Yesterday, was a great day! During the WWDC Keynote, I found out that soon I will no longer experience the massive slowdown that occurs whenever I plug my iPhone into my computer. The next version of iOS will support over the air updates and syncing, eliminating the need to connect the device to a PC or Mac running iTunes.
Ten years ago iTunes was a pretty good way to listen to music and get that music onto my iPod. However, with each successive version, Apple has piled the features on to iTunes, gradually morphing it from a simple music player to a behemoth that makes all my other apps slow down and my cooling fans speed up. iTunes is no longer a music player – it is a music organizer, a CD ripper, a device manager, a music store, a video player, a video store, a podcast organizer, a book store, a music recommender, a playlist generator and probably a dozen other things. Today, iTunes is unusable bloatware that I only run when I have to move content onto or off of my iPhone. Yesterday, Steve eliminated the last reason that I had to run iTunes. With the iCloud, I can cut the cord, I won’t need iTunes any more. R.I.P. iTunes.
Music Machinery 
#1 by ccmcgregor on June 7, 2011 - 11:53 pm
I fear those with a large non-iTunes-purchased library will still have to run it to utilise the Music Match facility. You’ll need to load songs into iTunes locally for the cloud to realise you own them and register the cloud copy. But I guess that’s still less painful than using it for everything else as well.
#2 by Fine Tuning on June 8, 2011 - 3:49 am
iTunes is this decade’s Real Player. RIP.
#3 by jeremy on June 8, 2011 - 8:42 am
I’ll say it for iCloud, the same way I said it for gGloud.. I don’t understand the advantage of having to upload all your songs to the cloud, in order to then pay for expensive monthly wireless plans to download it all again, and then if and only if you’re within signal range, not on an airplane, not in a foreign country, etc.
Don’t get be wrong; I see the advantage of storing and syncing one’s *settings* in the cloud, which settings include playlists that one has created, recommendations that one is getting, “scrobbles” of which songs have been played and when, etc.
But you can do all that, without having to store the songs themselves, and make the user dependent on streaming. I again have a proposal that works even better: Instead of just cutting the physical cord, you can cut the wireless cord, too… by adding more memory to your device (assuming that you don’t already have the 160 GB ipod anyway), so that you can carry around your whole collection and listen to it, even when you’re on the airplane.
#4 by jeremy on June 9, 2011 - 8:44 am
Oh I’m an idiot — I didn’t read closely enough. There is no streaming from the iCloud. There is only device syncing.
But now this really doesn’t make sense. Why would I upload ALL my data ALL the way to the cloud, just to sync it to my Apple TV or to my iPod Touch., when I (like most people) already have a home network, a router/hub? Shouldn’t I just be able to connected all my devices together via Ethernet or wifi, and sync them?
I’ve got a growing feeling that most of what the cloud is becoming is just engineering overkill. Doing it because they can, not because it’s the smartest thing to do. Harumph.