Head in "the Cloud" - Music
I was sitting, listing to my hymns playlist tonight and was reminded how much my music listening has changed in the last 5 years. 5 years ago, I lugged around my CD collection in my car. Lest you think I use the word “lug” unfairly, at one time I had anywhere from 500-600 CDs when my collection was stolen. I worked back up to probably about 400 CDs when I stopped buying cds.
So, what happened to wean me off of the massive case? Simple, 5 years ago, I drove 30 minutes to work each day and 30 minutes back, and 30 minutes to church and back, and 20 minutes to get fast food, or go to ShopKo, or get Hardees. That’s a lot of driving so my CD player in the car was busy. What changed? It now takes me 5 minutes to drive to work depending on the lights. It might actually be quicker to walk to Target than it is to strap the kids into the van, drive to the parking lot, unstrap the kids, and walk into the store. Also, storage space has increased rather dramatically. iTunes currently says that I have 85.48 GB of music. That’s a decent amount of space on my computer! So, as my ability to store MP3s increased, my willingness to migrate my library increased. The second piece of the puzzle to get me to start buying all of my music on Amazon was the introduction of cloud music services.
I should back up at this point and point out that I always have used a streaming music solution at home/work since college. After feeling convicted about downloading MP3s from AudioGalaxy, I signed up for Rhapsody, the first viable streaming solution. Since then, Spotify has come out, and I’ve moved over. Spotify is where I listen to all things new in the worship world. If I love an album enough, I go ahead and buy the album. When I buy the album, I do so on Amazon, because that’s where it makes the most sense!
A few years ago, Amazon beat Apple to the cloud music punch and released their Cloud Player. I jumped on the opportunity and uploaded all of my music! Now, when I buy a track on Amazon, it automatically shows up in my Cloud Player, then I download it to iTunes where it automatically uploads the track to Google Music. Google Music came out after Cloud Player, and initially I switched to Google Music, but I have found the playback to be a wee bit glitchy, and there is a 1000 track limit to playlists. My worship playlist has 2248 tracks in it! So, I’m back to Amazon Cloud Player. They since have added the feature to “match” and upconvert the tracks they recognize, much like iTunes Match. So, after the tracks are uploaded, I delete them from my computer, so total music on my computer, zero tracks. Hence, thanks to Dropbox, Google Docs, and a couple of other services, my computer could go up in flames and I really wouldn’t lose a thing. The downside is that I need to be online to listen to tracks, but I think the last time I was offline was a power outage, and I simply switched to using my phone as a hotspot. I can even redownload the tracks if I really want to burn a CD for the car….
(Originally posted October 2, 2012)
