iCloud Drive for hosting lossless iTunes Library?

[MajorFubar]

Any iTunes users given any serious thought to hosting their iTunes library on the iCloud Drive? Hot on the tails of me saying yesterday morning that I wouldn’t ever want to totally rely on streaming services for my musical fixes, I find myself tempted by the prospect of hosting at least a backup of my iTunes library on the iCloud drive.

Benefits are:

1) £6.99 a month buys 500GB of iCloud storage which is way more than the space occupied on my NAS by my 275GB of Apple Lossless CD rips, and is likely to forever remain sufficient.

2) I don’t have to worry about backups/drive failures/data corruption, someone else worries about that for me (although I’m sure there will be some asterisked clause somewhere which says Apple are not liable if they lose or f’k-up your iCloud-based data)

3) My entire lossless music library would be available to me anywhere where I have a Macbook + WiFi

4) Immeasurably better than iTunes (mis)Match for a multitude of reasons, because it’s genuinely streaming the rips from my CDs

Drawbacks are:

1) No slick & easy method of streaming from iCloud via iOS. Apps like File Browser sort of work but they aren’t as slick as the iOS Music app, which at the moment doesn’t allow users to point it to their own cloud-based library

2) Knackered without an internet connection

3) New rips will be slloooowww to upload for those of us without a fibre connection because of the huge disparity between upload and download internet speeds

4) £6.99 a month is knocking-on-the-door of £84 a year: is it really worth it?

 

[jjbomber]

Try a WD My Cloud. You can but one very year for the same money! I have the 3TB version and I have worldwide access via an app or web browser.

 

[MajorFubar]

I had a go at checking the feasibility of my idea today using the my free 5GB allowance (hearty when they laugh aren't they). In theory it would work I think, but not with my internet connection. In the space of half an hour it had uploaded about four songs from a 15-track album, and I have about 640 CDs ripped to my NAS. So posibly an idea to come back to when the infrastructure has caught up with the true potential of the technology. I really need to look at upgrading to fibre before I even give the slightest credence to a stupid thought like this again.

 

[Paul.]

A bit left field compared to what you have asked, but I have been using plex to great effect for streaming content away from home. The interface is very simple, it behaves exactly the same at home as it does away. It's even accessible from the lock screen on mobiles, it's on many platforms now.

the back up issue could be solved with an offsite backup or a hidden firesafe?

this is all dependant on which Nas you have and whether it can run plex server of course.

 

[Paul.]

justvseen your other post, plex will adjust quality dependant on bandwidth