iTunes in the Cloud (My Web Music Locker)

I purchase a fair amount of music on an annual basis(100+ recordings a year) Being a fan of music and technology, I have been eagerly awaiting Apple’s iCloud music announcement. On Monday, Apple announced at their World Wide Developers Conference, iTunes in the Cloud.

My present solution for buying music is varied like most music collectors. I buy music from record stores, music retailers, music e-tailers (amazon, CD Universe), directly from the artists and the record labels, Apple iTunes and Microsoft Zune.

I have been trying to determine how I can shift to a full digital music collection but I have been waiting for two things to happen. 1) Better universal availability and a more seamless management/distribution of my music. 2) Better digital audio quality sound (that may be answered next year by high audio resolution from Warner Music but how far reaching that will be across the rest of the industry remains to be realized.) Apple Audio Lossless Codec (AALC)  has not lived up to its expectations.

It looks like iTunes in the Cloud will satisfy the first requirement by allowing me to easily consolidate my music library in their cloud. I have the same reservation everyone is expressing about the nature of the cloud, “Can I entrust my music to the Apple iCloud?”.

I can begin by experimenting with the technology with  iCloud’s free 5GB of storage when Apple acknowledges me via e-mail that the service is available. The service will scan and match my current music collection for music that is available on the iTunes store. What I really like is that iCloud will then make it available to all my devices by sending my songs’ metadata (probably via Gracenotes technology…) to the cloud. Then if I so desire I can sign up for the new iTunes iMatch service which will cost me $25 a year, (uh-oh yet another Internet subscription) with unlimited storage.

So Apple how do you solve #2 for me and others? Hmmmmmmmmm 😉