Topic: Cloud Service - Music Collection

[todd e]

GooglePlay is limited to 20,000 songs. :-(

Anyone use Amazon Music Library?  It allows 250,000 songs, and supports FLAC as well
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201379270

$24.99 seems like a deal, but before I pull trigger I figured I'd ask yall for experiences or other recommendations.  TIA

[Ultfris101]

For $25/year I think I'm going to try it out. Glad you pointed it out.

I like the convenience of iTunes Match so I can put stuff in iTunes and then download it to my phone when I want it and delete when I need space, etc

The flexibility of # of songs and formats is interesting for this service and especially since it appears to work with Sonos which I have a couple components of.

[audBall]

Do they define a "song" by a certain file size?

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

I'd like to hear how this works too. I have Google Music and it's great. Now I'm mostly use it to listen to whatever (stuff I own and trying new things). It sure would be awesome to do all that AND have my entire live recording collection up there.

I have some of my recordings on Google Music, but I have way more than 20,000 songs in the live archive. I know it's way less than 250k though.

[bhtoque]

Leave a pc on at home and use subsonic. $1 a month, web or app, no synching or upload, does 24/96, create multiple users and share access.

www.subsonic.org

JAson

[audBall]

Assuming a wifi connection, would Remote Desktop work for something like this? I noticed there's a RD app back when I used it for work but never tried it.

[stevetoney]

A couple of questions...

- Wouldn't you need an unlimited data package to be able to take advantage of this?  Seems like if you're capped like I think most of us are, that it would get expensive to stream music from a cloud service if the main use would be to have access to your collection when you're away from your home machine. 

-  Does the sound quality decrease when you're listening to a stream?

[kubacheck]

^^^ can't answer the above questions, but one thing I'm sure of is that, at least with an iPhone, if you stream on your phone while on the go (not plugged in), it will sap your phone's battery much quicker than if you're just listening to music stored on it in iTunes.....

[stevetoney]

Leave a pc on at home and use subsonic. $1 a month, web or app, no synching or upload, does 24/96, create multiple users and share access.

Gotta believe that the 'share access' part of this response would be a copyright violation, or at minimum a grey zone, if it's commercial music that's being shared.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

A couple of questions...

- Wouldn't you need an unlimited data package to be able to take advantage of this?  Seems like if you're capped like I think most of us are, that it would get expensive to stream music from a cloud service if the main use would be to have access to your collection when you're away from your home machine. 

-  Does the sound quality decrease when you're listening to a stream?

For streaming I try to be on Wi-fi whenever possible. At least for me I don't often need to stream music via cell service. When I do it ends up being about 75MB per album. I have 3GB of high speed data before I get slowed down where I can't stream anymore. I've gotten to that point twice in the past year. Both times when I was on vacation. The last time I took a trip I made sure I downloaded enough music for my drives on the hotel wi-fi and that solved that problem. I still ended up streaming a few things in the car, but still well below the 3GB cap I have.

I can't speak for the Amazon option, but the Google option allows you to lower your quality of the stream to save data. If you want to have high quality sound you can. Again I mostly use the cell signal to stream while driving and I've been happy with the lower quality stream. Sounds good enough when you have road noise to compete with.

The main reason I like these services vs. something like subsonic (which I used prior to Google Music):

1. Your music is backed up. Yes I back up at home, and I do try to keep my offsite backup up to date. But IMO, you can never have too many backups...especially of our live recordings. I think the Amazon 250k limit will get me to upload all of my concert recordings up there. If I like it I'll consider changing my Google Music subscription over there.

2. If you pay for a subscription you can use it to either listen to new music that you might like (I'll listen to something if I read a good review of it). Other reason is just to have access to ANYTHING you can think of. I don't own any Cream albums, but I just watched 'Beware of Mr. Baker' and figured I should listen to some Cream and other bands Ginger Baker was in.

[stevetoney]

******

EDITING THIS RESPONSE 12/26/14

I've recently learned that sites like mypcbackup that offer 'unlimited' backup space are misleading us.  They do in fact offer unlimited backup space, but NOT on their personal plans and once you move over to the special plans where the unlimited space is available, it becomes REALLY expensive.  As far as I have been able to tell from my research they all do this.

So here's what they do.  They say for $100 a year or whatever you have unlimited backup space, but then when you hit a certain amount of space (in the case of mypcbackup, that amount is 816gb) you have reached your 'fair usage' limit.  What's fair usage?  Well it's their way of backending your storage space by saying well you've used an unfair amount of space compared to 99% of the rest of the users, so since you're not being fair to everyone else you don't get anymore unless you upgrade to a business account.  In the case of mypcbackup, who advertises UNLIMITED space for around $100 a year on their personal plan, an upgrade to business plan costs $83 just to get a business plan and $5 per month per 100gb of extra storage space.  So, lets say you're like me and you have 1.5TB in your music archives of masters you've made over the years and you want to have that all backed up.  I'd need another 700gb, so the upgrade would cost me 83 + 12* (7*5) or around $500 a year.  NO THANK YOU!

I'm not sure how these company's consider calling a plan unlimited when it's actually limited to 816gb FAIR, and going over 816gb UNFAIR, but you get the picture.  It's flat out 'bait and switch' advertising and it's absolutely wrong.  Like I said, it looks to me like all of the sites that offer unlimited space do this.  If I discover a site that doesn't, I'll update this post.

********

^ Makes sense Mike.  Thanks for the response. 

FWIW, a couple of months ago, I researched cloud storage services for backing up my masters and ended up going with myPCbackup, which so far I'm very pleased with.  This service isn't a specialized music streaming site, but just for backing up data.  I've been doing double harddrive backups at home for a long time, so this is a third backup location.  I may drop back to only one home backup since cloud storage is also backed up.  It's $100 a year for unlimited storage space.  Other features of this site that I like are quick downloads and that I can share my files at the file, folder, or directory level.

I used to upload to two places; archive and etree.  The problem with etree is it's torrent based and since most music I record is local and regional acts, the torrent dies pretty quickly.

However, I recently started a Facebook group for announcing and sharing my music...Funked Up (feel free to join if you'd like).   I wanted someplace where people could permanently download shows that aren't on archive, so myPCbackup does that perfectly. 

The only downside I'm finding to cloud storage like this is that, since upload speeds aren't nearly as fast as download speeds, it can take a long time to get files uploaded to your particular site, particularly the large 24bit FLAC masters.   

[Ultfris101]

Regarding upload speeds for backup services, I've been using Crashplan. I found that I was wasting a lot of CPU cycles compressing everything which is obviously a waste of time on FLAC and AVCHD video files, and only of marginal benefit for WAV.

I created a custom backup set that covered the directories I dump raw files and final storage and gave it higher priority with compression disabled and was able to get a lot more files uploaded quickly. I don't know if MyPCBackup has a similar ability to alter this but it's worth checking out if you haven't already.

[stevetoney]

I've recently learned that sites like mypcbackup that offer 'unlimited' backup space are misleading us.  They do in fact offer unlimited backup space, but NOT on their personal plans as advertised and once you move over to the special plans where the unlimited space is available, it becomes REALLY expensive.  As far as I have been able to tell from my research they all do this.

So here's what they do.  They say for $100 a year or whatever you have unlimited backup space, but then when you hit a certain amount of space (in the case of mypcbackup, that amount is 816gb) you have reached your 'fair usage' limit.  What's fair usage?  Well it's their way of backending your storage space by saying well you've used an unfair amount of space compared to 99% of the rest of the users, so since you're not being fair to everyone else you don't get anymore unless you upgrade to a business account.  In the case of mypcbackup, who advertises UNLIMITED space for around $100 a year on their personal plan, an upgrade to business plan costs $83 just to get a business plan and $5 per month per 100gb of extra storage space.  So, lets say you're like me and you have 1.5TB in your music archives of masters you've made over the years and you want to have that all backed up.  I'd need another 700gb, so the upgrade would cost me 83 + 12* (7*5) or around $500 a year.  NO THANK YOU!

I'm not sure how these company's consider it FAIR when they call a plan 'unlimited' when it's actually limited to 816gb, but going over 816gb is considered UNFAIR USAGE, but you get the picture.  It's flat out 'bait and switch' advertising.  Like I said, it looks to me like all of the sites that offer unlimited space do this.  If I discover a site that doesn't, I'll update this post.

** Note that I edited the post that I made earlier promoting mypcbackup for their unlimited plan...don't want anyone to read that post and make the same mistake I did...that being actually believing a company's statements that unlimited doesn't actually mean 'unlimited as long as you don't go over 816gb'.