Nelis van Nahuijs has a fascinating question about switching—not from or to an Apple platform, but from a Mac to an iPad.
My daily use is reading several digital newspapers, listening to music from my iTunes Library, watching television, and reading books in iBooks. I write rather often in Pages and Scrivener. Occasionally, I watch movies and series in Netflix.
But the fly in the ointment is their extensive music library, which currently resides on an external drive, and they still purchase and rip CDs to add to it.
I’ve been puzzling through this, and it seems like a computer will still be needed to prep and upload music files, though not to listen to them—as long as you don’t choose iCloud Music Library to store the files.
Amazon Music is probably the best choice. With a Prime membership, you can upload unlimited photos, and up to 5GB of other files, including music. With an Amazon Drive subscription, at $60 a year, you have unlimited file uploads of all kinds. This music can then be streamed or cached in the Amazon Music app for iOS (and on several other platforms).
However, you still have to upload the music, and there’s no iOS option for that. You need a Mac or Windows PC and Amazon Music software (which is free). Conceivably, with an external USB CD/DVD drive and an external disk drive, you could lean on a friend now and again to rip disks and upload to your account.
Because Amazon Drive offers unlimited storage, you can also use this for online backups, paired with software like Arq, which can use it just like any other backup destination.
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Author: Glenn Fleishman, Senior Contributor
Glenn Fleishman’s most recent books include Take Control of iOS and iPadOS Privacy and Security, Take Control of Calendar and Reminders, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac. In his spare time, he writes about printing and type history. He’s a senior contributor to Macworld, where he writes Mac 911.