iCloud + iTunes Match ideal for us DJs?
Just watched the WWDC keynote, where they announced wireless syncing for iPhone and the iTunes match service.
iTunes match will scan your library and upgrade the music you ripped to 256kbps AAC. All for $25 a year.
I can see myself buying a track on my phone on the way to a gig, rating it, syncing it to my laptop, and spinning it an hour later.
Do you guys think this is an interesting development?
Not really. Couldn’t you have done that before anyway?
I agree with Popinjay. I think the ability to just buy a song, pay for the extra kbps and dump it when you get to an event already exists. Does this like send it from the phone to the laptop?
Pretty much, needs to be on wifi tho.
I’ve been wrong about almost every prediction I’ve made about apple, and I think that service is stupid…which means it’s going to be insanely successful for the general public and if your DJ software supports AAC, then you’ll probably like it for that exact purpose, OP.
I love that this development comes about a day after I decided to stop buying mp3s and move up to buying wavs and keeping flac files around. What’s the point of paying for good-quality files if the fucking computer’s going to compress the shit out of them for you anyway?
I love Apple for making an OS that lets me use real software and not fight with Windows…but literally every time they change anything about iTunes or the iPhone, I get a little more pissed off and care a little less that Android screens hurt my eyes and that their BS operating system is a bit more of a pain in the ass to use than un-jailbroken iOS.
And why is it that every time they’ve come out with an OS update lately it turns out that those 250 features actually wind up being 245 things that don’t affect me or that I’ve done with 3rd party software that I like better anyway, 1 thing that is kinda neat but that never gets used, and 4 things I have to search the internet to figure out how to disable…?
I’m actually excited about some of the stuff that’s going to be in Lion, and I’ll probably do the upgrade as soon as I know Logic, Maschine, and Traktor will keep working. But I already have a list of “features” that I want gone: like, another criterion for me doing the upgrade is that I know how to turn them off before I start the install. iTunes is quickly joining that list. I’d almost rather not have music on my iPhone and buy a different media player (or just burn CDs like the dark ages) than deal with an even more intrusive version of iTunes that I never use to play files anyway.
I know of at least one DJ on here that’s been beta testing Lion for awhile. I know he uses Ableton and Traktor, not sure about Logic. He seems to like it so far.
That’s good to hear. I kind of assumed they wouldn’t break Logic with an OS update considering that it’s their product, but you never know. I’m more worried about Maschine and Traktor.
And the more I look at that list of features, the more I just want to turn things off. Mission Control–or is it Master Control–seems kinda cool, but not if a gesture is the only way to activate it. Gestures are cool for tablets that I don’t want…I can’t see them being more useful than the keyboard for a laptop. But I’m weird…I switched to Crome solely because there’s an extension for it that makes me not have to use a mouse to browse the web.
Anyway, iCloud looks cool…it’s just too little too late to keep me using iTunes.
I’ll never buy anything from iTunes, 256kbps FTL.
I just got an email from Apple saying that my MobileMe account will become an iCloud account “this fall” so i dont have much choice.
MobileMe is well handy for me, iDisk makes sharing and backing up my Traktor collections a piece of piss so… yeah ill be getting this cloudy stuff.
iTunes is becoming like a fattened goose … soon for the chop if it carries on like this.
Currently its borked with the rainbow of death thingy… that should have been fixed already.
For DJs, iCloud/iTunes match does not seem to be very useful. I mean, wherever I go DJing, I take my laptop with me for obvious reasons. All the music is on there, I don’t need it in the iCloud, mClound or whateverCloud.
Don’t get me wrong, maybe half of my music library is iTunes. But the other half just isn’t and consists of tracks that are either not on the iTunes store or even on any digital music store at all. iCloud or iTunes match won’t help me with that. And even if it could, I already have it, just in a different format.
Don’t see a problem with the 256kbps bitrate though, AAC at that bitrate is just as good or bad as mp3 at 320k, so if you go for compressed files anyway, it really doesn’t matter.
Technically, the iCloud thing seems to be useful for people who rely on a mostly apple-only digital lifestyle. It’s free because it’s supposed to support an apple-only lifestyle and it is paid for with all the money the company makes by selling it’s hardware. It’s supposed to lure in as many people into that lifestyle as possible, and if you’re willing to live with that, iCloud may be a good thing.
But to me personally, the iCloud thing seems a little overhyped. I mean, I own three macs and an iphone, and for me and my way of doing things, I just don’t see the point. Maybe it’s because I’m still a little paranoid about uploading all my life onto some server, just waiting for some crooks to hack the service and use my data for their purposes. Maybe it’s because on-the-go wireless data transfer via 3G networks in vast amounts still costs a considerable amount of money. But mostly it’s because it won’t be as useful to me as Mr. Jobs thinks it will be. Love my macbook, love my iPhone, but icloud - meh. I prefer a daily dose of dock cable.
The problem is, it’s the IE of OSX. A total piece of shit, and completely intertwined into the god damned OS.
iCloud + iTunes Match ideal for us DJs?
Although I haven’t watched the keynote, or read much into it… I thought that iCloud keeps everything in the cloud and you just stream your music from there (which would make sense) rather than physically downloading/uploading to and from every device. You don’t physically upload any music to iCloud it just scours your computer and matches the closest thing on their server a d links it to your user account. I’ll bet they won’t be able to match much Dj friendly edm. And if they do it’ll be a single file from a mixed compilation no doubt.
This would make it useless for djs.
Nope, it uploads all the music that doesn’t have a match.
Yeah thats my worry. iDisk is cool but will iCloud be as safe… i guess so but i only use iDisk for specific purposes that are probably useless to others if hacked.
I dont see any real uses for serious DJs due to the inbuilt paranoia that we rightly have.
And as for syncing, as you say i have ethernet cables tucked away in 3 rooms of my house so i can sync of move shit around my network that consists of 3 Macs, 1 Dell and my iPhone.
Thing for me is that ive used MobileMe for some years now so my .me email account is vital.
What is FUCKING ANNOYING is that ive paid £49 a year for it, and its coming free with iOS5 as i read it… Bugger. (i havent read that carefully)
yep, and that part of the service is free (but limited to 25,000 songs I believe).
I can’t see this being useful for me at all 
Actually, it’s not. You can completely trash iTunes and everything associated with it (not media). It affects nothing. I’ve done it before when I got pissed off at iTunes.
Actually, an iTunes upgrade resetting to its default “move my files where I don’t know where they are and re-name them” setting is the reason I stopped DJing with Ableton. I couldn’t find an easy to way to revert the change or to track down my files automatically, so I had a folder full of useless analysis files that needed to find their owners somewhere, and I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
The sad thing is that I could see buying an appleTV just as a cheap netflix device and literally never using the iTunes store on it.
iTunes is crap. But it’s also easy to get rid of. Trashme and your administrator password do the magic…though I think you have to change a setting in Trashme.
Nope. It’s not a cloud service so much as it’s a syncing service that happens to use a cloud for intermediate storage.
It’s also a market research tool. The upside of “match” for Apple is that they get to see all the music people want that isn’t in the iTunes store. Maybe they’ll start doing some statistics on that data and figuring out where they could make money by offering more music. Then, if the files were good enough to begin with, they could just serve the download off of files in iCloud and pay royalties.
The more I think about it, the more I think it’s a huge joke…and based on how stupid I thought the iPod was, how pointless I still think the iPad is, how much I hate 90% of the “upgrades” in Lion will be, and how much I think that jailbreaking an iPhone now gives you more than iOS 5 will…that means that it’s going to be a tremendous success and change the way people do music.
And I’ll still be sitting here, encoding files myself and eventually taking advantage of RAID devices and audio interfaces running over Thunderbolt…the one legitimately awesome new feature that Apple has brought us since the switch to intel processors.
Well, I should’ve mentioned I’ve not gotten that pissed off at. Tried to work “around” it but it always seems to pop up and whatnot. Note that I have an iPhone, so, kind of crucial for me in that respect. That’s part of where my intertwined comment came in. Of course, if you don’t have an iPhone, no need.
[quote]
Actually, an iTunes upgrade resetting to its default “move my files where I don’t know where they are and re-name them” setting is the reason I stopped DJing with Ableton.[/quote]
I store all my music on an NFS share… OSX is pretty awful about reconnecting on boot, and when that happens, iTunes automatically stores rips and whatnot in ~/Music/iTunes/blah /blah. 
That drive is like 160 GB. That’s fucked me more than a few times.
You guys really ain’t selling these macbooks to me 
So what aspects of the OS redeem it in your eyes?