Head To Head Comparo Of The Big Five Of Cloud Storage/Music Service

[Richard Chao]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/40364/icloud-google-music-dropbox-skydrive-amazon-cloud-player' target='_blank'>http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/403...on-cloud-player</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"It&rsquo;s been a busy time for cloud storage and music services and Apple&rsquo;s launch onto the scene with Apple iCloud has officially declared it global war. The lines have begun to blur as to what you own, where you own it and just how much you have to pay for the privilege to do so and one could be forgiven for doing a little head scratching on the matter."</em></p><p><img height="265" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1308183848.usr117680.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" width="400" /></p><p>In these last few months we've seen a few big players jump into the cloud storage/music service arena. &nbsp;The latest being Apple with iCloud. &nbsp;Apple joins Google Music Beta, Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive. &nbsp;Each of these services have pro and cons over their competitors. &nbsp;To help sort it out, Pocket-lint has written up a comparison of all of these services. &nbsp;</p><p>Personally, I use a combination of these clients. &nbsp;Amazon Cloud Drive for my music. &nbsp;Dropbox for my files. &nbsp;Microsoft SkyDrive for my Windows Phone 7 camera roll backup. &nbsp;Apple iCloud for my iPhone 4 backup. &nbsp;I'd probably use Google Music Beta too if I had an invite. &nbsp;And this is pretty similar to Pocket-lint's conclusion. &nbsp;How about you? &nbsp;Do you use one of these services exclusively or are you like me? &nbsp;Is there another service you'd recommend over these? &nbsp; &nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p>

[ptyork]

Just got an invite to Google's service. Complete crap. Music uploader pegs your CPU at 100% while it takes days to upload your music--this is not an exaggeration. I'm cool with the upload time. It's a lot of bits. The CPU pegging isn't kosher, though. Had to completely uninstall it from my PC. The browser-based player is okay, thought it craps out if your bandwidth or CPU is otherwise being sapped (i.e., when you are running the uploader). Also degrades over time.

On the bright side, I got a few new songs out of it. :)

Personally I'm gonna pay those evil bastards at Apple some more of my hard earned money for their Music Match service. I've been meaning to re-rip all of my 160Kbps MP3s, but I have many hundreds of CDs, and $25 is worth it to me for magic 256K conversion. And you get the music in the cloud to boot. May drop it after the year, though. We'll see.

[Richard Chao]

Just got my invite too. It's too bad you didn't like Google Music Beta. I'm hoping it'll improve over time and a client becomes available on the iPhone.

[Rob Alexander]

So AT&T capped mobile usage limits a few months ago. Verizon just announced that they're doing the same. My iPhone and iPad each have 32GB of storage and I'm not near the limit on either one. I just don't get why I'd want to use up my expensive bandwidth streaming my music from the cloud when I can carry it around with me and have it even when cell reception is bad.

I do understand other reasons to store data in the cloud. I use SugarSync to synchronize all of my working files (and, yes, my music) between my home and work computers. That also gives me access to all of my files from my iPhone and iPad. That's extremely useful. Very occasionally, a song that's not with me locally has come up in conversation and I've gone out to SugarSync to grab it, but that's pretty rare. It's trivially easy to have my music on the devices, so I just don't get wanting to make the cloud my primary music storage solution and pay Verizon extra money to stream my music regularly.

Apple's match feature is interesting, and I can see why that could be useful. All of my music is already in -v0 extreme quality LAME MP3 format anyway, with things I ripped myself also archived in FLAC, so I would be stepping down in quality to let Apple replace those with CBR 256kbps files.

Other than that, though, then what do Google, Amazon and Apple offer that I'm not already getting with SugarSync? With that one exception, SugarSync does everything they would do, plus a lot more.