Elastic Threads has written an interesting post about the way Apple is slowly changing the way iTunes handles music synchronization between desktop computers and iPhone OS:

“What I’ve noticed with the OS 4 betas is that when I delete a track from my iPod Touch, it merely gets hidden from the Music app. I’m sure that if I changed enough data on my iPod that the actual blocks of memory in my iPod got written over, then the mp3 would be lost and to get the song back on my iPod, then iTunes would have to re-copy the mp3.

Instead, what happens is that if you delete a song, and then later have iTunes add that song back to your iDevice, it checks first to see if that song is actually still on your device’s SSD (just invisible to the Music app), and, if its still there it just un-deletes the track. Much faster. When I upgraded my iPod to OS 4 beta 4 and it deleted the 4,000 tracks that were currently on my iPod, it only took between an hour to two hours to sync all 30 GB of data back to my iPod; in OS 3 it took a whole night.”

We don’t know whether this is just a small change to optimize the sync process or a first step towards a real cloud sync, but sure Apple is thinking about it, now that Google has announced OTA music sync for Android and Lala has been shut down this morning. We just have to wait.