Rumour Mill - Apple’s cloud player will have instant streaming

Powered by unicorn dust and leprechaun magic, Apple’s patents for a new method of song caching looks set to change the future of music streaming.

Granted, the mythical creature part is likely to be untrue, but there’s no denying that the proposed method is innovative. Instead of storing entire songs on your iPhone, you will instead only have the first 5 seconds saved locally.

As the first 5 seconds is played, some fancy software will scan the song, send out a request to servers which have the song remotely stored and finally start streaming. The process should be fast enough that there is no gap between the first 5 seconds and the streamed song.

What’s the point we hear you cry? Well, you could nuke off entire GBs of storage space on your device by only having the first few seconds of songs stored locally. As for the remote server, this is likely to be either your own iTunes music library or Apple’s own (now licensed) music store.

via Apple Insider