Accounts etc

[Bill]

I don't mind that- I'm comfortably within my allowance

That has changed... this may be useful to other iTunes users:

I recently moved my iTunes library to a bigger (external) HDD. Last night I discovered that (presumably during that move) much of what I'd bought from the iTunes store hadn't been copied over and was simply noted as being available in iCloud.

I haven't "lost" it of course, but I want it on my hard drive, not on some remote server that may or may not not be available when I want to watch it

There's an option to download stuff from iCloud so I'll be doing that, but there's 150GB of it

I found for a few items that it had copied it to the new drive and showed a separate mention of it as available in iCloud. I eventually realised that this was on items where I'd changed the genre... I suppose it thought that it was a different item that happened to have the same name. I can't be 100% certain (because some of the uncopied items also  seemed to meet that criterion) but this may be a way of preventing it happening if I ever need to move the library again.

It does have a "plus" aspect- all the HD stuff was in 720p as that was the only option available at the time. Now I've changed my default in prefs the downloaded version is 1080p (where available) 

[Steve]

The iCloud option is obviously useful with devices with more limited storage ie ATV, iPhone and iPad where a one off download, watch- listen and then delete is more applicable.

[Bill]

Yes, I agree.

But I've now got a total of 5TB attached to this 'ere iMac (thank you, Amazon Black Friday deals ), so drive space isn't a problem.

It would have been nice to have been asked... OTOH, this is Apple we're talking about- they know what's best for me 

[Steve]

I do keep my music library on HDD, which is then available via iCloud or Home share.

[Bill]

Yes, I use Home Share as well.

Having had a play with iTunes on the MacBook it seems that if an item is available on the local HDD it will use that (and doesn't even show the iCloud version), otherwise it will show the iCloud one. If I don't want to hit my download allowance I can attach to the iMac's shared library (assuming I'm within wireless range) and play from the copy stored on its HDD.

I'm happy with the principle of it, I'm just a bit grumpy about not having been asked when I moved the library, thus resulting in having to download a lot (150% of my monthly allowance) of files again...


edit- I can only hope that RSS usage feed doesn't go down again, I shall be paying very close attention to that for a couple of months!!!