iTunes in the Cloud, a feature of Apple's upcoming iCloud service announced at WWDC today, is currently available as a free beta for devices running iOS 4.3. We've played around with the service a bit, and while it's very basic at the moment, it works pretty seamlessly and has a great interface design.
The iTunes cloud services are accessed from the iTunes app, under the "Purchased" icon. There, you can see a list of purchased items sorted by artist, song, or album, and can use a toggle at the top of the screen to switch between viewing all purchased items, and only purchased items that have not yet been downloaded to the device.
A cloud button appears next to each item or group of items, and tapping the button sends it to your downloads list. We managed to trip the app up once: it changed the cloud button to a grayed out "downloading" indicator when pressed and didn't actually add the song to the queue, but some shuffling of menus let us download the song again. The downloader gets only one song at a time, and downloads can be paused if needed.
Once downloaded, the song or set of songs appears in the separate iPod application. This separation makes us wish that the iTunes and iPod applications were combined into one entity. As it is, there's a little counterintuitive awkwardness with things like podcasts: unlike songs you have attached to your account, new podcast episodes can only be pulled down to your iOS device through the iPod app, and not through iTunes.
Going in the other direction, there doesn't appear to be a way to get music off your device once it's on there, which you may want to do if your device is full but you'd like to pull down new music you recently downloaded. (Update: on further inspection, iPad users can delete songs via the Library interface, but it appears the iPhone can still only delete songs from playlists, not the device.) One of the features we're most curious about, iTunes Match, won't be available to try until fall for $25 a year.
Still, this is just a beta, and the feature stands to undergo a few tweaks before it actually launches. Share your experiences in the discussion thread!
Read the comments on this post
Joss Stone Majandra Delfino Maria Bello Jennifer Gareis Ashlee Simpson
No comments:
Post a Comment