Apple iCloud

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.<p>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.<p>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.

I want more control over my music with the cloud, not less.<p>* iCloud will not offer the ability to access content outside of Apple's devices: No web-based access has been announced or hinted at.<p>* 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.<p>* 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.<p>The iTunes Store is great. The iTunes application is horrible. Media lock-in is bad for consumers.

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.<p>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.<p>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)

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 <a href="http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html</a> ) . 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?<p>Obviously it is too early to know now, and we'll only know for sure when it comes out, but still, thoughts?

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.<p>Maybe they just don't give a shit.

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?<p>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.

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

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)?<p>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.

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