Patently Apple today reveals a patent filed all the way back in 2009 that relates to Cloud music streaming with iTunes. Calling the service “seamless and invisible to the user,” Apple details how the service picks the location to retrive data whether it is local or stored on a server.
So, that means Apple could decide to store the beginning of a song, for instance, locally while choosing to store the rest of the song in the Cloud. To the user, the song just plays instantly, but iTunes is saving local space by caching only a fraction of the song locally.
Another interesting passage:
The media items owned or accessible by a user could be stored in a user’s media library. The media library could be stored on any suitable device, including for example on a host device, on a remotely accessed server, in a cloud, or in any other suitable location. The user could store at least some media items of the library on an electronic device so that the user could locally play back the media items. The electronic device could include communications circuitry for remotely connecting to the media library and stream media items to the user’s device.
More at Patently Apple
