March 29, 2011
Your Music In The Cloud
Good morning! Dropped the girls off at their schools and head to Boxborough. Listened to a little more “No Agenda” early on and then called my dad the rest of the way. Happy to hear mom continues to do better. My dad gave me side splitting laughter when he joked that with her feeding tube mom could now enjoy a good beer with him.
Amazon preempts Apple with cloud-based music service for Web and Android. Makes me wonder: Apple bought Lala, a company for storing your music online, back in Dec 2009, shut down their service in May 2010. We all assumed that it was because Apple wanted to make their own integrated iPod/iPhone/iTunes solution for keeping your music collection "in the cloud". What is Apple planning? I can already hear The Steve announcing it some months from now and spinning it as "Cloud music done right".
Did not know there were so many Doctor Who audio books at Audible.com. Perhaps now I'll have something to use my credits on...
Updating my Amazon MP3 store Android app for the new "cloud drive" functionality. May play around with it later...
After giving Amazon's music cloud a quick trial run I was discussing it with my peer at QC. I had to laugh. He is an audiophile and is NOT their target customer. He's has over 1100 CDs ripped in a lossless (ie. minimal compression and huge file sizes) format. He keeps his media on a terabyte RAID network attached storage at his home. If anything, he's considering how to stream music from his house, not from Amazon. I did give it a try and bought an album on their service with it being stored "in the cloud". Worked pretty well. Anything to wean me off of the 160megabytes iTunes app is a plus in my book.
Smooth drive home with a bit of sunset glare. It beats driving home in the dark! Listened to Buzz Out Loud #1436 on my commute. And yes, the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Drive Player were among the top stories. I'm kind of glad that Amazon put it out there, prodded the music companies, and effectively said, "okay, record labels, go public and sue us and show how you don't want customers to have easy access to the music they've already purchased". It's record label licensing issues that have held this kind of thing up in the past. We've had the technology to do this for years now.
After dinner Timothy and I decided to do more research into the Boxee Box. It seems to me to be the most complete tv set top box and has a nice user interface. I then got the boys tucked in bed with their prayers and soon did the same. Good night all!