Cloud Music

I've been a subscriber to iTunes Match, Apple's online music hosting/streaming service (for want of a better moniker) for a year now and my subscription is up for renewal a week or so before Christmas.

For anyone who has never heard of iTunes Match, the service essentially offers you the ability to listen to all your music from any Apple device regardless of whether that music is synced to the device. The only caveat being that you must have Internet access (WiFi or cellular) to download or stream the file.

When you first subscribe to the service, iTunes will scan your library and match and songs that you own with a corresponding copy that they hold in the "cloud". The main advantage of Apple's service is that they hold - if memory serves correct - over 60 million songs in their database. The chances are that a lot of your albums will also exist in the Apple catalogue and these songs will instantly become available to you to stream.

For any more obscure tunes that iTunes can't match, the software will upload them to the Cloud so you have a copy available.

The whole process can be a bit time-consuming to begin with but once all of your tracks have been matched or uploaded, any incremental changes should only result in a quick scan and match/upload.

The key word in the last sentence is 'should'. I find that iTunes Match causes iTunes to hang when scanning my library for new songs. My library consists of around 13,000 songs and at any one time there might be a new album or two. iTunes seems to take ages to identify these and upload or match them.

There are a couple of new kids on the block since I first bought my subscription to iTunes match - Amazon's Cloud Player and Good Music.

As far as I can tell, the pros and cons of each are as follows:

iTunes Match

Pros:

- Integrated with iTunes so no need to download a media scanning app.

- Integrates with the Music app on my iPad.

Cons:

- Slow to scan my iTunes library. Does it every time I load iTunes.
- I will soon no longer have an iPhone so no access on my phone when out and about.
- No web browser based access.

Amazon Cloud Player

Pros:
- Android app for my phone.
- Web browser based access for when I'm out and about.
- 200,000 track storage (not that I'll ever get close to that, mind).

Cons:
- No iPad app (yet).
- Not as big a catalogue of tunes to match against (so more tracks will be uploaded which takes a lot of time).

Google Music

Pros:

- Free!
- Available across all my devices and via the browser.

Cons:

- No matching feature. All music must be uploaded.







With Amazon Cloud Player being priced at the same level as iTunes Match, I think I'll be going with the former and hope that they release an iPad app sooner rather than later.

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Nexus 4

Decided to upgrade from my iPhone 4S to a Nexus 4 today. Estimated ship time of 1-2 weeks - I can't wait to get my grubby mitts on it!

 

 

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Holiday Idea #2

Burma. And more specifically Bagan.

 

 

 

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Species extinction

Since my last blog post, I've been thinking and reading more and more about different types of endangered species. It depresses me to think about the massive expansion of the human population across the planet and the complete disregard for any other species.

I stumbled across this article today and started to read more about the big cats; jaguars, leopards, tigers and lions. Perhaps my recent holiday to Tanzania has sparked a bit of an interest.

It should come as no surprise that every single one of the cats listed above are endangered to some extent. What did surprise me was the numbers of surviving animals.

Take the jaguar, the third largest cat on the planet (after the tiger and lion) and previously indigenous to a good proportion of North America and all of Central and South America.

It is now estimated that there are between eight to fifteen thousand animals left in the wild.

I've seen the human population rise from six to seven billion people in my lifetime and I find it an absolute disgrace that so few of these animals now survive. It doesn't sit well with me.

I read an article a couple of years ago which described how people who had recently watched the film Avatar felt a kind of depression that the world they had seen on screen didn't actually exist. If you've seen the film, you know the scene I mean - the one where the lead character first becomes an Avatar and runs in to the forest whereupon he stumbles across an incredible array of flora and fauna. Sooner rather than later, we will all be watching documentaries on TV showing what an amazing array of beautiful animals once roamed the planet and we'll all feel that same sense of disappointment that they're no longer with us.

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Tigers of India

I'm just watching a program on the BBC about the tigers of Ranthambore National Park, India, a place I visited around eighteen months ago.

It's sad to see how so few tigers survive in the wild. I'd imagine if you were to conduct a poll, few would know that there are less than 3,500 surviving in the world.

Take a look at the image below, yellow shows the historic roaming range of tigers, the green shows the current day range.

If something drastic isn't done sooner rather than later these magnificent creatures will become extinct. What a shame it will be for future generations to know that these animals which once flourished were wiped out on our watch.

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Central America 2013

Planning a trip to Central America next year. Top of the list of destinations to visit are the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, Mexico and Tikal, Guatemala. Is would mean I've chalked off four of the New Seven Wonders of The World.

I love planning future trips!

Chichen Itza

Tikal

Posted with Blogsy

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