Cloudy With a Chance of Music →
Shawn Blanc wrote an excellent piece on the state of cloud music services. My setup is exactly like he describes:
In an ideal world I would always have access to my whole iTunes library from my laptop, Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Most people solve this by purchasing a Mac Mini and setting it up as the shared media library for the house. This is a pretty good and clever solution for home media library, and would solve most of my problems. The trouble is that: (a) a Mac mini isn’t cheap; (b) if I’m not at home then I don’t get access to those songs; and (c) if I don’t use the mini for syncing my iPhone and iPad then I can’t get all the music and movies I want onto those devices.
And I concur it’s a pain in the ass for syncing. I was forced to move my music library off my laptop after I switched to a SSD (My iTunes library is 170 GB while my SSD is 120 GB).
Shawn is less than impressed with the current offerings from Google and Amazon and prefers owning his music instead of renting it. Living in the US Shawn doesn’t have access to one excellent cloud service we have in Europe however, Spotify. Spotify allows you to stream your music to native Mac, Windows and mobile clients. They also allow you to purchase music. But you don’t need to purchase the songs to sync music to your iPhone or Android device for offline playing which is excellent for traveling abroad. And their pricing is comparable to Rdio, € 9.99.
