I don't quite grok music streaming services. Sure, I understand that I get all the music IN THE WORLD!!!111 while I'm current, which is impressive, but that only works if I accept that I'd get tired of $7-10 of music each month or am happy paying $7-10 a month for life. (Amazon's service runs $7 a month if you have Prime.) Fair enough; there are many albums I'd listen to but regret buying, but would I get $7-10 a month of ever proverbial "joy" from that music?

If your daily playlist churns less and you tend to buy for the long term, wouldn't it be better to own an album a month?

I've made this argument on this site before.

But there are really two issues, aren't there?

1. How to most affordably pay for a license to your music, subscription or "own", and...
2. How to access it when you want to listen.

Spotify has apps for every platform. Apple Music famously even has an Android app. My mp3 files have... well, no great options for my phone or work computers.

How do I get ubiquitous access to music files that I own?

I used to use Amazon Music, which gives Prime users like me access to Amazon Prime Music streaming (the "free" subscription) and all the mp3 tracks you've purchased from Amazon, which lets you get around your favorites that aren't in the Prime Music library by... buying them. Seems fair, but you see the issues -- One, I have to buy all my music from Amazon going forward. Two, I can no longer add my own music files I had pre-Amazon. (I actually have 100 grandfathered tracks from when Amazon let you upload music, but that only goes so far.)

I've also tried Foobar 2000 on iOS (direct app store link), which, wacky dated UI aside, works well, but requires that you have your files on the phone, iPod-style, which Apple makes prohibitively expensive. Thanks, Mr. Cook. Can I have an SD slot, please?

Now, after a few failed experiments, I use Astiga, essentially a web-based third-party interface to music files you have in cloud storage. It's a competent app. It supports playlists, and gives you the normal Albums, Artists, Genres, and Songs lists. And it doesn't downsample afaict.

There are some foibles. My least favorite is that it sometimes splits albums into two for... I don't know. Small changes in id3 information? Different file types? (I have some AAC and mp3 mixes, I'm afraid.) But ultimately quote competent.

For sources, it supports, at a minimum...

• pCloud
• Backblaze
• Dropbox
• FTP
• Google Drive
• OneDrive
• Amazon S3
• SFTP
• WebDAV

I've considered keeping a box running at home and SFTPing into it, but decided against. Instead, I've opened a pCloud account and gotten a little less than 10 gigs for free, I believe. With the exception that this isn't nearly enough space, it's worked great. I've added a throw-away OneDrive account too to get twice the songs, but OneDrive often requires a new login to keep Astiga's access current. pCloud has not. pCloud wins by about a mile.

There's even an official Astiga Android app. There are also serviceable, though not great, pCloud apps for iOS and Android. Right now, I use CloudBeats on my phone. YMMV.

Admittedly, I do use a throw-away email address and there's ­nothing­ on my pCloud other than music. I trust most online services and these apps about as far as I can throw them. I really wish I could give read-only access to specific folders in OneDrive, but for some reason what's there now doesn't quite suit.

So Astiga and pCloud wins -- except for the lack of space. I listen to significantly more than 20 gigs of music regularly.

pCloud has a paid tier of 500 gigs for $175 lifetime or 2 TB for $350, on sale for Black Friday for $122.50 and $245. On its face, this seems ludicrous. $123 to host files I own? Super. $123 is a lot of music (the "opportunity cost" in this equation), maybe 10-12 albums on Amazon (my cloud "alternative"), but it's also a great price for 500 gigs of online storage with plenty of throughput.

I think I'm finally going to bite on the 500 gig plan. Again, I don't think I'd put anything particularly sensitive on pCloud, but I would load it up with music. It looks like I have just under 100 gigs of tracks on my "real" OneDrive account now, so that's lots of room to grow. And it would mean I could stop ripping at 256 and go full FLAC if I wanted, for instance.

Looks like I'm back in the "Rip. Mix. Burn. Cloudify. Stream." crowd.

Labels: amazon music, Apple Music, cloud, music, pCloud, spotify

Remember in April when I complained about how hard Apple is selling me services, and how it made it sound like I would lose email?

Guess who else is selling me services? You got it. Google. Well, specifically Gmail.

 

 

Let's give that a shot.

Wait, okay, that's actually kind of helpful! has:attachment larger:10M is a neat search suggestion to get rid of some oversized emails.

Unfortunately I only have 125 that match. That's not nothing -- 125 at even just 10 megs each is well over a gigabyte, giving me nearly 8% of my 15 gigs of free space back and hopefully silencing this message for a while.

But what really hits me is the coincidence that Apple and Google are both yelling at me to pay something [or pay more in Apple's case] at the same time. 

Interestingly, Outlook seems to hard cap at 50 gigs even when you're paying $70 a year (includes 1 tb OneDrive). Google offers 100 gigs in gmail for $20 a year. Apple lets you lump email in with your iCloud, so potentially 2 terabytes (!??!), but that's shared with your iCloud backups, messages, and pictures, and runs $10 a month, so... Fastmail charges $5 a month for 30 gigs and $9 for 100, which seems to be obviously too much until you recall they aren't profiting on what's in your emails.

Regardless, what getting caught on both ends with "upgrade now!!1!" adverts tells me is that companies aren't scaling storage over time, as it becomes cheaper for them. And storage isn't being updated year over year because having people run out of storage is a profit center.

Not crazy, but not coincidental either. This is a decided, "let's all charge for services" play by all the companies. There's money in them thar hills.

Labels: apple, cloud, gmail, Google, hats o' money, icloud, outlook

Remember Joel Spolsky's "Let Me Go Back" letter? I do.

Microsoft, specifically Microsoft Office, doesn't.

I'm obviously trying to save the file to my local drive. And I obviously would prefer not to have to navigate that horrendous UI Word has now to move from OneDrive to my drive.

For an app that still impressively honors old keystroke recipes -- like alt-I, B (alt-insert, break) to insert a page break -- this really offends me (haha) as a user. They are actively preventing you from saving to your drive. (This is not new. This is simply the first time I got aggravated enough to post.)

This is not progress. This is a commercial for OneDrive.

... but...

Fewer keystrokes is better! Let me go back!

Labels: cloud, hats of money, microsoft, microsoft fail, office, UI, usability, users

The reason I haven't used 1Password yet, though its auto-generated passwords have to be safer than what I'm using, is that you've...

1. Got a single point of failure for all your passwords, and,
2. Will transport those passwords through the cloud.

Looks like 1Password just started showing the issues with 1.)... From a wrap-up on Michael Tsai's site:

So it appears 1Password is sending data to the browser extensions over the loopback interface in clear text and not only passwords but credit card data as well if you use it for checkout forms. If anyone is sniffing your loopback they can get any data passing between the two.

The reply from 1Password makes some sense...

Officially our view is “if a malicious process with user privileges is running on the users machine when they use 1Password, there is little we can do”.

Fair enough, but, again, one mistake in their code means all of your danged passwords are out. If someone is sniffing your loopback, well, all your passwords and 1Password info is out.

If they make this sort of mistake in moving things around the cloud, it's no longer a local machine issue.

Use strong passwords, and keep your use of them to a minimum. Keep your laptops pretty clean and your home computers turned off when you're not using them. In short, be smart. Don't depend on a cloud service to be smart for you.

Labels: cloud, privacy

Here’s how I experienced it:

I was playing with my daughter, when my phone went dead. It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

I went to connect it to my computer and restore from that backup—which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four digit pin.

I didn’t have a four digit pin.

By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. I walked to the hallway to grab my iPad from my work bag. It had been reset too. I couldn’t turn on my computer, my iPad, or iPhone.

I used my wife’s iPhone to call Apple tech support. While on hold, I grabbed her laptop and tried to log into gmail. My password had changed. I couldn’t reset it either because the backup went to iCloud, where my password had also changed.

I checked Twitter, and saw someone had just sent a tweet from that account. I tried to log into Gmail again, and now it told me that my Google account had been deleted. The way to restore it was to send a text message to my phone which I didn’t (and still do not) have access to.

... [Apple tech support wasn't] able to stop the wipe on my Macbook. Or give me a pin to log into it. Or give me immediate access to my phone. They couldn’t do much of anything, actually. Although they did set an appointment for me at the Genius bar tomorrow. Actually, I did that, later, when I called the store myself.

EDIT: Wow, I've never seen so many stupid typos. Wth was I doing in August of 2012? Watching The Untouchables?

Labels: cloud, security

"On the iPhone, you sync your data with your PC/Mac via iTunes, and MobileMe in parallel syncs both the iPhone and the PC/Mac with 'the cloud" [at MobileMe]. If the cloud were to go down and everything lost (like I said, an almost completely inconceivable occurrence except by deliberate sabotage), your data would still be preserved on both your iPhone and your PC/Mac," a source explained.

'Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way on the Sidekick. The Sidekick was designed under the assumption that the cloud would always be available, and that your data would be safe there, so the device doesn't try very hard to preserve your data if you were to yank the battery or in the rare event of a phone OS crash/reboot. Instead, under these circumstances the device starts from an empty database and then reloads all of your data from the service when it comes back up." [emph mine -R]

Since Mac OS X 10.6 launched in late August, numerous reports online have detailed the issue, which is triggered by logging in and out of a guest account on a Snow Leopard machine. Upon logging back in to their regular account, users will find that it has been wiped of all data.

Labels: apple, cloud, microsoft