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Shawn Blanc writes about the state of cloud-based music services (with a natural North American bias).
Here in the UK we can’t get Rdio or Google Music, and although we can get Amazon Cloud Drive (via amazon.com, not amazon.co.uk) we’re blocked from Amazon Cloud Player.
Where does that leave us loyal British subjects?
I love Spotify. So do my kids (which is my my “recently played” and “top tracks” lists aren’t public - we don’t share the same taste in music!). I’ve had an on-and-off subscription, and the recent changes to limiting tracks (and time) have prompted me to subscribe again - for the price of an album or two on iTunes, I have access to the the full Spotify catalogue. Result.
Anyone who knows me knows I do love my fruit flavoured hardware, and although I like iTunes (insofar as managing my media and various iOS devices and iPods), I love discovering music through Spotify more. Will the much-rumoured “iTunes Locker” or “iCloud” change things? I don’t know. I love the cross-platform nature of Spotify and Dropbox, and I love that Spotify isn’t limited to just my library.
On the other hand, all these cloud-based services are making it much easier to reduce the amount of stuff stored on my laptop, and justify that SSD upgrade…
When using OS X I vary between listening to local (iTunes) and remote (Spotify), but I’ve been frustrated by not being able to use the built-in media keys to control playback. Every time you press Play/Pause key, iTunes assumes it is the only media application running. Which can lead to amusing situations where you either end up with audio from both applications, or alternating between the two. Not too helpfully when you just want to pause…
Quitting iTunes isn’t an option either, since when you press the keys it reopens.
I’ve found a solution though: Shift (⇧) + Option (⌥) + the media key of your choice will control Spotify (and presumably other applications), but will be ignored by iTunes.
