[The Final Dakar]

Mods, dunno what forum to put this in. Throw it wherever you like if you don't think the Lounge is appropriate.

Apple Allows iTunes Streaming to iPhone With iDisk

Well this was unexpected: Apple has quietly enabled its devices to stream music to iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches from online storage through iDisk. It's the very next-best thing to putting iTunes in the cloud.

The new feature was unearthed by Michael Robertson, who also provided the screen shots above showing clearly that iDisk allows both background music streaming and public file sharing. Matt declared iDisk "halfway there" in his lightning review—this seems like as good a second half as any.

It's not totally effortless and there are a few limitiations: you need to drag your music files one by one to iDisk, there's no playlist support, and you're limited to 20GB of storage. That's still a whole lot of songs, but some users may not be able to fit their entire music library. There's also the tricky question of legality—music companies aren't generally in favor of streaming music without a license, something that may be holding up iTunes Live.

But that's Apple's problem, not yours. The only thing you need to worry about for now is which tracks are hitting your iDisk first, and where you want to play them from.

UPDATE: Sam's been testing this out, and it works like a charm over Wi-Fi and 3G alike, with "decent" audio quality. [Michael Robertson]

Not sure I'll bother throwing anything on iDisk, but holy crap, that's progress.

[The Godfather]

Just a note for those that would base their Mobile Me purchase based on this feature alone:
(1) You can stream music and movies from any HTTP server, as long as it is properly encoded.
(2) A Pogoplug can stream music and movies over 3G, and it is only limited by the harddrive connected to it.
(3) AirVideo can do the same for movies, and they don't even need to be pre-encoded, but it requires your PC/Mac to be on.

[Spheric Harlot]

I am tremendously saddened by the demise of SimplifyMedia. Their iPhone app made my iPod classic obsolete.

I'm hoping that Apple will implement something similar into MMe, the way Google has by buying up Simplify for Android.

This looks like one quarter there. I don't really want my stuff in the cloud.