Anyone using OS X Server successfully? I've been beating my head against it for a couple of weeks now, trying to use it with my Airport Extreme for VPN services but I can't get it running. Bah. A $20 piece of software is wasting hours and hours of my time.
When this "service" first rolled out, people assumed it wouldn't be able to discern the differences between, say, a live vs. demo vs. studio version of the same song. Talking Heads have released 4 or 5 iterations of Psycho Killer officially plus all the bootlegs out there. In just live recordings, how many versions of Grateful Dead songs are out there? Or if your music is all Apple Lossless or whatever, iTunes is going to disregard that and serve you up its cloud version. They're not going to keep 10 million discrete versions of Adele's Hello in the cloud, and stream only your version back to you.
Lots of times, at work, I wish I could play a song that's at home, and I almost activate this cloud service, but luckily there's a bit of a logistical hoop to jump through if you didn't do it when you first set up your account, so I haven't been able to. Because I didn't know about the physically deleting songs from my hard drive part (why would it even bother? maybe from my phone or other slave machine, sure). I was willing/happy to have it substitute 256k MP3 streaming because although I rip Apple Lossless from CDs, I don't listen via audiophile equipment. I was mostly leery of it not knowing which version of Modern Lovers' Roadrunner I wanted to play, but honestly I assumed they'd solved that problem by now.
I guess not.
It was kind of the same for me but I unfortunately signed up in a weak moment. I was very wary of big corporations and big data but the convenience factor of having all my data available all the time swayed me over (I mean my photos are unique pretty high volume files too, right?). Now I regret it. Not only does the solution fail to provide my entire library to my external devices like I was hoping, there's also stuff missing from my "home" library on the MacBook. Also it seems kind of buggy. My garageband playlist has replicated itself 10 times on my phone but with different content each time. And in terms of photos I have about 200 photos that the cloud always downloads to my phone but my photo library already has. For some reason, there must a naming error, tag, or some piece of background information at work because every time I plug in my phone, my photo library wants to import them as "new". I don't obviously but am scared to delete them as this will then delete them from all devices, so if my hunch is actually wrong, I might even lose my originals.. etc. etc. All a bit of a mess.
Most of all I hate it when machines think they can do my thinking for me. They can't. And they should get the hell off of my lawn.
Well, that explains a lot. Thanks for the heads-up.
When this "service" first rolled out, people assumed it wouldn't be able to discern the differences between, say, a live vs. demo vs. studio version of the same song. Talking Heads have released 4 or 5 iterations of Psycho Killer officially plus all the bootlegs out there. In just live recordings, how many versions of Grateful Dead songs are out there? Or if your music is all Apple Lossless or whatever, iTunes is going to disregard that and serve you up its cloud version. They're not going to keep 10 million discrete versions of Adele's Hello in the cloud, and stream only your version back to you.
Lots of times, at work, I wish I could play a song that's at home, and I almost activate this cloud service, but luckily there's a bit of a logistical hoop to jump through if you didn't do it when you first set up your account, so I haven't been able to. Because I didn't know about the physically deleting songs from my hard drive part (why would it even bother? maybe from my phone or other slave machine, sure). I was willing/happy to have it substitute 256k MP3 streaming because although I rip Apple Lossless from CDs, I don't listen via audiophile equipment. I was mostly leery of it not knowing which version of Modern Lovers' Roadrunner I wanted to play, but honestly I assumed they'd solved that problem by now.
The thing underlying this, and so many of my complaints recently, is that Steve wouldn't have allowed this to happen. The details were everything, and now software gets released that has a quick update because it's buggy. GUIs are confusing and not predictable (for instance, the "update all" button appears in different places of the App Store depending on which device you're using - why?). And then this thing about the music loss: can you imagine if someone noticed it at 1 Infinite Loop? It never would've been released.
There's the confusing spectrum of object size: iPod - iPhone - large iPhone - Small iPad - iPad - Small iPad Pro - iPad Pro. WTF is that? Laptops: Air, Macbook, Macbook Pro ?
Far too many choices for the average consumer to feel confident that they're getting the right one. This was a problem when Jobs left Apple, then returned to find far too many products. He asked the engineers to pick which was right for him and it became a mess. Then, the famous 2x2 square with home/office and portable/desktop on each axis: "Now you only make four products." Very liberating.
I've been a shareholder before the first Bondi Blue iMac, but this is starting to look like the Gil Amelio years, and I'm wishing I'd offloaded the stock back with it was in the 140s.
I've always considered I-Tunes to be a virus after my first and only experience with it years ago helping someone load their I-Pod with some mp3's via my computer. This just confirms it.
