Apple Confirms Steve Jobs To Announce iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud on June 6 | Hacker News Reader

Apple Confirms Steve Jobs To Announce iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion and iCloud on June 6

technobolt.com

35 pointsengr_haseeb8 comments

Does anyone know how a Cloud music service would work for non-iTunes bought music? While I would never pirate music cough, I'm wondering whether music obtained in such a manner would be available in the cloud. I can see three different ways the iCloud could work: 1) The only music available via the cloud are songs you've purchased. You have to sign in to get access to the music and only songs purchased with the account are available. Possible, but I doubt anyone would really use it if this was the case. 2) You are able to upload any music that you haven't purchased and add it to your cloud account. I think this is most likely but doesn't really differentiate it from current competitors. 3) Any music that you have in your itunes is instantly available online. I highly doubt this will be the case.

Anyone else have any thoughts on how it would work? Would you use it if you can't get pirated music on the cloud?

Since Apple acquired Lala, you'll probably see a lot of similarity between how the two worked. In the case of Lala, any music you purchased through the store was instantly available online, and was paired with the choice to download a physical copy. Any music you had that wasn't in the Lala system already, you'd have to upload. So, it worked for pirated music as well as legally purchased content.

I think this is most likely but doesn't really differentiate it from current competitors

Well, Apple doesn't really need to differentiate itself from current competitors, it just needs to show up to the party with an identical product that's already integrated with iTunes and iPod and they win by default.

Since iTunes allows you to use music you got from any location, it would make most sense to go with option two. This would be consistent with the manner in which Apple allows customers to use iTunes currently. If they choose option 3, their servers would probably be overloaded immediately, an embarrassment which hampered the launch of MobileMe[1]. Apple won't want to risk this.

I doubt if there would be much uptake of the service if it were iTunes-purchased music only. Piracy aside, what about music that you bought legally from legit sources?

[1] http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/09/inside-apple/

EDIT: there would probably be some limit that you could use for free (e.g. 10GB), but beyond this there would be a monthly fee, à la Dropbox.

I'm not at all convinced there will be a limit, at least not such a small limit as 10GB.

I read somewhere that Apple are going to replace music files you have with higher quality files. I suppose this means they are not really storing every single file separately.

I'm looking forward to Apple restoring OpenGL acceleration to what it was before Snow Leopard. After updating, games that would run in the 50 - 60 fps dropped to a disappointing 20fps.

I noticed OpenCL performance for bitcoin miners improve a lot (about 15%) when switching from Snow Leopard to the Lion Dev Seed.

No real explanation, just an observation.

Really? How and why did that happen?

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