Life in the cloud?

By now you’ve heard about Apple’s announcement of iCloud. This week’s media launch from Apple showcased that new service (with the stupid name of “iCloud”) plus some lesser ones. I think the best news from that event was that Steve Jobs was part of the presentation. Whatever the extent of his health issues, it’s good to see that he’s still involved.

The new service will scan your PC’s music collection and then make the same music available from Apple’s servers. The idea is to make your music accessible remotely from any connected device. There are questions, though, as a lot of detail has yet to be communicated.

For example, how will Apple match music? Will it be simply based on artist and song? What about cases where the artist has recorded many different renditions of a particular song, which is common in jazz. What about the particular album release? I spend time seeking out the better sounding releases, so that I may prefer the 1988 CD of an album rather than its recent harsh sounding remastered version. Which one will Apple provide?: presumably the recent one, as it’s what would be currently available from the record company.

Will the source of the music tracks matter? Surely any tracks originally purchased from Apple’s iTunes will be matched, but what of other sources? I have many digital tracks that I copied myself from my CDs. Will Apple provide those from its cloud? What of tracks that were downloaded illegitimately, from pirate sources? Will Apple match those, or try to find a way to screen them out? This is a tough one, because if they filter out those, then they’ll probably not allow the albums that I copied from my CDs.

Beyond music, Apple plans to scan and upload your photos, word processing documents, and other files from your computer. Given the increasing frequency of security breaches on major servers, do you want your entire digital life sitting on Apple’s servers? I’m not sure that I do.