Lets face it the telcos can't handle true streaming to the entire population of iOS users. More importantly they (the telcos) never will be able to handle that sort of bandwidth. Simply from the standpoint of technology and spectrum availability I can't ever see a service that relies upon streaming 100% of the time ever being a long term success.
Frankly I've never understood the desire o be able to stream anything over the air waves. It is a great experience if you have a fast hardwired internet connection, but that is about it.
From the standpoint of the user; I can't see why anybody would want to eat up their available data, streaming something that can be downloaded once and not thought of again.
I guess the distinction they're making is that a buffer is in memory and this cache file is on disk, so the architecture is slightly different. It kind of makes sense that they would do it with a cache because these devices are generally memory starved (it keeps power consumption down) but have lots of hard disk space.
Ultimately, it makes no difference to the end user. The authoritative version is stored on the server. The cache file can be deleted as desired by the system.
It might make a difference, e.g. if you want to play again you already have it assuming the cache isn't cleared. This would be awesome if you were traveling in a poor reception area for example and you can have an entire playlist downloaded already.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
I'd slow up on the insults till we know more. If you were to go into a zero reception area can you now play your Pandora song you listened to yesterday again? Perhaps the Apple system would allow that. We'll see soon enough I'm sure.
Huh? Is anyone suggesting this is a bad thing? It's most certainly not! It's a GOOD thing. It means you get - on your own hard drive - an excellent sounding song file. I'd rather have it on my Mac than just in the cloud.
A copy in iCloud isn't going to take it away from your Mac. You should keep a local copy.
First off there are probably more ways to do streaming than can be counted on most hands. So correctness here is somewhat dependent upon how you define the concept of streaming.
For example I could argue easily that streaming would imply buffering to RAM and never to secondary storage. Thus with this definition any sort of cache on secondary storage would not be streaming.
While I'm not going to get into the way the various services stream content, what one company does is not a die against which every other service must be cut. In the case of music files there is little incentive to throw data to disk if you can buffer multiple tracks in memory.
In Apples case I would have to guess that the temporary cache is actually a buffer that self trims based on age and usage. This would have the feature of greatly reducing impact on bandwidth availability for frequently referenced tracks. Since the GUI app serving up your tunes would search here before streaming content you can't really call the system a streaming service.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtDecoDalek
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
No, because have you ever really paid attention to YouTube videos?
It downloads enough in front to play without stutter (debatable because they always seem to stutter for me because downloads here suck). If you want to go back to see something again it has to redownload that section because it's already cleared what it has played.
What Apple is saying is that the music starts playing as it downloads the entire song/video after which you can go forward and back without any delay or any redownloading because the whole file is still there.
Incidentally this is nothing new and has been handled by QuickTime for many many years now.
I thought the cloud was simply continuous incremental synchronizing. Buy a song on your phone, poof (boom?) it's on your Mac. Rip a cd to your Mac, put it in a playlist, poof, the playlist is updated on your phone.
Obviously, there is a transfer delay, but the phone can play it before it is completely downloaded.
Turn off icloud and the syncing stops. The files do not disappear from any device.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
But perhaps the cached music will remain on the device for a given period of time (as long as there is enough storage available) before it is purged.
The way I see this... you have your locally stored library and you have your much larger library in the cloud. As soon as you try and access music stored in the cloud it begins downloading the song to a cache NOT in the local library, where it remains for let's say 30 days before it is purged as long as no further plays have been requested. This means that if you want to re-play the 'streamed' song within the 30 day window it is not re-streamed but instead played from cache.
I wonder if your local library will store the first few seconds of every track in the cloud library in order to facilitate 'instant' play?
It might make a difference, e.g. if you want to play again you already have it assuming the cache isn't cleared. This would be awesome if you were traveling in a poor reception area for example and you can have an entire playlist downloaded already.
This is exactly it. If its really streaming and you don't have a connection you are out of luck. If its what Apple appears to be doing you MAY be in luck. If iTunes keeps the file in some tempory folder until there is no space left you might be able to play a song that you last "streamed" months ago if you have space on your hard drive.
My iPhone and iPad have lots of space on them because when I load music to be synced I am never sure what I really want so I basically don't load much. Even if I filled it I might find I decided wrong and what I really want to hear I didn't sync. Under this system Apple is basically doing the math for me. I would not be surprised if when a song does need deleted the software delete the songs that are rarely played.
Lets face it the telcos can't handle true streaming to the entire population of iOS users. More importantly they (the telcos) never will be able to handle that sort of bandwidth. Simply from the standpoint of technology and spectrum availability I can't ever see a service that relies upon streaming 100% of the time ever being a long term success.
Frankly I've never understood the desire o be able to stream anything over the air waves. It is a great experience if you have a fast hardwired internet connection, but that is about it.
From the standpoint of the user; I can't see why anybody would want to eat up their available data, streaming something that can be downloaded once and not thought of again.
It may be splitting hair. But perhaps hair splitting to get this by the lawyers, not to mention the rights holders who might be stopping Apple from true streaming?
According to other reports, Apple has 'true' streaming rights to the tracks
My guess is that they want this pre cached info so folks don't have to wait for part of the track to download before the song starts.
As always with Apple, it's about the user experience. They don't care if it's called "streaming" or "caching" or "buffering", and neither do their customers. Their customers care if the mirroring process is relatively painless and fast and dead simple, and they care if they can access their music from the cloud, and if it starts immediately, and if they decide to move around in the song by jumping or fast-forwarding or rewinding, that it doesn't stutter or have to rebuffer.
Right? That's the ideal experience. Where you don't really have to think about it and it acts like it's locally stored and you can get that behavior without filling the limited memory space on your mobile device.
Apple always approaches stuff this way, starting with the user experience they want and designing the tech accordingly. If the tech isn't available they jump start it with money or they wait till it is. And then everyone second guesses them because they need to know how it works and how that compares to how it's typically done and reckon someone else is doing it better because of those sort of criteria.
It streams electrons through a connection that is first wired and then wireless, ending at the device, which streams electrons through the device to a speaker which vibrates at various frequencies.
ALTERNATE POST:
It streams notes of various frequencies. Whether or not it's "music" is up to the listener.
It streams electrons through a connection that is first wired and then wireless, ending at the device, which streams electrons through the device to a speaker which vibrates at various frequencies.
ALTERNATE POST:
It streams notes of various frequencies. Whether or not it's "music" is up to the listener.
Comments
Frankly I've never understood the desire o be able to stream anything over the air waves. It is a great experience if you have a fast hardwired internet connection, but that is about it.
From the standpoint of the user; I can't see why anybody would want to eat up their available data, streaming something that can be downloaded once and not thought of again.
I guess the distinction they're making is that a buffer is in memory and this cache file is on disk, so the architecture is slightly different. It kind of makes sense that they would do it with a cache because these devices are generally memory starved (it keeps power consumption down) but have lots of hard disk space.
Ultimately, it makes no difference to the end user. The authoritative version is stored on the server. The cache file can be deleted as desired by the system.
It might make a difference, e.g. if you want to play again you already have it assuming the cache isn't cleared. This would be awesome if you were traveling in a poor reception area for example and you can have an entire playlist downloaded already.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
I'd slow up on the insults till we know more. If you were to go into a zero reception area can you now play your Pandora song you listened to yesterday again? Perhaps the Apple system would allow that. We'll see soon enough I'm sure.
Huh? Is anyone suggesting this is a bad thing? It's most certainly not! It's a GOOD thing. It means you get - on your own hard drive - an excellent sounding song file. I'd rather have it on my Mac than just in the cloud.
A copy in iCloud isn't going to take it away from your Mac. You should keep a local copy.
Who cares?
Yep. Looks like a Duck, quacks like a Duck...
For example I could argue easily that streaming would imply buffering to RAM and never to secondary storage. Thus with this definition any sort of cache on secondary storage would not be streaming.
While I'm not going to get into the way the various services stream content, what one company does is not a die against which every other service must be cut. In the case of music files there is little incentive to throw data to disk if you can buffer multiple tracks in memory.
In Apples case I would have to guess that the temporary cache is actually a buffer that self trims based on age and usage. This would have the feature of greatly reducing impact on bandwidth availability for frequently referenced tracks. Since the GUI app serving up your tunes would search here before streaming content you can't really call the system a streaming service.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
No, because have you ever really paid attention to YouTube videos?
It downloads enough in front to play without stutter (debatable because they always seem to stutter for me because downloads here suck). If you want to go back to see something again it has to redownload that section because it's already cleared what it has played.
What Apple is saying is that the music starts playing as it downloads the entire song/video after which you can go forward and back without any delay or any redownloading because the whole file is still there.
Incidentally this is nothing new and has been handled by QuickTime for many many years now.
I thought the cloud was simply continuous incremental synchronizing. Buy a song on your phone, poof (boom?) it's on your Mac. Rip a cd to your Mac, put it in a playlist, poof, the playlist is updated on your phone.
Obviously, there is a transfer delay, but the phone can play it before it is completely downloaded.
Turn off icloud and the syncing stops. The files do not disappear from any device.
Am i missing something?
Don't call it streaming now and you can't call it streaming later.
bring on more ios AWESOMENESS
Downloading to a temporary cache with an instant start IS streaming. To say otherwise is deeply ignorant of the way streaming works. This is what Pandora does when it streams music. This is what YouTube does when it streams video. This is the way streaming works.
But perhaps the cached music will remain on the device for a given period of time (as long as there is enough storage available) before it is purged.
The way I see this... you have your locally stored library and you have your much larger library in the cloud. As soon as you try and access music stored in the cloud it begins downloading the song to a cache NOT in the local library, where it remains for let's say 30 days before it is purged as long as no further plays have been requested. This means that if you want to re-play the 'streamed' song within the 30 day window it is not re-streamed but instead played from cache.
I wonder if your local library will store the first few seconds of every track in the cloud library in order to facilitate 'instant' play?
It might make a difference, e.g. if you want to play again you already have it assuming the cache isn't cleared. This would be awesome if you were traveling in a poor reception area for example and you can have an entire playlist downloaded already.
This is exactly it. If its really streaming and you don't have a connection you are out of luck. If its what Apple appears to be doing you MAY be in luck. If iTunes keeps the file in some tempory folder until there is no space left you might be able to play a song that you last "streamed" months ago if you have space on your hard drive.
My iPhone and iPad have lots of space on them because when I load music to be synced I am never sure what I really want so I basically don't load much. Even if I filled it I might find I decided wrong and what I really want to hear I didn't sync. Under this system Apple is basically doing the math for me. I would not be surprised if when a song does need deleted the software delete the songs that are rarely played.
Apple is brilliant!
Lets face it the telcos can't handle true streaming to the entire population of iOS users. More importantly they (the telcos) never will be able to handle that sort of bandwidth. Simply from the standpoint of technology and spectrum availability I can't ever see a service that relies upon streaming 100% of the time ever being a long term success.
Frankly I've never understood the desire o be able to stream anything over the air waves. It is a great experience if you have a fast hardwired internet connection, but that is about it.
From the standpoint of the user; I can't see why anybody would want to eat up their available data, streaming something that can be downloaded once and not thought of again.
Actually this technology detailed here http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf stands to finally solve the limits of wireless streaming.
Actually this technology detailed here http://www.rearden.com/DIDO/DIDO_White_Paper_110727.pdf stands to finally solve the limits of wireless streaming.
Well that's good news.
It may be splitting hair. But perhaps hair splitting to get this by the lawyers, not to mention the rights holders who might be stopping Apple from true streaming?
According to other reports, Apple has 'true' streaming rights to the tracks
My guess is that they want this pre cached info so folks don't have to wait for part of the track to download before the song starts.
Right? That's the ideal experience. Where you don't really have to think about it and it acts like it's locally stored and you can get that behavior without filling the limited memory space on your mobile device.
Apple always approaches stuff this way, starting with the user experience they want and designing the tech accordingly. If the tech isn't available they jump start it with money or they wait till it is. And then everyone second guesses them because they need to know how it works and how that compares to how it's typically done and reckon someone else is doing it better because of those sort of criteria.
…doesn't technically stream music...
It streams electrons through a connection that is first wired and then wireless, ending at the device, which streams electrons through the device to a speaker which vibrates at various frequencies.
ALTERNATE POST:
It streams notes of various frequencies. Whether or not it's "music" is up to the listener.
It streams electrons through a connection that is first wired and then wireless, ending at the device, which streams electrons through the device to a speaker which vibrates at various frequencies.
ALTERNATE POST:
It streams notes of various frequencies. Whether or not it's "music" is up to the listener.
C-c-c-close enough!