iTunes 9 Home Sharing/Sync the Wrong Solution. Give us automatic media caching!

We live in an age when homes don’t have a single computer on a desk, everyone has their own laptop. It’s great that iTunes9 recognizes the need to share files between computers so that everyone in a home can make local copies to hear each other’s music and watch each other’s videos.

Except that we have tiny storage in iPhones, MacBook Air and netbooks — some iPods hold more. We need to solve the problem of keeping only the files we need with us and having the rest stored on the network. I want an automatic system to swap in and out the files on my machines based on my requests and favorites, caching all the most used files locally and pulling less-often used files off the network as needed.

5 thoughts on “iTunes 9 Home Sharing/Sync the Wrong Solution. Give us automatic media caching!

  1. Hi Dale, I'm wondering the same thing about storing files in the cloud particularly as it relates to my enormous music collection (95 GB), which even the newly announced 64 GB iPod Touch can't accomodate. I have a 160 GB iPod Classic that houses my entire music collection, but I'd really like to be able to access my whole music collection from a flash memory based iPhone. See my thoughts on this and today's iTunes 9 related announcements at http://blog.mobilemusicmessenger.com/?p=221Seth

  2. Not to bust your balls again, but really you are trying to make these devices work harder than they need to. Instead of copying media to and fro, why not set up one primary location for your media (maybe that Mac Mini you mentioned?) and share that device's iTunes library across your home network?You will be able to access and play all the content your heart desires and not have to store all the media locally on your internal MacBook Air. You can then use Home Sharing to copy over media to your Air that you'd like to have on personal devices (iPods, iPhones, etc) and delete any media you don't need after syncing said devices.Wireless storage locations + current bandwidth availability in the US + available wireless networking bandwidth = long transfer/load times + unreliable data accessIn the case of the curve of technology it seems as if you're putting the carriage before the horse. Give the wizards in labcoats some time to make the devices smaller, faster, and even cheaper and I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised in the near future and maybe even find something to be excited about as opposed to the most recent entries I've read (pessimistic much?)Remember… “Patience is the companion of wisdom.”

  3. Not to bust your balls again, but really you are trying to make these devices work harder than they need to. Instead of copying media to and fro, why not set up one primary location for your media (maybe that Mac Mini you mentioned?) and share that device's iTunes library across your home network?You will be able to access and play all the content your heart desires and not have to store all the media locally on your internal MacBook Air. You can then use Home Sharing to copy over media to your Air that you'd like to have on personal devices (iPods, iPhones, etc) and delete any media you don't need after syncing said devices.Wireless storage locations + current bandwidth availability in the US + available wireless networking bandwidth = long transfer/load times + unreliable data accessIn the case of the curve of technology it seems as if you're putting the carriage before the horse. Give the wizards in labcoats some time to make the devices smaller, faster, and even cheaper and I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised in the near future and maybe even find something to be excited about as opposed to the most recent entries I've read (pessimistic much?)Remember… “Patience is the companion of wisdom.”

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