local exchange, so my frustration may just shift from not having the right file at the right time, to trying to play the right file at the right time.

    We are seeing more and more rich media services coming to the UK, YouTube offering rental movies, just the latest example, but unless our infrastructure steps up I can’t see wide spread adoption.

  4. Seems tv shows are included in the US, but not in the UK.  No mention of movies in either.  Shame really.  Makes people feel like “free”/pirated comes with fewer restrictions.

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