Is Apple’s iCloud shattering our hopes?

iCloud was looking to be one of Apple’s biggest launches this year at the WWDC but will the new service with tons of layers actually be exciting. As the details continue to emerge what we first thought may not be completely accurate. Just yesterday reports were coming in that Apple had finalized deals with around four big record labels including Universal. This has been confirmed by the LA Times which suggests that the deals should be finalized sometime tomorrow, which means that everything should be set for Monday’s debut.

As reported by CNet the iTunes module of iCloud will not launch anytime soon…but as Apple put it ‘it would be soon’. The rumor mills hint that while Apple was all set for a launch of their service in fall it probably got pushed back because of Google’s and Amazon’s limited cloud music type offerings.

The second and this is probably the most disturbing for people who use iTunes is that the launch version will only allow you to access those songs which have already been purchased via iTunes. This means that if you have songs which have been downloaded from other online stores, ripped from a CD or obtained from any other means you will not be able to enjoy in via iCloud.

However, this moves does make sense in the interest of music companies who do not want pirates to benefit. But the controversy is in the fact that Apple kept saying that it was working in the best interest of the people who could use their cloud for all available music. This is an important point especially since users will want to work with their existing music collection. But Apple according to CNet has announced that this is something which may be added sometime in the future.

The other bad news as reported by the LA Times concerns uploading which has been talked about since the announcement of iCloud. The killer feature of iCloud was ought to be the ability for users to mirror their songs. This meant that iTunes could scan your hard disk to identify all music so that you could access those songs via iCloud without you having to upload anything. This is in contrast to what Google and Amazon currently offers which requires tiresome uploading. But this is because both companies do not have their publisher deals ready. This could potentially be a deal breaker…but we will wait and see what happens.

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