Until today, I hadn’t taken CloudPlay too seriously. I tended to view it as a poor substitute for integration of the established streaming services. This afternoon though, I decided to give it a try and have been very pleasantly surprised. As a Jazz fan I’m finding the quality of the selections from contributors, coupled with the lossless flac files, quite compelling.
Keeping always in mind the need to stay legal; it’s my understaning that uploads of complete Albums/Artists are off the table; fair enough. With that in mind though, I see enormous further potential in CloudPlay.
Here are a couple of ideas I’d like to see implemented to make CloudPlay even better.
1/ As this feature consists of selections from users own music library, I’m sure there must be many “out of print” selections out there, and selections that may still be available for purchase on physical media; but not available on any other streaming service. I would like users who upload their playlists to be able to flag these in some way. Perhaps “Out of Print” and/or “Available only from CloudPlay” could be added as new categories. In some cases “Out of Print” albums might not be subject to the same legal contraints, so could perhaps be uploaded in their entirety?
2/ How about Vinyl rips? Again some real gems could be uploaded which are not to be found anywhere else. Such uploads should include as much detail as possible as to how the vinyl was ripped, and the equipment used. Vinyl rips should be a separate category.
3/ There was a post asking about the possibility of Multi-Channel DSD on CloudPlay and I understand why that would not be technically possible at this time. Multi-Channel flac though, could surely be possible. These should be placed in a seperate category as more technically demanding for streaming. Once streamed though, J River could easily handle any down-mixing for users who don’t have the necessary multi-channel support. This may seem like a niche; but with Apple’s push for Spatial Audio and a growing library in Dolby Atmos, as well as Tidal’s support for Sony’s 360 Reality format; Amazon music; etc. this is quickly growing beyond a niche. Qobuz have 20 or so albums in full 5.1 Multi-channel and streaming as high as 192khz on all 6 channels. I believe support for Multi-channel/Quadraphonic flac streams on Cloudplay would be a terrific addition.
Cloud sourced music has enormous potential and the way I see it, we’re just at the beginning!
