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One feature most iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users are hoping for is iTunes on the cloud. The ability to stream your music library wherever you are, especially if your enormous collection is just too much for any of the current capacities of Apple’s iDevices, is what audiophiles are lusting for. Now we’re getting a similar feature, one that wasn’t publicly advertised by Apple in its latest update of iDisk. Unbeknownst to most users, and apparently buried within the release notes, Apple has enabled background music streaming from the iDisk application.
First, in order to use iDisk, you’ll have to be a MobileMe subscriber. The online data storage service from Apple has always allowed you to play music if you put your tunes on it, but it would shut off if you left the application. Now, it happily streams your tunes straight to your ears while it runs in the background. Apple is now also allowing public sharing of these files with no restrictions. Both of these features are sure to set off alarms amonst the record labels who require licensing for music streaming, but the way in this feature works is a little tricky. You are listening to your own music for which you paid and stored on an online storage service.
While this seems like a great feature, and perhaps a neat way of getting additional tunes to play through your iPhone or iPad if it’s already brimming with all the music it can handle, it’s still not what we’re hoping for with a cloud-based iTunes. In order to get music onto your iDisk, you’ll have to select and manually add them to your iDisk rather than the easy syncing option you get through iTunes.
Does this new feature portend the coming of something bigger and better from Apple? Perhaps, but before we get too excited, let’s not forget the recent news that cloud-based iTunes could very well be delayed.
[Via: Michael Robertson]
About The Author
Marc Flores
Marc has been a mobile fanatic for the better part of a decade and has had more devices pass through his hands than he would care to count. Originally from Los Angeles and briefly in San Francisco, Marc now lives in Brooklyn where, unlike Will Park, he longs for simpler times and simpler technology. All the while, he writes about gadgets and wireless technology as he tinkers, hacks and ultimately breaks most of his gadgets in the process. Marc has written about the mobile industry for Boy Genius Report, MobileCrunch, Laptop Magazine and has had his work appear in the Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, CrunchGear and more.
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