Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider, “Apple’s anticipated cloud-based music streaming service could could offer faster playback of Internet-stored content by syncing just small snippets of songs via iTunes.”
“The details were revealed this week in a new patent application published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and discovered by AppleInsider. Entitled ‘Local Storage of a Portion of Streamed Media Items,’ it describes a device like an iPhone having pieces of songs synced to it via iTunes,” Hughes reports. “Using this method, users could dramatically reduce the amount of storage used by their music library on their mobile device. Segments of the song would be stored locally, and the iOS software would fill in the gaps by obtaining the rest of the track from a file stored in the cloud.”
Hughes reports, “The application suggests that the remotely stored content could be a user’s own library, which they have streamed from a home computer or a remote server. Or, it could be streamed from a large ‘content source,’ such as the iTunes Music Store.”
Read more in the full article here.