Google has released their new music sharing system, and it’s interesting to see how the “free market” in music and Internet services has shaped this new system.
First, you can only upload your own music. Unlike Amazon’s similar system, you can’t buy anything on Google Music. That’s because the record labels don’t really want any cloud storage of music, and Google decided to let Amazon walk point on the inevitable lawsuit from the recording industry.
Second, when you do upload your own music, you’ll be uploading every single bit of it, and Google will be storing every single bit of it. Google could have made a system that just checks your music for a “digital signature”, recognizes that you have a copy of a Britney Spears album, and stores a tiny little marker in your account pointing to one universal copy of “Oops I Did It Again”. This would allow you to upload a few bytes of information instead of megabytes of song data. But, again, the record labels wouldn’t like that, so Google will be storing millions of copies of the same music in everyone’s individual account, and millions of bytes of upload bandwidth will be wasted uploading these identical copies.
This brings us to all the uploading Google Music customers will be doing. All the excitement over “cloud services” and “music lockers” ignores one little fact of US Internet service: it’s extremely asymmetrical. Our upload speed is usually about 10 times slower than our download speed. That’s because the most widely deployed technology used by our cable and telecom ISPs is built on copper wire that’s up to 100 years old. Telcos’ copper is so old that it will probably never support really fast upload speeds, and cable companies have been slow to roll out the technology that allows moderately fast uploads. Only fiber to the home can support fast, symmetrical Internet connections. But fiber-based competition has been limited by cable and telco monopolies, and even when communities try to deploy their own fiber, cable companies have their lobbyists ram through legislation stopping those roll outs.
And let’s not forget that over half of the country can only buy Internet service with bandwidth caps, so those users of Google Music will face hefty overcharges if their kids stream Bieber’s latest too many times. Nevermind that the price of wholesale Internet bandwidth does nothing but fall.
So, moochers, temper your excitement. In twenty or thirty years, cable and telcoms may finally implement fiber, and record labels may finally give up their dream that you’ll re-purchase your entire music library in digital form, just like you did when you trashed your LPs and converted to CDs. Then, and only then, will you looters be able to taste the sweet fruit of Google Music, brought to you by the innovation of the free market.
TheMightyTrowel
My big question is how far google will go to anonymise accounts so that the information about who has which songs/audiobooks/files uploaded into their ‘lockers’. I can think of several scenarios where having this information in the cloud could be misused: for example, will the record labels see this as their chance to pounce on all the people with illegally downloaded files and track people down who have non-drm or drm-cracked files in their cloud? Or, what about people with politically sensitive audiobooks or musicians? Will governments who monitor internet usage be able to see which of their visitors has protest songs?
Alexandra
Because I’m going to store about 650Gb of lossless files in Google’s ‘cloud’ which should, oh, only take about 12-18 months to upload.
Walker
Don’t I know it. This is killing my house search right now. I have got to have reasonable upload speeds to work from home.
Triassic Sands
And generally third rate. As is increasingly the case, the US chooses mediocrity + private profits over excellence + empowered citizens (better known in their unempowered state as consumers).
The backwardness of this country and complete lack of vision is embarrassing…except to the overlords.
Joseph Nobles
My bright idea of the day: Google should open up some brick-and-mortar locations where you can bring your laptop or music device all busting full of digital music. There you can upload to the cloud everything you’ve got at a reasonable speed.
Comrade Javamanphil
@Triassic Sands: U-S-A! U-S-A!
lonesomerobot
Speaking as an owner of a record label, the RIAA and the labels just don’t get it, and never will. You’d think the same industry that came up with the idea to surcharge dual well cassette recorders and cassettes would see that as a good template for this very issue, but no. Instead they want to go after college students (and their families) for downloading music. Because they can’t get their heads around the fact the the horse has already bolted. The kids are getting their music for free.
So I’ll just ask it here: how many people would accept a surcharge of a few cents on hard drives, blank CDs, flash drives, and other media if it meant that a) you could download any music you wanted freely and b) the owner of the intellectual property would actually be compensated?
Because we already have the framework for that in place, just not the will of the labels and the RIAA to enforce it. Oh, and Hillary Rosen (former head of the RIAA who started us down this intractable path, and consultant to BP during last year’s oil spill) is basically a shameless profiteer, also, too.
Suffern ACE
@Joseph Nobles: Why not call them “Gugel” stores and open them yourself?
lonesomerobot
@Joseph Nobles: I’ve mentioned this to my own distributor, actually – kiosks where you can manage your music, bring a flash drive and upload/download what you want. The idea could easily apply to other forms of media, as well.
Emma
Scre(w) that. The Library of Congress just put online a metric ton of old recordings http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/. It’s an amazing collection. Not only the music but related materials like cover art and artists’ bios. And it’s all pre-copyright, including the complete Sony pre-1925 recordings.
Somedays it just makes me happy to be a librarian.
RandyH
I remember reading in PC World magazine in like 1981 or something that the local telcos were committed to deploying “fiber to the home” for EVERY household in the country within 10 years, This was long before most people saw the possibilities of (or had even heard of) this Internet thing. And the telcos didn’t yet even understand the value of an “always on” connection like DSL or Cable Modems now provide. They just knew high bandwidth would be needed for something. (maybe high-definition TV phone calls was their thinking.) And they had science-fiction visions of the future that they wanted to live up to I guess.
They failed us. Big time. The telcos are the absolute worst at rolling out any new technology now. The cable companies are better. With a modern cable modem (Docsis 3.0) they can provide you with over 300 Mbit/second download speed and over 100 Mbit/second upload speed. But they don’t. The highest they tend to offer are like 1/3 of these numbers and only to those willing to pay an outrageous amount of money for it. Everyone else gets throttled back to like 20 Mbits Down and 2 Mbits Up. What a shame.
It really bugs me that they think they can limit bandwidth, yet still increase prices every year like they do with shitty Cable TV channel packages. That model just doesn’t work with Internet service. Prices should go down AND speeds go up every year. At least I’m lucky that my Cable company does not have any caps in place YET but they may soon. Who knows.
lonesomerobot
@Emma: My wife’s also a librarian, in an academic setting. One of her biggest fears is that IT people are taking over and libraries are being turned into internet cafes.
tBoy
Lafayette Louisiana has rolled out fiber to the door under the auspices of their city utilities. Bell South/AT&T & Cox cable spent millions trying to stop it. Socialism, etc …
jibeaux
Let’s get down to basics here. I dislike iTunes, but I’ve gotten used to it and have finally managed to get most of the music I care about over to it or re-purchased. I have a life, I’m not an audiophile, and I’m really, really uninterested in constantly changing technology just to be able to listen to music. I have my music on my iPhone and that’s what I listen to pretty much everywhere. Why would I use a cloud or a music-sharing service? Are there advantages here that would outweigh the giant time suck? Who’s this aimed at? (Imagine you’re explaining it not quite to your grandma, but getting there.)
Emma
lonesomerobot: I’m not so worried about that, maybe because my job is systems :D. What’s happening now is a shift in how we deliver information. With the growth of online degrees, and part-time, mostly off-campus students, we have to find a way to deliver what they need. IMO, as academic librarians we need to concentrate on content. This LOC project represents that approach.
The other important thing is preservation. LOC has just scooped up all of Twitter. It sounds crazy, but information is being conveyed in different ways. Some academic libraries have started to collect work-related emails from faculty. Why? Because it’s the new way they communicate. Darwin wrote long letters to friends, working out ideas; a modern-day scientists is probably using email. If we want a record of the work, we need to collect it.
It’s interesting times in libraries, that’s for sure.
Comrade Javamanphil
@RandyH: I’m actually amazed some smart, cash rich tech company hasn’t started going all in on a fiber to every home business model. Google seems to be dipping its toe in the waters but this seems like a perfect business opportunity. Everybody hates the telcos and the cable companies. Everybody. That should be encouraging somebody to enter the market, even with the high upfront cost barriers.
lol
@lonesomerobot:
They do that in Canada with CDs, I believe.
mr. whipple
@Emma:
That looks cool, thanks!
RandyH
@jibeaux:
I don’t see any advantage in uploading all of your music to the “cloud.” Not at all. If you want a complete library of music to listen to on your portable device or your home/work computer, you’re much better off subscribing to a service like Napster or Rhapsody or something. I know that with Napster, which I subscribe to, they’ve got nearly everything ever released and great advice as to playlists, etc.
And it’s like $15 every few months. They even have Apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. You never need to buy new music because their whole library is available to you all of the time over the internet, as long as your provider doesn’t gouge you for bandwidth usage.
But I still buy and collect stuff that I really like in MP3 format, which is mine to keep forever.
Joseph Nobles
@Suffern ACE: My brilliant ideas only apply to spending other people’s money.
@lonesomerobot: That’s literally all this would need – a kiosk in a mall with a fiber optic connection straight to Google’s servers.
Or as others are saying, we could just improve the infrastructure all around. My U-Verse guy told me I had fiber all the way to the property line of my condo. But the condos themselves weren’t wired for fiber, so I was SOL. I’m driving a tricycle on the Autobahn. Oh, well, sounds like I got a signature issue to fight with the HOA about.
cleek
@jibeaux:
because you can pull your music from “the cloud” (aka Google’s shared servers) any place you have an internet connection. it gives you access to everything you own, instead of whatever you can fit, and remembered to put, on your iPhone. imagine if you could sync your iPhone to your home computer from wherever you are and grab songs off it whenever you wanted – same thing.
downsides are: you need an internet connection to get to your stuff. upload speeds are so slow that putting your music on Google’s servers will be a huge waste of time; this is why Amazon’s purchase-direct-to-cloud service is much better. and, you’re handing control of your music files to a third party.
so, no cloud for me.
lonesomerobot
@jibeaux: It’s being sold as “convenience”. The main advantage would appear to be that you could store more music than you could on your iPhone (potentially all of your digitized music could be stored in the cloud), and have access to it anywhere. I prefer my 160gb iPod over any cloud-based storage, personally. I can take that anywhere, too. The problem I have with the cloud concept is that ultimately you’re at the mercy of those that own the machines where your stuff is stored. Wherever that may be. Always have a backup.
@Emma: One thing my wife has noticed is that there are plenty of “librarians” that are actually complicit in the killing of the library — her boss is one example, basically walks around and wonders aloud if libraries even have a purpose in the modern world (he’s old and jaded); but worse than that, he regularly tends to push and support policies that further marginalize the library’s purpose. The digitalized media and database-focus is certainly a larger part of the job these days, but the democratic basis for the library as a place where anyone should have access to knowledge and information has always been the foundation to which she’s adhered.
bs23
I agree with you that the uploading costs are large and annoying compared to what could be done with a digital signature. But for what it’s worth, I can’t imagine google’s going to store everything separately. They’ll compress the data, which will catch a lot of the redundancies automatically.
burnspbesq
BFD. Maybe I’m just not the target market for cloud services, because I spend so much time in places where there is no internet connection at all (i.e., on airplanes), but there is nothing in cloud storage of music that I find even remotely interesting. I’ll be a Luddite and continue to occasionally re-sync my iPod Touch and iPhone from the 1.6 terabites of music on my home network.
RandyH
@Comrade Javamanphil:
Google is doing it in certain markets to scare the hell out of the telcos and cable co’s. They plan to go into places like Kansas City and offer Gigabit-up/Gigabit-down for like $30 a month (and still profit) to show Americans how badly they’re being ripped off. But they have no intention of doing it nationwide. That’s not their business. Hopefully the telcos and cable co’s will be shamed into doing the right thing before local communities do the SOSHULLIST model and do it as cities like many places do trash collection and water/sewer service.
burnspbesq
@RandyH:
That’s really sad. Can you not hear the difference between mp3 and higher-resolution digital formats?
RandyH
@burnspbesq:
Confused. I store and buy music in 256kbps MP3 format, which is about as good as it gets. There’s something better? News to me.
lonesomerobot
@burnspbesq: it’s funny how this matters a lot to some of us, but doesn’t really matter at all to most. The sad history of declining audio fidelity being favored in the consumer market has mostly always been about convenience (lower audio quality cassettes supplanting vinyl, CDs that chopped off the entire audio range above 22kHz, and now mp3s).
If it weren’t for sound engineers and audiophiles we’d be stuck with what they give us. I wish cars still came with turntables.
jibeaux
Ok, thanks. I don’t see any advantage in any of that for me. Although I wish eMusic would go back to their old model. I discovered a lot of interesting new music for a few bucks an album with them. I think it was an old, grandfathered plan for 50 downloads a month for $17.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Cloud services are better than the alternative that geeks have been doing for years, using their old computer as a streaming server, which then you’re butting up against the upload limits whenever you’re streaming.
Taxes on hdd and media to compensate record companies??? never ever ever. Might as well tax gas to pay horse-whip manufacturers. They’re only tangentially related, and totall unnecessary. These are my mp3s that I bought (either directly or purchasing the CD that gives me the rights to store it in any way I want, according to the supreme court) and I don’t have to pay extra for putting my music on my computer rather than putting it on a shelf.
lonesomerobot
@RandyH: Consumer mp3s often go up to 320kbps, anything below 1440kbps (full CD resolution) has been digitally compressed to make them more easy to transfer, basically for the internet.
AIFF or WAV files are full CD resolution, and even that isn’t actually “full” fidelity, because CDs chop off the frequencies below 20Hz and above 22kHz. DVD audio gets closer, having resolution up to 48kHz, and the Super Audio CD had the audacity to go all the way up to 96kHz.
Of course someone will say, ‘but humans can only hear up to about 20kHz, so who cares?’ Well, what you can’t hear — harmonics above 20k — influences the depth and richness of the sound within the human range of hearing. Upper range harmonic interplay turns out to be one of the nice psychoacoustic effects one gets from hearing music live (or on vinyl, for instance).
Emma
lonesomerobot: Yes, sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot.
The democratic basis for the library as a place where anyone should have access to knowledge and information has always been the foundation to which she’s adhered.
This has always been the foundations of the public libraries. Academic libraries have sometimes chosen to limit access to their materials to their student/faculty/alumni body. Still, the problem is what when you subscribe to a database you agree to their limits on access. Libraries are trying to get around that by starting their own open access projects. One of the more interesting ones is in the field of legal librarianship, the Chesapeake Project, is working to archive documents and open-source legal materials. It’s a pilot project but they are currently trying to expand it nationwide. It’s all guerilla warfare, so far, but some of it has been successful. The Bepress Digital Commons is another one.
lonesomerobot
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac: Not sure you’re getting my argument. The idea is surcharge on the media and playback devices = everyone gets to download everything for “free”. It isn’t that you have to pay for the mp3 AND then also pay the surcharge, that makes no sense. And it isn’t just the record companies, it’s the songwriters that get paid. A pre-recorded CD would not have a surcharge, only blank CDs or other media used to potentially copy.
What I’m proposing has already been done before, see the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. This was the RIAA admitting that the only way to make money off of “free” music was to create a royalty pool with which the intellectual property owners could be compensated, because people were making cassette copies. Same premise, different century.
The Raven
Part of what Google is looking towards seems to be an inexpensive, moderate-performance wireless voice and data services. With such a service, it would be perfectly feasible to have a very small, inexpensive Android player with access to the entire music collection–something that might cost $10. Cell phone service and moderate-bandwidth, moderate latency wireless internet could be a no-charge public service, costing much less than a highway network, and that’s probably the model Google is aiming at.
Comrade Javamanphil
@lonesomerobot & @burnspbesq: I cannot hear the difference. I have done comparisons, with high quality headphones, and I literally do not notice a difference between 256kbps MP3s and the lossless formats. I assume, much like taste and vision, people just have different abilities to sense these things.
NonyNony
@RandyH:
That’s what they say.
However, if Google goes into Kansas City and seriously creates gigabit speeds for $30/month and shows a profit on it, does anyone seriously think they’ll not push into that market?
By all rights just ANNOUNCING that they were going to do it should have scared the telcos shitless. The announcement alone should have driven the telcos into starting to build infrastructure just to keep Google out of the running. Instead nothing – not a peep. If Google is successful with their pilot program, the telcos will be years behind them and Google could quite easily start offering it’s pilot program to another city.
And if they actually turn a profit on it AND it gets that gigabit connection that they dream of having into people’s living rooms, I don’t see why Google wouldn’t decide “fuck it – if they’re not going to do it we will”. Google benefits a LOT by having high bandwidth into people’s living rooms – the telcos these days see themselves as cell phone companies who run land connections for businesses and support legacy land connections for residences.
Give ’em 20 years – if AT&T and the other telcos continues to be as myopic about technology as they have been, Google could quite easily replace them in a couple of decades – at least as far as land connectivity goes. The major telcos could become a bunch of cell phone companies with Google and a handful of cable-tv outfits (like Comcast and Time-Warner) operating the land network.
Notice that those folks have a vested interest in having some kind of fat pipe into people’s living rooms either unrestricted like Google or restricted like the cable-tv providers – they all provide content that uses that fat pipe and make a ton of money off that content. The telcos have no vested interest in providing fat pipe into people’s homes other than “maybe people will pay more for a fatter pipe” since they don’t provide any content. Their only incentive is a profit motive, and they’ve made the decision that they’ll make more money short-term by NOT providing fat pipe than they would by providing it.
cleek
@bs23:
i’d be surprised if they were actually doing cross-file compression. but it would be very clever of them to avoid storing duplicates by doing a quick hash of the uploaded file and comparing that to hashes of already-stored files – if there’s a match, don’t store the duplicate, just store a link to the already-stored copy. if there’s not a hash match, store the uploaded file as a ‘master’ copy which can’t actually be deleted, and give the user a link to that.
and that hashing could be done on the client side. wouldn’t even have to upload the file, in most cases.
tada, all subsequent copies of that 3MB MP3 are now 100-byte symbolic links.
Comrade Javamanphil
@RandyH: If having all of your customers hate you doesn’t shame the telcos / cable companies, I have no idea why Google thinks their little scheme will. Hopefully somebody with cash and a brain is watching to see if they can make a business out of it.
Thad
While we do have some really old last mile copper in the US, thats not what is holding back decent Internet service in most places, its the telco monopolies unwillingness to invest in their internal networks or backbone connections. That is why we have bandwidth caps; they don’t want to invest in better backbone peering or new routers.
Yes, it would be nice to get the 100MBps service that much of Europe has or is rolling out… but frankly I would be thrilled if I could just get the consistent 6MB service that I know my local copper is capable of without worrying about the 150GB monthly cap they just stuck me with.
P.S. My GF says I should mention that I used to own an ISP, so I actually know a bit about this stuff. :)
kindness
I understand that ‘Cloud Computing’ has some advantages, but in all honesty, me & my ipod are just way easier and I don’t have to worry about a network being down or slow or hacked or whatever.
Call me a Luddite.
Martin
Google really is missing the point of how to compete in this space. The progress that has been made so far hasn’t been to merely prop up some tent full of servers and call it a business model. The progress has been by pushing the labels into doing the very things they don’t want to do and which consumers do want to do. Every successful online service was successful for this reason.
Google did try to do variations on the storage locker with purchase, etc. but because they built it without talking to the labels, the labels told them to go fuck themselves when they hit the bits they needed the labels to buy into.
I expect better solutions will pop up before the year is out.
KSH
I already re-purchased my entire music library in digital form: I bought CDs!! Why should I pay someone else top dollar to rip them?
burnspbesq
@RandyH:
Oh, yes indeedy. A lot of record-label websites will sell you anything from CD-resolution WMA, FLAC, and Apple Lossless up to 96Khz/24 bit FLAC and AIFF. Check out theclassicalstore.com, the online home of Chandos Records, and you’ll see what I mean. Then there is the truly wonderful hdtracks.com, without which life as we know it would be impossible.
Higher sample rates and deeper bit depths mean that you lose less of the original analog information in the sampling process.
bs23
first, fywp
@cleek: sure, that’s an excellent strategy for essentially compressing the file before its uploaded. But that’s back to the digital signature point made in the original post.
But it seems I should have rtfa:
I don’t see how there’s any meaning to “exact files” which requires one to keep duplicates. Two links to the same master each allow us to literally access the exact files we separately uploaded, do they not?
It seems like one is quickly forced to argue that either you own the media that the music was stored on when you bought it (don’t know what that means for itunes) or that once you’ve bought one copy of a music file, you’ve bought all copies.
Emma
KSH: A friend of mine who’s really, really, really into music just spent about $150 on two external drives of the kind that you can carry. He uploaded his whole CD collection into one, copied it into the other, and that was it.
mpbruss
For the last 6 months or so, I’ve only paid for music live and on vinyl. Most new records being sold come with a free digital download, so for one purchase I get all the beautiful album artwork and a nice hard copy, plus a digital copy that I put on my iTunes, which I can burn to CD if I need to take it in the car. Alternatively, I can hook the iPod directly to the car stereo. This will suit me just fine until all the music people figure out what they want to do with cloud music.
KSH
@Emma: Heh, that’s exactly what I did… then I sold all the CDs to a used store :)
Jay in Oregon
@cleek:
There’s also the fact that cloud services can actually fail…
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/7/amazon-s-s3-storage-outage-felt-everywhere-even-my-iphone
cleek
@bs23:
hey. you’re right!
i should really read more closely.
Paul in KY
I have an iPod Shuffle (4 gig) with about 790 killer tunes on it. These tunes are all from my collection of 650 CDs that I have uploaded to my sister’s PC. I think I have uploaded somewhere North of 6,000 songs. That is a whole lot of uploading time.
I am a fossil, I guess when it comes to how I get my music.
Love the iPod though.
Paul in KY
@lonesomerobot: I have ridden in a car with a turntable. Any significant bump caused needle to skip. Plus, it is bulky.
MikeB
@burnspbesq: I agree, as a professional
musician and owner of a small recording studio, I find it difficult to
listen the the “swiss cheese” audio quality of MP3’s for any length of time.
A CD audio file is roughly 10 times larger than an MP3, however.
It’s true that most people can’t tell the difference, and listen to
music on cheap speakers or earbuds anyway, so downloadable music
is here to stay.
SectarianSofa
@MikeB:
Can you not upload flac or wav files?
@Whoever else — this is an attempt to chip away at Apple’s dominant position with itunes as an one-stop digital store and storage shop. A foothold in this area is a blow to the Apple ‘itunes for everything’ model that’s generates cash flow for them above and beyond their high-priced hardware.
Anyway, what kind of bandwidth are you people suffering from? Unless you’re using dial-up technology from 1985, I don’t see that this is a real obstacle.
The ‘cloud’ is just a marketing term for various kinds of distributed storage and data transfer plans (many of which have existed for years). If you’re Microsoft, it’s a way to make licensing money ; if you’re Amazon, Google, etc., it’s just buy-in to what will probably be an increasingly large market.
SectarianSofa
@Jay in Oregon:
“There’s also the fact that cloud services can actually fail…”
Yes, and so do local storage devices. Using both cloud-based and local-only storage or services seems to be the best way to go. I like the redundancy, since hard drives and network cables can get cut at home or at a remote location.
chris
Two links to the same master each allow us to literally access the exact files we separately uploaded, do they not?
Technically yes, but legally maybe. If Google refused to store a second copy of Bob’s file but replaced it with a pointer to Alice’s identical file, then whenever Bob wants to use “his” file Google is actually making a *copy* of Alice’s file to send to him, and that might be a copyright violation. At least, it would take a lot of lawyers a lot of money to argue it isn’t. And data storage is way cheaper than lawyers.
Can you not hear the difference between mp3 and higher-resolution digital formats?
Depending on the speakers and ambient noise, usually no. And there’s a *lot* of emperor’s clothes in audiophilia, so I’d be cautious about accepting anyone’s claim that they can tell without a well-controlled ABZ test or something reasonably equivalent.
Heck, there’s probably just as many people claiming they can tell the difference between uncompressed and lossless compression. Because they’re audiophiles, not mathematicians, so don’t bother them with your stupid proof.
TheWatcher
“Telcos’ copper is so old that it will probably never support really fast upload speeds, and cable companies have been slow to roll out the technology that allows moderately fast uploads. Only fiber to the home can support fast, symmetrical Internet connections.”
That has to be the stupidest g-d technology statement on the Internet I’ve read in a while. Asymmetrical ISP service is only to make the customer buy business class ISP service instead of residential, because if you have high upload speeds, you could serve content without paying a bandwidth premium. Can’t have that in our ‘free’ market! VDSL has very high symmetrical speeds depending on distance. But then you wouldn’t need to pay for ‘business’ class service, would you? Can’t have any of that EVIL ‘soshulism!
MikeB
Sectarian Sofa: wav and aiff files are uncompressed and large, these are
the audio files used in studios and on CD’s. The FLAC would be about
60% of the size of a wav, while an MP3 is 1/10th the size (roughly).
I store some uncompressed CD files on my hard disk for various reasons, and
they take up a lot of room. I guess for cloud purposes the FLAC would be
a good compromise in terms of storage space/sound quality.
Here’s a good primer on various digital audio formats:
http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd