Apple allows iTunes streaming to iDevices with iDisk

Apple has done something something pretty surprising in regards to streaming music to your iPhone. Apple has quietly enabled its devices to stream music to iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches from online storage through iDisk, which is the next best thing to a cloud-based iTunes.

The new feature was brought to light by Michael Robertson, who also provided the screen shots above showing that iDisk allows both public file sharing among multiple devices simultaneously and background music streaming thanks to iOS4. Matt declared iDisk “halfway there” in his review—which leaves me to wonder what the whole thing would be like.

Supposedly you have been able to do this with iDisk for a while, but this is the first time you get background support and controls.

It’s not completely hassle-free and there are a few stipulations: You need to drag your music files one by one (or whole folders) to iDisk, which can certainly get tedious, there’s no playlist support, and you’re limited to 20GB of storage. That’s still a whole bunch of songs and in fact is bigger than my computers hard drive, but some users may not be able to fit their entire music library. The app itself is free, but you’ll need a MobileMe subscription (about $100 per year) to use it. There’s also the tricky question of legality — music companies aren’t generally in favor of streaming music without a license. However that’s Apple’s problem, not yours.

Also, it is said to “work like a charm over 3G and WiFi with ‘decent’ audio quality.”

Do you think it’s worth the $100 per year (or about $8.33 per month) to be able to stream music, or is this unnecessary if you have the songs on your iPhone anyway? Let me know in the comments below.

Via: Gizmodo

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EDITED: The last paragraph should read $100 per year, not month. The post was fixed to reflect that. (Thanks, Jason!)