Don’t you hate it when you want to play a particular song on your phone and realize that the MP3 file is stored on your computer’s hard drive? Managing a large media library becomes really difficult, when you have multiple devices such as a desktop PC, a MAC, an Android phone, an iPad or tablets. How do you keep your music files in sync and access any file from any device at any given moment? How do you make sure that your entire media library can be accessed from the internet, without you having to manually upload and sync all those Mp3 albums over and over again?

There is only one answer to all these questions – The Internet.

Cloud storage services (Dropbox, Amazon cloud drive) allow you to store music on a remove server for you to access from anywhere from a web based interface. Many websites offer an overview of cloud services, such as Justcloud Review, which discuss the benefits of using the internet to store your music library.

But before you really use (or pay) for a cloud storage service, here are the most important reasons why you should store your music and media library in the cloud:

Syncing:  Using a cloud service lets you sync your music from one computer to another. This eliminates the use of flash drives and CDs to transfer files back and forth. You get access to your music files on your laptop, desktop and smart phone all using one cloud service. Never again will your favorite song be on your desktop computer when you want to listen to it in your car.

Backup: When you save music to your cloud storage account, you create a backup of the file from your computer. This saves your music files from accidental deletion and corruption. If your laptop crashes, you still have your music in the cloud and can download it back when you repair your laptop.

Sharing: Your cloud account is available from every computer that has an Internet connection. Cloud services are excellent ways to share music with friends, family and friends on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter. Next time you go to a party, you can share that new song you found with your friends and family.

Access From Everywhere: Not only can you sync music and back those up to your cloud but you have access to them from any computer with an Internet connection. Now, using cloud services, your music files are available to you from your smart phone, tablet, laptop and desktop or any computer with Internet.

Save Space: Don’t have much hard drive space? Music files take up quite a bit of space on your hard drive particularly the space on smaller hard drives such as smart phones and tablets. Saving these files to the cloud frees up much need hard drive space giving you more room on your computer and continuous access to your music files in the cloud.

Cloud programs are slowly eliminating the need to use flash drives on Internet connected computers. They allow continuous syncing and sharing of your files with your network and friends. There really is no reason not to use cloud services to store your media files.

Choosing the right cloud storage service for storing your entire media library depends mainly on two factors:

• The size of your media library – how many songs you want to store and access from the cloud?
• Accessibility options – will you be using the cloud storage space for only backup? Or will you use it to sync those songs or live stream it on various devices? If its the first case, you won’t have to spend a dime, just create a Windows Live Skydrive account and store files up to 25 GB, absolutely free of cost.  On the other hand, if you want to have the ability to stream those songs on your iPad or Android device, Windows Live Skydrive won’t help. In that case, you have to opt in for a dedicated cloud music manager service e.g Amazon cloud drive, Google Music, Spotify and so forth.

Whitson Gordon gives an excellent rundown of all the popular cloud services that support music streaming. Here is the comparison chart:

The most important thing – you must have access to a really fast data plan on mobile or otherwise, all these efforts won’t bear fruit. If your mobile’s internet connection is really slow and sluggish, you won’t be able to randomly stream tracks from your cloud storage provider. It would be better to test the speed of your mobile’s internet speed first and then take a decision.