Earlier this year Apple announced iTunes Match alongside its iCloud offering.
iTunes Match is intended for users who have music in iTunes that was not purchased from the iTunes store.
iTunes Match allows you to store up to 25,000 songs from your collection.
(This limit does not include songs purchased from the iTunes Store.)
Setting up iTunes Match
Setting up iTunes Match was a breeze since nearly everything is automatic.
This page will explain the service and provide you with a link to purchase the annual subscription.
Once you sign up, iTunes will scan your music library and gather data about your collection.
Amazingly, 19,651 of my tracks were matched!
The final step in the process was to upload the remaining tracks that could not be matched.
This took a few hours on my good (30/5 Mbps) internet connection.
Any new music that you add to iTunes in the future will be automatically processed and added to iCloud.
For songs that are listed as matched, these songs will be available as a 256 kbps AAC track.
This is fantastic for those old 128 kbps albums you might have in your library from the 90s.
This seems like a fair trade-off to me.
You will see a cloud icon next to albums that are in iCloud but not yet on your equipment.
To listen to a song, just tap the song and it will begin to download to your phone.
Once part of the song is downloaded, you will be able to start listening to it.
Anything that you listen to will be downloaded and saved on the gear.
Practically speaking, this makes sense since downloading over 3G uses a lot of data and can be slow.
Overall, I am less impressed with the iOS portion of iTunes Match.
Hopefully these performance issues will be resolved in a future update.
iTunes Match is currently beta software, so some issues like this are expected.
Despite these issues, there are definitely many bright spots.
Wrap Up
I’m extremely impressed with iTunes Match so far.
The benefits on the desktop are astounding and the iOS support looks promising.
I don’t see why anyone would pass this up.
