The article comes across as if this is bad news. I must say i assumed the Family Plan concept was a replacement for Home Sharing and the latter would be fazed out. Not really a shock and certainly not a negative. The Family Plan works far batter especially for apps and iTunes Match.
That is annoying, but it never really supported large audio libraries too well.
Can anyone suggest good alternatives?
I've used Sonos for music streaming in my home since well before Apple had Airplay and Home Sharing. Rock solid and fast with a 25K song library, works with almost every online streaming service as well as things like Soundcloud, and it's only a one time cost for the boxes as opposed to a monthly fee (which I prefer). And no, I don't work for Sonos -- just a very satisfied customer.
I've never had a use for this music streaming feature, but can't somebody just have their music on iTunes Match, and then any device that they have will be able to stream that music?
My music library is 3.8 TB large consisting of a lot of recordings not available from iTunes. 75% of it in ALAC. As far as I have understood this means that most of it will have to go in the cloud, and it will be downgraded to 256 kbps AAC. This means that I will need at least 2 TB (this should do it with the reduced file size due to reduced quality) iCloud storage for this to work. Disregarding the reduced quality - how much will this cost?
I still prefer CDs. They always work, and the sound is usually better than audio streams from the net.
I still prefer CDs. They always work, and the sound is usually better than audio streams from the net.
It's really convenient to have music at your fingertips as opposed to digging through a large collection to find what you need. I have about 2500 vinyl records and recently got rid of about 700 CDs after ripping them at high quality. It's so much more convenient to be able to just run a quick search or have a playlist and stream it to your exact location in the house (or multiple locations you'll be moving through) than digging through physical media and loading it into various players in your house.
As long as you have personal control of the technology used to store and stream them (i.e. it all happens within your home), then you can easily fix any problems. It's when things move out to "the cloud" that you can have network outages or lossy compression applied beyond your control.
That said, the cloud makes it much easier to have your audio with you on-the-go. This is where I'm toying with the idea of iTunes Match and Apple Music -- easier to maintain audio on my devices and have access to most/all of my music. But you do have to let go of the expectation that you can have a large collection of impeccable audio quality songs always accessible on a portable device (maybe someday, but not today).
So how many times did you try it before you gave up? I am not dissing you (completely!) but it is strange that you have a 24K track library but lose interest in listening if you need to wait for 5-10 minutes.
To be clear I didn't lose interest in listening to music. I lost interest in trying to stream from my Mac to my iPhone.
My music library is 3.8 TB large consisting of a lot of recordings not available from iTunes. 75% of it in ALAC. As far as I have understood this means that most of it will have to go in the cloud, and it will be downgraded to 256 kbps AAC. This means that I will need at least 2 TB (this should do it with the reduced file size due to reduced quality) iCloud storage for this to work. Disregarding the reduced quality - how much will this cost?
I still prefer CDs. They always work, and the sound is usually better than audio streams from the net.
You may want to check out the StreamToMe app for iPhones and iPads in the App Store. It handles lots of different formats.
It's dirt cheap and I've been using it for years, accessing my libraries on WiFi both at home and while traveling and also using 4G LTE. Pay once for the StreamToMe app and use it on all your devices when you Install the free ServeToMe app for Mac or Windows. It has AirPlay capability so you can use your phone or tablet to direct your content anywhere you prefer to different AppleTVs or Airport Expresses in your local network.
I never used iCloud match because I prefer to personally manage a body of video and audio content currently consuming about 10TB of storage spread across three Macs and several external drives. Except for protected audio or video content, I can watch or listen to just about anything I want, anywhere.
Other advantages: For large libraries, the app searches much faster than anything else. Personal storage is cheap. Lately I've seen Western Digital 4TB external drives selling for $110. Simple, consistent user interface - almost boring but much simpler but easier and faster to navigate than any app from Apple. Enduring - the developer has kept the same user format for years so users don't have to stumble through ever-changing interfaces.
But don't just take my word for it. Read the reviews by other StreamToMe app users.
Nerfed - from the company NERF. To fire a safe foam projectile. It's a kids toy, it's hardly violent.
From Urban Dictionary. The term "nerfing" comes from the online gaming world of Ultima Online. At one point in the game, the developers reduced the power of swords in melee combat. This resulted in players complaining that it was like they were hitting each other with nerf bats, not swords. From then on, if ever something gets made less worth while than it had been originally, it is considered 'nerfed'
Gotta love Americans moaning about the incorrect use of English.
"Kneecapped" IS an English word, just not an American English word.
Thanks for the details on "nerf." My point was that deriving a common-usage word from plastic kids' toys (that much I knew because I looked it up) does violence TO the language by deriving vocabulary from the junk merchants like Hasbro, Mattel and ToysRUs. The poor kids who had to grow up with that primary-colored crap are now coining words out of their infantile experience. Result: You get Google and Chrome logos made with the same infantile primary colors, operating systems named Lollipop, cute robots in Fisher-Price green, and so on.
Infantilism is our number one modern psychological problem, now that I think about it. Maybe that's why movie and TV-derived gangster trash talk, which is where "kneecap" comes from, derives its appeal. We use this tough-guy language to mask inner childishness.
It's really convenient to have music at your fingertips as opposed to digging through a large collection to find what you need. I have about 2500 vinyl records and recently got rid of about 700 CDs after ripping them at high quality. It's so much more convenient to be able to just run a quick search or have a playlist and stream it to your exact location in the house (or multiple locations you'll be moving through) than digging through physical media and loading it into various players in your house.
As long as you have personal control of the technology used to store and stream them (i.e. it all happens within your home), then you can easily fix any problems. It's when things move out to "the cloud" that you can have network outages or lossy compression applied beyond your control.
That said, the cloud makes it much easier to have your audio with you on-the-go. This is where I'm toying with the idea of iTunes Match and Apple Music -- easier to maintain audio on my devices and have access to most/all of my music. But you do have to let go of the expectation that you can have a large collection of impeccable audio quality songs always accessible on a portable device (maybe someday, but not today).
This still does not answer my question of cost for the Apple solution using iTunes Match.
It is a cost/quality/convenience equation, and I'm not sure that that convenience equals out the cost/quality issue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kibitzer
You may want to check out the StreamToMe app for iPhones and iPads in the App Store. It handles lots of different formats.
It's dirt cheap and I've been using it for years, accessing my libraries on WiFi both at home and while traveling and also using 4G LTE. Pay once for the StreamToMe app and use it on all your devices when you Install the free ServeToMe app for Mac or Windows. It has AirPlay capability so you can use your phone or tablet to direct your content anywhere you prefer to different AppleTVs or Airport Expresses in your local network.
I never used iCloud match because I prefer to personally manage a body of video and audio content currently consuming about 10TB of storage spread across three Macs and several external drives. Except for protected audio or video content, I can watch or listen to just about anything I want, anywhere.
Other advantages: For large libraries, the app searches much faster than anything else. Personal storage is cheap. Lately I've seen Western Digital 4TB external drives selling for $110. Simple, consistent user interface - almost boring but much simpler but easier and faster to navigate than any app from Apple. Enduring - the developer has kept the same user format for years so users don't have to stumble through ever-changing interfaces.
But don't just take my word for it. Read the reviews by other StreamToMe app users.
Thank you for the info. My media library is spread over 4 4TB disks, of which 12 TB is video and 4 TB is audio. I will have a look at your suggestion. I have a feeling that iTunes Match is not for me...
It is a cost/quality/convenience equation, and I'm not sure that that convenience equals out the cost/quality issue.
As you mentioned, the quality you'll get for songs which iTunes Match is able to find in the iTunes database is 256 kbps AAC. For those which it isn't able to find, it'll try to upload them in a supported format. ALAC files are converted to 256 kbps AAC according to this page. It also shows that you're limited to 25K songs (soon to be upgraded to 100K as per Eddie Cue's announcement). There's no specific storage space limit, just number of songs.
As well, the iTunes library/ies from which you generated the iTunes Match database will remain unchanged. Apple won't replace or modify your existing audio files. It's only when other devices which don't have access to those audio files try to play the songs where you'll get the 256 kbps AAC version. Which is where my comment about "on-the-go" comes in -- you simply can't expect to have a huge library of ALAC quality audio at your fingertips everywhere you go. But you'll still have it in your home as long as your local iTunes libraries are pointing to the files.
As you mentioned, the quality you'll get for songs which iTunes Match is able to find in the iTunes database is 256 kbps AAC. For those which it isn't able to find, it'll try to upload them in a supported format. ALAC files are converted to 256 kbps AAC according to this page. It also shows that you're limited to 25K songs (soon to be upgraded to 100K as per Eddie Cue's announcement). There's no specific storage space limit, just number of songs.
As well, the iTunes library/ies from which you generated the iTunes Match database will remain unchanged. Apple won't replace or modify your existing audio files. It's only when other devices which don't have access to those audio files try to play the songs where you'll get the 256 kbps AAC version. Which is where my comment about "on-the-go" comes in -- you simply can't expect to have a huge library of ALAC quality audio at your fingertips everywhere you go. But you'll still have it in your home as long as your local iTunes libraries are pointing to the files.
I'm at 203 034 songs now (a symphony counts as 3+ songs, an opera can be up to 50 or 60), so even the 100 000 song limit is not large enough.
I don't really feel the need to have my whole library available everywhere I go, so I'm fine with having a selection. I have 2 160GB iPod Classics that I use for traveling. One contains pop/rock, one contains orchestral/chamber/church music, and 1 for opera. Works fine. I hope they will work for a long time.
BTW: How does iTunes Match differentiate between my 4 different Karajan recordings of a Bruckner symphony? How about m 9 different recordings of Wagner's Ring? Wagner's Ring isn't just Wagner's Ring, but Böhm's interpretation, Karajan's interpretation, Furtwängler's interpretation ..., and then there are different recordings with the same conductor and orchestra, but different singers...
Not everyone pays for iTunes Match, and AirPlay should stream all digital content over your own home network without Apple restricting it to what they want you to watch or listen to....but apparently they are.
Restricting to what they want you to watch or listen to? How so? You can add as much music to any of your ios devices and still airplay, you just can't use an ios device as the middle man to stream from your physical hard drive. Unless I am understanding things wrong?
Home Sharing was nicer on a feature checklist than in actual usage. Could never get it to work reliably on all of our iOS devices. It would take about 10 minutes for the library and playlists to load up, and even after doing all of that, the playback would often cut out or sound choppy. Took less time and trouble to just go to the computer and locally sync a playlist.
I subscribe to iTunes Match anyway, and use either AirPlay or a media server connected through a PS3 to stream tracks through my AV receiver. It's neither here nor there for me, but this is a situation where I would have preferred that Apple fix something that clearly did not work as advertised. Some of the initial steps I see with Apple Music don't bode well for music fans that prefer to work offline.
I'm at 203 034 songs now (a symphony counts as 3+ songs, an opera can be up to 50 or 60), so even the 100 000 song limit is not large enough.
So, if you go with iTunes Match, you'll have all 203,034 songs available from your main iTunes library (or any library directly linked to the files), and 100K available on the go. Though I'm not sure if they'll let you pick which 100K, or if it's just the first 100K it finds in your library.
Quote:
BTW: How does iTunes Match differentiate between my 4 different Karajan recordings of a Bruckner symphony? How about m 9 different recordings of Wagner's Ring? Wagner's Ring isn't just Wagner's Ring, but Böhm's interpretation, Karajan's interpretation, Furtwängler's interpretation ..., and then there are different recordings with the same conductor and orchestra, but different singers...
I'd assume there's some metadata in your audio files which can allow it to differentiate. For example, if they were ripped from different CDs, then it'll be able to use the CD title as the differentiator. It's not actually analyzing the audio, just looking at the metadata.
It's dirt cheap and I've been using it for years, accessing my libraries on WiFi both at home and while traveling and also using 4G LTE. Pay once for the StreamToMe app and use it on all your devices when you Install the free ServeToMe app for Mac or Windows. It has AirPlay capability so you can use your phone or tablet to direct your content anywhere you prefer to different AppleTVs or Airport Expresses in your local network.
I never used iCloud match because I prefer to personally manage a body of video and audio content currently consuming about 10TB of storage spread across three Macs and several external drives. Except for protected audio or video content, I can watch or listen to just about anything I want, anywhere.
Other advantages: For large libraries, the app searches much faster than anything else. Personal storage is cheap. Lately I've seen Western Digital 4TB external drives selling for $110. Simple, consistent user interface - almost boring but much simpler but easier and faster to navigate than any app from Apple. Enduring - the developer has kept the same user format for years so users don't have to stumble through ever-changing interfaces.
But don't just take my word for it. Read the reviews by other StreamToMe app users.
Thank You! I was just going to post the exact suggestion to [@]hillstones[/@].
I've been using and recommending S2M since IFAIK iPhone 3GS and iPad 2 days.
As long as they don't take it away from my Mac, I use home sharing so I can keep a shared library with all content on a server. They take that away & I'll actually be pretty ticked as I will then have to manually add music to my other computers wasting my time & hard drive space.
Comments
Have you tried the Family Sharing set up yet?
Using the Remote app still enables home sharing
This is simply not true. You cannot share to an iOS device with the new update.
iOS Remote App still has home sharing so you can play other libraries' music on it.
Wrong. It plays on the computer with the library. NOT THE IOS DEVICE!
That is annoying, but it never really supported large audio libraries too well.
Can anyone suggest good alternatives?
I've used Sonos for music streaming in my home since well before Apple had Airplay and Home Sharing. Rock solid and fast with a 25K song library, works with almost every online streaming service as well as things like Soundcloud, and it's only a one time cost for the boxes as opposed to a monthly fee (which I prefer). And no, I don't work for Sonos -- just a very satisfied customer.
I've never had a use for this music streaming feature, but can't somebody just have their music on iTunes Match, and then any device that they have will be able to stream that music?
My music library is 3.8 TB large consisting of a lot of recordings not available from iTunes. 75% of it in ALAC. As far as I have understood this means that most of it will have to go in the cloud, and it will be downgraded to 256 kbps AAC. This means that I will need at least 2 TB (this should do it with the reduced file size due to reduced quality) iCloud storage for this to work. Disregarding the reduced quality - how much will this cost?
I still prefer CDs. They always work, and the sound is usually better than audio streams from the net.
I still prefer CDs. They always work, and the sound is usually better than audio streams from the net.
It's really convenient to have music at your fingertips as opposed to digging through a large collection to find what you need. I have about 2500 vinyl records and recently got rid of about 700 CDs after ripping them at high quality. It's so much more convenient to be able to just run a quick search or have a playlist and stream it to your exact location in the house (or multiple locations you'll be moving through) than digging through physical media and loading it into various players in your house.
As long as you have personal control of the technology used to store and stream them (i.e. it all happens within your home), then you can easily fix any problems. It's when things move out to "the cloud" that you can have network outages or lossy compression applied beyond your control.
That said, the cloud makes it much easier to have your audio with you on-the-go. This is where I'm toying with the idea of iTunes Match and Apple Music -- easier to maintain audio on my devices and have access to most/all of my music. But you do have to let go of the expectation that you can have a large collection of impeccable audio quality songs always accessible on a portable device (maybe someday, but not today).
So how many times did you try it before you gave up? I am not dissing you (completely!) but it is strange that you have a 24K track library but lose interest in listening if you need to wait for 5-10 minutes.
To be clear I didn't lose interest in listening to music. I lost interest in trying to stream from my Mac to my iPhone.
You may want to check out the StreamToMe app for iPhones and iPads in the App Store. It handles lots of different formats.
http://zqueue.com/streamtome/support/features.html#format
It's dirt cheap and I've been using it for years, accessing my libraries on WiFi both at home and while traveling and also using 4G LTE. Pay once for the StreamToMe app and use it on all your devices when you Install the free ServeToMe app for Mac or Windows. It has AirPlay capability so you can use your phone or tablet to direct your content anywhere you prefer to different AppleTVs or Airport Expresses in your local network.
I never used iCloud match because I prefer to personally manage a body of video and audio content currently consuming about 10TB of storage spread across three Macs and several external drives. Except for protected audio or video content, I can watch or listen to just about anything I want, anywhere.
Other advantages: For large libraries, the app searches much faster than anything else. Personal storage is cheap. Lately I've seen Western Digital 4TB external drives selling for $110. Simple, consistent user interface - almost boring but much simpler but easier and faster to navigate than any app from Apple. Enduring - the developer has kept the same user format for years so users don't have to stumble through ever-changing interfaces.
But don't just take my word for it. Read the reviews by other StreamToMe app users.
Thanks for the details on "nerf." My point was that deriving a common-usage word from plastic kids' toys (that much I knew because I looked it up) does violence TO the language by deriving vocabulary from the junk merchants like Hasbro, Mattel and ToysRUs. The poor kids who had to grow up with that primary-colored crap are now coining words out of their infantile experience. Result: You get Google and Chrome logos made with the same infantile primary colors, operating systems named Lollipop, cute robots in Fisher-Price green, and so on.
Infantilism is our number one modern psychological problem, now that I think about it. Maybe that's why movie and TV-derived gangster trash talk, which is where "kneecap" comes from, derives its appeal. We use this tough-guy language to mask inner childishness.
It's really convenient to have music at your fingertips as opposed to digging through a large collection to find what you need. I have about 2500 vinyl records and recently got rid of about 700 CDs after ripping them at high quality. It's so much more convenient to be able to just run a quick search or have a playlist and stream it to your exact location in the house (or multiple locations you'll be moving through) than digging through physical media and loading it into various players in your house.
As long as you have personal control of the technology used to store and stream them (i.e. it all happens within your home), then you can easily fix any problems. It's when things move out to "the cloud" that you can have network outages or lossy compression applied beyond your control.
That said, the cloud makes it much easier to have your audio with you on-the-go. This is where I'm toying with the idea of iTunes Match and Apple Music -- easier to maintain audio on my devices and have access to most/all of my music. But you do have to let go of the expectation that you can have a large collection of impeccable audio quality songs always accessible on a portable device (maybe someday, but not today).
This still does not answer my question of cost for the Apple solution using iTunes Match.
It is a cost/quality/convenience equation, and I'm not sure that that convenience equals out the cost/quality issue.
You may want to check out the StreamToMe app for iPhones and iPads in the App Store. It handles lots of different formats.
http://zqueue.com/streamtome/support/features.html#format
It's dirt cheap and I've been using it for years, accessing my libraries on WiFi both at home and while traveling and also using 4G LTE. Pay once for the StreamToMe app and use it on all your devices when you Install the free ServeToMe app for Mac or Windows. It has AirPlay capability so you can use your phone or tablet to direct your content anywhere you prefer to different AppleTVs or Airport Expresses in your local network.
I never used iCloud match because I prefer to personally manage a body of video and audio content currently consuming about 10TB of storage spread across three Macs and several external drives. Except for protected audio or video content, I can watch or listen to just about anything I want, anywhere.
Other advantages: For large libraries, the app searches much faster than anything else. Personal storage is cheap. Lately I've seen Western Digital 4TB external drives selling for $110. Simple, consistent user interface - almost boring but much simpler but easier and faster to navigate than any app from Apple. Enduring - the developer has kept the same user format for years so users don't have to stumble through ever-changing interfaces.
But don't just take my word for it. Read the reviews by other StreamToMe app users.
Thank you for the info. My media library is spread over 4 4TB disks, of which 12 TB is video and 4 TB is audio. I will have a look at your suggestion. I have a feeling that iTunes Match is not for me...
It is a cost/quality/convenience equation, and I'm not sure that that convenience equals out the cost/quality issue.
As you mentioned, the quality you'll get for songs which iTunes Match is able to find in the iTunes database is 256 kbps AAC. For those which it isn't able to find, it'll try to upload them in a supported format. ALAC files are converted to 256 kbps AAC according to this page. It also shows that you're limited to 25K songs (soon to be upgraded to 100K as per Eddie Cue's announcement). There's no specific storage space limit, just number of songs.
As well, the iTunes library/ies from which you generated the iTunes Match database will remain unchanged. Apple won't replace or modify your existing audio files. It's only when other devices which don't have access to those audio files try to play the songs where you'll get the 256 kbps AAC version. Which is where my comment about "on-the-go" comes in -- you simply can't expect to have a huge library of ALAC quality audio at your fingertips everywhere you go. But you'll still have it in your home as long as your local iTunes libraries are pointing to the files.
As you mentioned, the quality you'll get for songs which iTunes Match is able to find in the iTunes database is 256 kbps AAC. For those which it isn't able to find, it'll try to upload them in a supported format. ALAC files are converted to 256 kbps AAC according to this page. It also shows that you're limited to 25K songs (soon to be upgraded to 100K as per Eddie Cue's announcement). There's no specific storage space limit, just number of songs.
As well, the iTunes library/ies from which you generated the iTunes Match database will remain unchanged. Apple won't replace or modify your existing audio files. It's only when other devices which don't have access to those audio files try to play the songs where you'll get the 256 kbps AAC version. Which is where my comment about "on-the-go" comes in -- you simply can't expect to have a huge library of ALAC quality audio at your fingertips everywhere you go. But you'll still have it in your home as long as your local iTunes libraries are pointing to the files.
I'm at 203 034 songs now (a symphony counts as 3+ songs, an opera can be up to 50 or 60), so even the 100 000 song limit is not large enough.
I don't really feel the need to have my whole library available everywhere I go, so I'm fine with having a selection. I have 2 160GB iPod Classics that I use for traveling. One contains pop/rock, one contains orchestral/chamber/church music, and 1 for opera. Works fine. I hope they will work for a long time.
BTW: How does iTunes Match differentiate between my 4 different Karajan recordings of a Bruckner symphony? How about m 9 different recordings of Wagner's Ring? Wagner's Ring isn't just Wagner's Ring, but Böhm's interpretation, Karajan's interpretation, Furtwängler's interpretation ..., and then there are different recordings with the same conductor and orchestra, but different singers...
Not everyone pays for iTunes Match, and AirPlay should stream all digital content over your own home network without Apple restricting it to what they want you to watch or listen to....but apparently they are.
Restricting to what they want you to watch or listen to? How so? You can add as much music to any of your ios devices and still airplay, you just can't use an ios device as the middle man to stream from your physical hard drive. Unless I am understanding things wrong?
Home Sharing was nicer on a feature checklist than in actual usage. Could never get it to work reliably on all of our iOS devices. It would take about 10 minutes for the library and playlists to load up, and even after doing all of that, the playback would often cut out or sound choppy. Took less time and trouble to just go to the computer and locally sync a playlist.
I subscribe to iTunes Match anyway, and use either AirPlay or a media server connected through a PS3 to stream tracks through my AV receiver. It's neither here nor there for me, but this is a situation where I would have preferred that Apple fix something that clearly did not work as advertised. Some of the initial steps I see with Apple Music don't bode well for music fans that prefer to work offline.
I'm at 203 034 songs now (a symphony counts as 3+ songs, an opera can be up to 50 or 60), so even the 100 000 song limit is not large enough.
So, if you go with iTunes Match, you'll have all 203,034 songs available from your main iTunes library (or any library directly linked to the files), and 100K available on the go. Though I'm not sure if they'll let you pick which 100K, or if it's just the first 100K it finds in your library.
BTW: How does iTunes Match differentiate between my 4 different Karajan recordings of a Bruckner symphony? How about m 9 different recordings of Wagner's Ring? Wagner's Ring isn't just Wagner's Ring, but Böhm's interpretation, Karajan's interpretation, Furtwängler's interpretation ..., and then there are different recordings with the same conductor and orchestra, but different singers...
I'd assume there's some metadata in your audio files which can allow it to differentiate. For example, if they were ripped from different CDs, then it'll be able to use the CD title as the differentiator. It's not actually analyzing the audio, just looking at the metadata.
Thank You! I was just going to post the exact suggestion to [@]hillstones[/@].
I've been using and recommending S2M since IFAIK iPhone 3GS and iPad 2 days.