Apple Takes A Baby Step Toward iTunes In The Cloud

Michael Robertson noticed new streaming music capability in a new release of iDisk:

Michael Robertson, Apple Quietly Enables Online Streaming To iPhones, iPad and iTouch

Apple recently pushed a new version of their iDisk software. iDisk is Apple’s online storage service similar to Microsoft Skydrive and Google Docs. Quietly mentioned in the release note of version 1.2 is the ability to play music files from remote storage in the background. I say “quietly” because this capability is not among the bullet list of features. Only if you click the “More” button do you see this listed:

* Play audio from your iDisk while using another app

What this means is that for any music files such as MP3 or Apple’s AAC files stored in your iDisk account you can play them on your devices while you use your device for other operations. This makes streaming practical from Apple’s online storage. This new release brings this capability to iPhone, iTouch and iPad. You can stream music to multiple devices simultaneously.

This is not “iTunes in the cloud” but it is definitely moving the Cupertino company in that direction. First off there is no automated way to get all your iTunes music to your iDisk account. To load files to iDisk you have to select individual files and upload them from your browser. (Apple does let you sync Calendars, Contacts, Bookmarks, etc directly from OSX but excludes music files.) Secondly there’s no support for playlists so your iTunes playlist do not work in iDisk. There seems to be no way to play a list of files. Cover art is not supported as well. And while iDisk will cache other files, it will not cache music files. Still it’s not hard to see how Apple is adding features to enable it to support audio in it’s cloud storage business.

I tried the new app, and it is as Robertson reports.

I find it especially curious that I can share music in this way — having it published to a public or password protected location on the web — as well as streaming it to my iPhone.

I tried uploading a compressed music folder to see if it would do something with that, but it doesn’t — although I can shared compressed files with others.

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