Use MobileMe iDisk To Stream Your iTunes Music Wirelessly To Your iDevice

Many of you have been wishing for a way to stream your own iTunes library wirelessly to your iDevices because you may have more music than your iDevice will hold, or just don't need every song in your library frequently available. Whatever your reason, there is a way to do this but it's not an official 'cloud' service, and it is not super seamless or completely free. The basic concept is using the MobileMe iDisk to access your music files from the MobileMe online storage servers. Foremost, you'll need a MobileMe membership. The suggested retail price for the service is $99 per year but you can pick up a copy, even when renewing, for around $70 from places like Amazon.com. The second item of importance is the data bandwidth meter is running, and all valid charges apply. Over Wi-Fi it won't be a huge problem, but 3G cellular service may be a big concern for those who don't have the unlimited data plans. In which case, I'll refer to "How To Check Your AT&T Data Usage" and AT&T's online data calculator. There are a few more items to note and they deal with the MobileMe membership. Normal membership includes 20GB of storage and 200GB of data per month. That storage and bandwidth is used for any backups, syncing, general storage, iWeb or other web hosting, photos, music, movies, and any documents. If you choose to, you can upgrade to 40GB of storage with 400GB of data transfer for an additional $49 per year or 60GB of storage with a limit of 600GB of bandwidth per month for another $99 annually. If you are unaware on how to check your MobileMe bandwidth, proceed to MobileMe: Data transfer limits. Now, if you're comfortable with all of that, we can continue to finally making your music available anywhere you have an Internet connection. The gist is to upload your music to your iDisk using your desktop computer and then access it using the MobileMe iDisk app. Since you'll be strictly dealing with files and folders, organizations is key. I chose to upload my music straight from the iTunes Music folder, which is organized by artist, then album, and finally listed songs. To access your iDisk in Mac OS X, go to the Finder, click on the Go menu, choose iDisk, than select My iDisk. Those running Microsoft Windows will want to check out Connecting to your iDisk from Windows Explorer. You can also access your iDisk from me.com but it may be a bit unreliable when uploading large amounts of data. It's probably easiest to just upload your music folders and files to the Music folder on your iDisk. Once you have everything uploaded, if you don't already have it, get the free MobileMe iDisk app installed on your iDevice(s). To listen to a song, launch the app, tap the Music folder, then navigate the hierarchy as necessary. For iOS 4 users, you get the added advantage of background audio.

As I proclaimed earlier, this is extremely limited. There is no way to play an entire album, pick an artist, shuffle, playlists, and most other iTunes functions. You pick a song and when it is finished, you need to go and choose another. Even the next and previous controls in the background audio control interface are useless, they just stop the current song from playing. What does everyone think, is this at least "something" that can be useful, or are you just going to wait for a true cloud service from Apple?

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