I’ve been twittering a lot over the past few years but I miss writing in complete sentences and paragraphs. Time to get back on the horse I think.

So yeah, the past few days I’ve been playing around with various music-streaming services that have iPhone apps. It sure is a whole new world compared to the old days of Live365 and Launchcast… now it’s all about music recommendation, and prediction of what you’ll like. I know Pandora‘s been around awhile but I hadn’t played with it much until now… pretty sweet. IMEEM is nice too, though maybe not quite as user-friendly. There are so many others out there… but it’s not that easy to teach a machine about the preferences of somebody as finicky as me. And I can’t invest that much time on multiple sites; I want to pick a good one and stay there. Which ones do y’all like?

I think my ultimate goal would be to keep all my digital music in the cloud, including podcasts… like an iTunes on the web. I’ll deal with backups, but please keep these one bazillion MP3s safe for me and available for streaming anytime through my iPhone or my computer. Keep my original versions if they’re unique to the network, let me decide whether or not to share tracks, and let me tweak my ID3 tags the way I want. Let me hear my podcasts and keep track of which ones I need to catch up on. I’m sure some of this is doable now, but not on any one site. And which company would I trust with all that data? Sure wish Google would stick their finger in that pie! It’s a service I would gladly pay for (within reason) if I could count on my data being safeguarded for many years to come.

At least I’m listening to music again. What a concept.