The designers (and marketers, let's face it) of audio/video receivers seem to be forever to be on the lookout for a new blade they can add to this Swiss Army Knife of the home theater realm. And in an industry where consumers are being increasingly encouraged to store their content remotely in The Cloud, Onkyo has come up with quite a handy feature, in partnership with music service provider MP3tunes, which will be added to the company's 2012-model network-capable AVRs.
Onkyo will reportedly be the first brand to incorporate access to the MP3tunes.com music Locker in its network operating system. With this feature, MP3tunes subscribers will be able to use a network-connected Onkyo receiver to play personal music collections stored their MP3tunes Lockers, as the company refers to their Cloud-based music servers.
MP3tunes allows subscribers to maintain up to two gigabytes (about 400 songs, assuming that they're not all " "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" ripped at 320kbps) for free, with the option of fee-supported accounts starting at $39.95 per year for a healthy 50GB (approximately 10,000 songs).
Onkyo's National Marketing and Product Planning Manager, Paul Wasek, certainly sees the benefit: "MP3tunes Locker is an easy and secure means to maintain this data, while providing easy access through an Onkyo receiver, computer, smart phone, or any of the many network capable devices that support MP3tunes."
MP3Tunes support will arrive as a standard feature on new Onkyo network receivers beginning on models coming in the first quarter of this year. Details should be forthcoming.
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