iTunes Match has finally arrived, a bit tardier than iOS 5 and iCloud released earlier this month, but none the worse for wear. Whether or not you’ve pulled the trigger on the $24.99 per year subscription service -- or are about to -- it might be helpful to know that Apple’s latest cloud-based offering isn’t for everyone. Here’s a look at some ways Apple could make it even better.

Tech companies often get carried away making their products sound so amazing, they’re almost hard to believe. Apple is certainly guilty of such behavior, whether it’s true or not -- and many times, what Cupertino delivers is usually a bit more down to Earth than what the keynotes and publicity might have you believe. (Hey, they’re only human.)

Take, for instance, iTunes Match, the company’s latest offering which promises to scan and match your music library to ease the pain of putting it in the cloud. While the annual subscription service mostly does what it promises, there’s so much more potential that we simply had to sit down and dream up a list of things Cupertino might do to make it even better.

Streaming

When iTunes Match was first unleashed upon developers over the summer, rumors began circulating that the service actually streamed music from the cloud, rather than downloading it as initially promised. While that made iTunes Match infinitely more interesting to many of us who weren’t looking to store a bunch of tracks on our iOS devices, the reality was something else -- it’s more of a download buffer than a stream.

A bummer to be sure, but streaming our iTunes music library remains at the top of the wish list. Sure, we have plenty of other options for streaming music including Spotify, Rdio, MOG and others, but those require yet another subscription and at $10 per month, they’re definitely pricier than iTunes Match at $24.99 per year. Give us the option to stream tracks instead of downloading them, and we can see a lot more folks signing up.

Don’t Make Us Work for It

Apple generally makes life easier for users, but in the case of iTunes Match, there’s likely to be some level of confusion. After turning on the service and getting a scan and match started, iTunes Match then uploads any music it couldn’t match. So how can you tell what was matched and what was uploaded?

Thankfully, there's a new offering called "iCloud Status" under View Options (Command-J) menu which shows detailed information about which tracks are Matched, Uploaded, Purchased, Duplicate or Not Eligible. As shown above, users can also view the Summary tab of a given track to see if a track was matched. It's an improvement over the developer betas, but we think Apple could still improve on these features and make us do a little less detective work to get those 256Kbps AAC DRM-free versions of our tracks.

Scan and Match Feedback

In a typically Apple decision, iTunes Match subscribers are also kept in the dark when it comes to the actual scan and match process itself. Other than a count of how many tracks get matched just before the remainder are uploaded, users don’t have a clue about which tracks and albums were matched -- including whether or not your music is even being matched to the correct data in the first place.

We’d like to see some confirmation as the scan and match is happening, or at least have iTunes throw up a few choices when it’s confused about which album certain tracks belong to -- including the option to manually match tracks or albums in the iTunes Store so we don’t have to upload a bunch of stuff that already lives in Apple’s cloud.

It Shouldn’t Be All or Nothing

Perhaps the greatest initial disappointment with iTunes Match is the realization that it’s an all or nothing proposition -- once you enable it on your iOS device, it wipes any music you have already synced, leaving you with a blank canvas and potentially a whole lot of time downloading to get things back to normal.

We can’t really think of a technical reason why this might be -- after all, the desktop iTunes appears to have no such limitation, and as outlined above, you’re actually forced to manually delete music files after turning on iTunes Match if you want to pull down those sweet bits of 256Kbps AAC DRM-free music nectar. Ideally, switching on iTunes Match would keep music synched via iTunes right where it is, but allow us to see the rest of our music library and download those remaining tracks at our convenience.

Too Many Tracks? No iTunes Match For You!

We thought we had a pretty sizeable music collection in iTunes with nearly 7,000 tracks until we started seeing developers complain that iTunes Match wouldn’t give them any satisfaction because they had more than 25,000 tracks. 25,000 tracks!! That seems like a crazy amount, but in reality many hardcore music lovers probably have that and more. (Some developers have claimed the cutoff point is more like 29,000 tracks, so your mileage may vary.)

So what’s behind Apple limiting iTunes Match to less than 25k tracks? Beats us. Cloud storage and bandwidth are certainly valid reasons, particularly during the fragile beta period for developers over the summer. But just imagine how crazy that could get now that the service is live. It’s a bummer, but here’s hoping Apple will sing a different tune (get it?) now that the service has officially launched to all.

Stop Making Smart Playlists So Dumb

At first we thought it was iOS 5’s new Music app throwing a monkey wrench into things, but using iTunes Match on a second Mac made us realize the new service may need to take a bite off the ol’ blame sandwich as well. The problem is, manually organized Smart Playlists appear to be completely ignored -- instead, tracks will appear on your other computers and iOS 5 devices in a random order. This makes us sad.

This particular bug appears to exist when “Live updating” is checked on the Smart Playlist(s) in question -- for example, a playlist we’ve created for recent favorites that we listen to frequently, based on how many stars we’ve given tracks in the Ratings column. For whatever reason, our main iTunes library stays just the way we like it, but every other device appears helter skelter. We won’t blame this one all on iTunes Match, but it’s certainly not helping matters.

So how is iTunes Match working out for you, dear MacLife.com reader? Sound off in the comments if you think that hard-earned $24.99 per year was well spent -- or a complete waste of dough.

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