Music and the Cloud, Pt. 1

I figured I'd cover digital music in detail first since most people nowadays have at least some experience purchasing digital music.  This topic will be broken into two parts, one for cloud locker services and the other for subscription-based services.  We'll start with cloud locker, but both sections are going to be long simply because there's a lot of ground to cover.

Chances are that if you're reading this blog, or any blog, you've purchased music on iTunes.  Sure, you may still have a large leftover CD library from your high school and college days stashed away in one of those giant CD wallets.  Maybe you still buy the occasional CD when passing by the now-tiny music section in Walmart.  Maybe you're even a diehard purist who refuses to buy music any other way than on vinyl at your local, old school record shop (in which case this blog probably isn't for you).  Whatever the case, the vast majority of people now purchase their music digitally.

Even if you still buy CDs, there's really no reason now to not make digital backup or archive copies, if nothing else.  However, the sheer number of services for doing this can be bewildering. Let's take a look at three of the most well-known.

Apple iTunes with iCloud
iTunes is already the industry leader in terms of digital music distribution.  If you use an iPhone or iPod and live in the Apple ecosystem, iTunes with iCloud and Match provides a powerful solution for your music needs.  With one of the biggest selections - around 30 million songs - you're sure to find the music you're looking to purchase in the iTunes store.  In addition to downloading the song or album you just purchased from iTunes to your computer, iTunes will allow you to download your purchased songs onto another registered computer or iOS device.  You no longer have to hook up your iPhone to your computer and sync with iTunes to transfer music, and Apple makes this transition easy.  All users also get 5 GB of free cloud storage, but items purchased from Apple, including iTunes music, don't count against your storage quota.

Subscribe to iTunes Match for $25/year and get storage for up to 25,000 additional songs that you ripped from your CD collection or purchased from somewhere other than iTunes.  The way this works is that iTunes will scan your computer's hard drive for music and attempt to match each song to its master copy, giving you access to the iTunes copy.  The beauty here is that if your copy of the song is of an inferior quality (i.e. you downloaded a crappy ripped copy on Napster or Limewire before they were shut down), you will get the iTunes copy at 256 kbps AAC.  iTunes will also manually upload your copy of any song it isn't able to match.

Apple was also the first to introduce a smart playlist creator, called "Genius," and has integration with Facebook and Twitter if you want your pals to know what you're listening to. Rumor has it that Apple will also be introducing a subscription based service to broaden its competitiveness, but nothing further yet.  What we do know is that all this makes iTunes a powerful solution, but may not make sense for you if you don't use an iPhone or tote a separate iPod/iPad around with you everywhere.  Since iTunes is only available on iOS devices, you may want to look elsewhere if you have, say, and Android phone.

Amazon MP3 & Cloud Player
Amazon is very similar in its execution of cloud music strategy to iTunes.  For those not already aware, Amazon has its own extensive MP3 store with over 20 million songs.  When you search for music on the Amazon website, Amazon gives you a choice to purchase in CD or MP3 format if available.  Music on Amazon is often 10 or 20 cents cheaper than on iTunes or elsewhere.  When you buy an Amazon MP3 song, the song is automatically added to your Cloud Player.  Like iTunes, Amazon gives you unlimited storage for anything you buy from Amazon.  You can also import your existing music to Cloud Player in a similar fashion - Amazon scans your hard drive for music, matches what it can to its own 256 kbps MP3 files, and uploads the rest.  Amazon gives you storage for 250 songs for free, and you can upgrade to storage for 250,000 songs for $25/year.  It's hard to imagine anyone would need space for more than a quarter-million songs.

Amazon originally launched the Cloud Player interface is a Web app, as opposed to a software application you run on your desktop like iTunes.  So, no additional software is required to play your music on a computer; you just navigate your browser to Cloud Player from the Amazon website.  Since then, however, Amazon released a PC software app that you can use instead.  I find the desktop app more streamlined and intuitive than its cloud-based counterpart, and the program also handles library management (uploading and downloading songs).  Mobile playback is offered through the Amazon MP3 app on Android and iOS, which let you stream music through the app or download songs to your device for offline listening.  There are also apps available for Sonos and Roku devices, Samsung smart TVs, and integration with Ford SYNC.  You can purchase music through the mobile app to put directly on your device or store in the cloud.  Streaming playback is offered in the song's original bitrate quality up to 320 kbps.  The fact that Amazon MP3 is available on multiple platforms makes it far more flexible than iTunes by default.  However, Amazon is missing some other options iTunes offers, namely social integration and smart playlists.

Google Play Music

Google has had a somewhat tougher road that its trailblazing competitors in terms of securing the licenses it needs to make music available for purchase, but that's a topic for another article.  Google now has a fully competitive marketplace, with over 18 million songs in its Play Music store.  Google Play is accessible through the website on desktop browsers or through the Android app on any Android device.  Your music library is managed and played through a browser (like Amazon) or through the Play Music Android app.  Google's offering is very similar to Amazon's and Apple's with a few important differentiating factors.  Any song you purchase in the Play Store will automatically be added to your Google storage cloud, where you have unlimited space for Play Store purchases.  Google will also scan and match songs on your PC's hard drive and put them in the cloud if you wish, once again upgrading your poor-quality and ill-gotten songs if Google can find a match for them.  Play Music will then manually upload any song for which it can't find a match.  Google also has some similar features that other services offer - you can create an "Instant Mix" based on a single song, just like iTunes, and there's Google+ social integration, for whatever that's worth.

This brings us to the first and most important differentiating factor - cost, or lack thereof.  Google gives you space for up to 20,000 songs you upload to the cloud (not counting songs you bought from the Play Store), which is slightly less than Apple and much less than Amazon.  And it's completely free.  And you can't beat free.  Did I mention it costs nothing?  The second feature - sound quality.  While iTunes and Amazon offer song purchases at 256 kbps AAC and MP3 formats, respectively, Google offers songs encoded at 320 kbps MP3.  This may mean little to the vast majority of people, as most couldn't tell a difference between a 256 kbps file, 320 kbps file, or a lossless FLAC file, and still some would argue that AAC is a more efficient codec that MP3 so the difference in sound quality would be null.  Regardless, what you need to take away from this is that music purchased from Google is among the highest quality you can get from a digital storefront.  Third feature - free music and music discovery.  Google will often spotlight new and upcoming artists, and offer a track or two from them for free.  Sometimes, Google will spotlight a well-known artist for a special occasion (like a famous birthday), or a genre, label, etc., along with free or discounted tracks.  There are hundreds of free songs (some exclusive) available from Google.  The free tracks can be a bit of a mixed bag, but there are many well worth having.

So, while Google's ecosystem isn't platform agnostic, free cloud storage makes for an extremely compelling offer for people in the Android universe.  Like with iTunes, rumors abound that Google will also introduce a subscription streaming component to its service as well, sometime this summer.

As for myself, I have an Android phone and no longer use my iPod, so buying and storing my music on iTunes doesn't make sense for me.  My wife, however, uses it all the time with her iPhone.  And why wouldn't she, as Apple maddeningly convenient?  I personally use both Amazon's MP3/Cloud Player and Google Play Music.  While I started with Amazon before Google came out with its service (and was very pleased with it, I might add), I've found myself migrating to Google's offering.  It's free - that's the big thing - I don't need space for more than 20,000 songs (I seriously doubt most people will), and I like some the features better than Amazon's.  I still buy music on Amazon, as it's often cheaper, but will probably cancel my $25/year subscription the next time it's up for renewal.  Sorry, Amazon.

The next post will be about subscription music services, and why you may not even need to buy music at all anymore.

The weather's great up here, just don't look down!

In this post, let's talk about what it means to keep your stuff in the cloud and why you should do it.  As I mentioned in the previous post, it's mostly about convenience - the convenience of having your stuff accessible to you wherever you have an Internet connection.  First, let's define what we mean by "cloud."  Essentially, I'm just talking about saving files on a secure, remote server rather than on your own computer's hard drive.  In other words, remote storage versus local storage.  Think of the cloud (that remote computer server) as your own, rented digital locker.

Your immediate reaction may be, "wouldn't my stuff be a lot more secure on my own computer"?  The answer is, well... yes and no.  Most major, reputable companies that offer cloud storage use sophisticated encryption and data protection.  Your data should be accessible only to you, and your security credentials are usually a username and password.  Of course there's no absolute guarantee everything is 100% safe, but neither are the physical things you put in real storage.  On the other hand, things you store in a secure, rented pod may actually be safer in some ways than what's in your house - security may be tighter, tougher to break in to, and accessible only by someone who has your key or lock combination.  So it is with digital storage.  You have to decide for yourself whether you actually need the storage and whether the benefits outweigh the risks.

It used to be that you had to purchase sometimes costly cloud storage, manually backup your computer, and simply download files back onto your computer when you needed them.  This is useful for people and businesses who need protection/backup in case of a computer crash or similar loss of data.  However, the more connected people became and the more devices people had, the greater the need to share and access data across devices instead of just backing it up.  Nowadays there are a bewildering number of cloud storage solutions depending on your needs, the type of devices on which you will access the data, what type of data you'll be storing, etc.  These solutions can range from all-in-one, backup and store everything, to very  specific types of storage for very specific types of data.  Over the next several posts, I'll be covering different types of storage solutions for probably what are your most immediate needs.  I'll try to highlight services that I personally like and/or have used, and give you at least some information that could help you make an informed decision about whether to use a particular service.  Help me help you make your life easier!