So recently I've been looking into moving my music library to cloud storage. It actually makes sense. I have far more music than I could ever listen to. I think the last time I checked I could play music for 105 days without repeating and, of course, there is some music in there I'd never listen to. I'm moving towards having all SSD's in laptops and I don't want to take up the whole thing with my music collection.
Yes, I can have it on the file server, and I do. It's on a raid array, but what an enormous pain when I need to move it, or add some new music, fix id3 tags etc...
So I started looking at the three major options.
#1 is Apple. It's the logical choice for me. I have an iPhone, and will for the foreseeable future. I think it's the best phone/pda/media player on the market. If you like your GS3, great. That's a fantastic phone too, but nothing beats apple's iTunes/App Store integration. Here's the problem. Apple limits you to 20000 songs. I have 37000 and growing. Even if I prune out the shitty songs I've picked up over the years, that's almost 1/2 my library. Not going to happen. Not to mention that Apple only supports Windows and OSX. Yes, I wish I'd bought a Mac, but I didn't. I have a really nice 17" HP laptop that's less than a year old and STILL costs less than a 2 year old refurbished Macbook Pro 17". It runs windows 7 now, but will run Linux later, so Linux support is important.
#2 is Google. First off, it's free, at least it's free now. That's a great deal. Second, it's Google. They'll throw money at it until they crush the competition (Apple). Third, they support Linux. Yes they do. Oh and their browser support is first rate. There's even an iPhone/iPad app to play the streaming music. Not to mention it's supported natively on my Galaxy Note. This would appear to be the best choice. Not so fast. Google also has a 20k song limit, and there's no guarantee it's going to stay free. I've also read it's not very smart at differentiating computers so you can duplicate the library. I've also never bought music from Google.
#3 is Amazon. This initially was my first choice. The library size they support is absurd 200000 songs. Yes, 10x more. It's cheap at $24.99/year. It's supported on the iPhone, iPad and Android, and they're the only one that lets you buy directly on the iPhone, except for Apple. The player software on the iPhone is pretty nice, lets you mix cloud and local songs, and you can download directly to the device. The only catch here is the songs are stored in the app. Pretty stupid, except I'mg guessing it's something Apple did. Sounds perfect right? It was, until I found out they don't support uploading from Linux. Why do you insist on using Adobe Air. Oh and I can't download more than 1 song at a time. That's not going to work either. It''s really a shame, because otherwise this was a perfect solution. I love the mp3 match, and the free mp3 downloads if you buy a cd. Honestly, this would have been a perfect offer.
So, none of these are perfect, but I'm going to have to go with Google. I *want* to use Amazon, but refuse to be trapped into running windows. It's going to suck that I can only upload 1/2 the collection, but shit happens. Since none are ideal, I'll take the free options.
Do you hear that Amazon. You forced a customer who would happily have paid for your service to a competitor. I get that Linux is a fraction of the desktop market, but I won't have a new laptop for 4 years, and the desktop I use runs Linux too. Maybe by the time I install Linux on this Amazon will get its act together.
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