Off the top of my head: You tie your data to one provider instead of simply physical media, you lose discoverability (will your kids browse your album choices 30 years from now?), exporting/importing quality is at the mercy of the provider (for example Amazon dropped several dozen mp3s when I migrated a few gigs to Google), and of course you place your data at the mercy of a business, (is any tech company eternal and/or always interested in providing cloud services?)
The cloud is way overdone, after giving a variety of services a go over the last few years, I'm actually pulling back.
I'm also an Rdio and Netflix subscriber, but running Plex on my server allows me to 'roll my own Netflix' and stream movies and music to my iPad or other computers, or even from my server to any computer in the web browser. I'm happy.
Edit: Rebooted phone and it works now. Holy shit this is cool, and I can even share my media library with friends!
i just have an apache serving all my videos and a bookmark on any device browser. click and play. for android i use mx player.
Before you ask - yes I used to be running xbmc, minidlna, etc. previously. No, they are nowhere as good (actually, to rephrase, the client-server model is not xbmc's focus, which is completely wrong IMHO).
https://github.com/ampache/ampache
https://web.archive.org/web/20130302160313/http://ampache.or...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130306044144/http://ampache.or...
Within the last year the project ditched their website in favor of just using github. However, strangely they didn't migrate any the content from their website to it.
That used to be the case, but the newer versions actually phone home and verify the license.
Ugh.. lost me. I don't run Java anything anymore.
As a JavaEE architect/developer, I whole-heartedly agree that you shouldn't run Applets in your browser anymore. In fact, unsigned applets will no longer run after January of 2014, which will break a lot of the banking infrastructure and a couple important client applications at my day job.
Java may not be amazing, but it's hardly "so bad I literally won't ever use it."
Who cares if he still uses some website that is build on servlets server side, or if his tv/car/fridge has a Java running CPU? That's totally besides the point.
Java is not "everywhere". In fact it's getting nowhere fast (including it's use on microcontrollers and devices). The only exception is server side, where it's also not what it used to be these days...
There's no reason that The Cloud and Owning Your Files has to be a binary choice. The Cloud can be a great compliment to your local file storage, rather than a replacement for it.
Another example: store your music in Dropbox, which clones it to all your devices (where applicable), and then use Tunebox (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tunebox-dropbox-music-player...) as your frontend. Now you have a 'cloud' music service where you control the content, someone else handles the distribution, and everything is cloned locally on all your machines (for your other players to use). Then you can trivially back up your music files from Dropbox to a local backup (or a third-party backup service if all you want is some form of company-independent redundancy.
[1]: http://owncloud.org
Also with music, I point blank refuse to let music turn into a subscription based service. I still buy CDs when something agrees with my ears and listen to them.
I also quite happily transcribe things to sheet music and play it breaking many a royalty and public performance law. Fuck 'em.
There are plenty of us CD buyers left :). We're just not as noisy.
physical media has enormous problems for anything besides long term archival use.
I'm also glad my music is on physical media every time I don't have to pay insane rates for a couple hours of wifi on a flight just to listen to my music, or when I'm killing time somewhere where cell service is spotty at best.
I don't yet live in the future where access to the cloud is a given, and I prefer my devices don't become completely useless without a data connection.
Edit: My primary physical media isn't a pile of CDs—I have plenty of those too, but stopped carrying them the moment I got an MP3 player. Now I carry almost my entire collection on my phone and a whole lot more than that on my laptop. I see nothing wrong with having copies of things in the cloud (remote backup FTW), but I'm not about to take a shotgun to my local disks.
for those of us that consider music as art that is precisely the point, especially re: children browsing their parents collections
