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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Google as a monopoly, Nikola vs Tesla, BestBuy’s Gamers Club membership not accepting new members, a cryptocurrency replaces the dollar, a Google Home update to enable touchtones, and more.
Our guest this hour:
Matt in Tyler, Texas listens on 97.5 FM KTBB and asked: “We have a lot of digital music on an iMac that we purchased in 2006 that it no longer being used. We are having trouble transferring it or using it on another device that is more current. We actually have a set of backup CDs, but they don’t seem to work. How can we go about getting all that music from that iMac, that we either bought from iTunes or loaded from CDs that we had purchased onto a modern device?”
Matt, the music you bought on iTunes is likely downloadable by any device that can access iTunes, that means a phone or a modern computer, even an Apple TV can play it, but you mentioned that some of it came from CDs too, so we’ll give you a more generic solution.
Assuming your old iMac still works, you can get it and upload it to a myriad of services that will let you play it on other devices. Amazon recently discontinued their music storage services, but other services like Google Music will let you store plenty of music for free. Assuming you have 50,000 or less, Google won’t charge you to keep your music on their servers and you can stream them and download them into most modern devices.
If you’re no fan of Google, pCloud will allow you to store up to 20GB worth of music for free and play it back.
Then there are the paid services
Then there are the paid services on top of that, we’ll skip over the ones that offer storage because… do you really have a library of more than 50,000 songs? You probably don’t need the paid storage ones, but services like Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, and Google Music will charge you a monthly fee that is usually in the neighborhood of $10 and let you stream just about any song ever recorded on just about any device. If you’re willing to pay, you can recover your collection and much more.
If you just want to move those files to a newer computer, just a phone or similar mobile device, you can just plug in an external storage device and copy them onto a new computer that way, that’ll cost you the price of a flash drive, which by now should be close to nothing.
Joe in Durham, North Carolina listens on WPTF 680 AM and asked: “I subscribe to Hulu, Amazon Prime and Netflix. Yet so far, I have not seen three movies (The Great Wall, Life, and Kong of Skull Island.) on any of these services. Yet I know they are playing on networks like HBO and Showtime. I don’t know why they haven’t shown up on any of the services that I have.”
Joe, those movies haven’t shown up on any of the streaming services you have because they just don’t have the licenses to play the content.
Content owners and streaming services negotiate contracts to stream movies and music, when those contracts expire they negotiate new ones, lose some shows, movies, and albums and gain others. Streaming platforms are not equal to each other, different ones have different content.
If you want to wait around long enough they may or may not make it to the streaming services you already have, if you don’t want to wait, you can rent them from another service like Google Movies or iTunes, or pay for a HBO Now or Showtime Anytime.
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