I am becoming progressively more confused about my music needs.
First of all, I have a lot of music on CDs. Much of that music has been turned into mp3s, in my iTunes library. Secondly, there's music I've bought as mp3s, which by now is not insubstantial. That too, of course, is in iTunes. But since Amazon is usually cheaper than iTunes, and often has remarkable sales making it crazy not to buy music you're even remotely interested in, most of the music I've bought is from Amazon. Because of this, Amazon not too long ago allowed me to store everything I have in iTunes on their cloud server, for free. And I recently got a classic iPod, which is now a little over half full, which holds my entire iTunes library as well. For the record, my iTunes library is on a remote disk attached to my MacBook Pro.
Here's the deal. Amazon says it's going to charge $25 a year for the formerly free service. iTunes Match is the same thing, also $25 a year, with no doubt better synchronization to my various Apple devices. Do I need either of these? After all, I do have all of it on the iPod already. I don't know.
Then there's the other apps. I listen to Pandora for maybe half an hour a day in my office when I first arrive. I don't pay for this. I looked into RDO, and really liked that vastness, but that cost money. It's not that I can't afford it, but that I wonder if I'd get the value out of it. Spotify is similar, I guess, but it annoys me to see what people are listening to via Facebook. No offense, but the number of people I care about what music they're listening to, if I'm not in the room, is Kelvin (i.e., absolute zero). Similarly, the number of people I want to know what music I'm listening to when they're not in the room is also K. I like finding new music, but I fail to see how the name of a song and the performer is somehow an aid in that quest, given that for all I know you're listening to the song and vomiting uncontrollably.
Modern life is tough. I'm bordering on getting iTunes Match, but not so much as to actually get it.
I wish someone could solve this for me.
2 comments:
A time-machine backup on external drive may be fine (though if you get a new one every four years might be the same price as cloud storage without the fire protection as well). Considering your iPod and your iTunes library as backups of each other is not fine--one iTunes sync bug and they're both gone (this has happened to people).
iTunes Match stinks. It converts all your audiofile-quality music to 256kbps. Plus, if you have more music than allowed, it just stops syncing when it wants.
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