Another WWDC, another breathtaking array of new offering Cupertino. One of the big reveals was iCloud, Apple's upcoming cloud-based storage service. iCloud will let you more conveniently access your music from any of your devices, whether they're iOS, Mac or even PC. Music you've purchased from iTunes in the past will automatically be available to you online, but by default, your other music won't be. If you want it to be, you're going to need to subscribe to iTunes Match. This is a service that scans your iTunes library, and makes your non-iTunes-store songs available to you everywhere. The cost of sweet portability? $24.99 a year.
If you want to use iTunes Match, you'll need to get ready for iTunes Match. So how do you do that?
Double-check that all of your CDs have been ripped to iTunes. Sure, you'll be able to add music to it whenever you want, but what else do you have to do while waiting for iTunes Match to be released?
We live a life of email and hard drives, and as such, we often have files that get isolated on drives we forget about. Check on your computer, and through all of the hard drives or discs you can find, to get your hands on songs you forgot you totally purchased 100% legitimately. It's like musical pennies from heaven!
Maintaining a nice, clean music library is a time-consuming tasks, and it's true that many of us don't do it. It's also true that many of us have old music files that came to us -- however formally or not -- with bad metadata, or bad filenames. When iTunes Match scans your library, it's going to probably use the metadata to determine which songs you have. So while you might know that “Track 03” is really a copy of “Down on the Bayou”, iTunes will have no idea. Do yourself a favour and tidy up your files. If you don't want to manually go through your entire library, you can use a tool like TuneUp, which makes your metadata proper, automagically.
Once you've got all your music loaded into iTunes, and arranged just so, the only thing left to do is wait for iTunes Match to arrive at your front door, making your life complete.
frankly
June 10, 2011 at 2:09pm
Is iTunes Music Match available now if you're a developer and download iTunes 10.5 or do developers have to wait until fall like everyone else?
intellax
June 10, 2011 at 9:54am
Can you clear some things up about iTunes Match, if you're able?
1. This is not a streaming service, correct? Unlike LaLa, the technology behind the scan and match part, you have to actually download the track to your iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac or PC to play it?
2. Is there any meta-data preservation once it's uploaded? Specifically, does it preserve ratings, comments, etc...?
3. How does device management co-exist with this? Specifically, if I download a song to my iPhone that I already have on my computer, does it disappear from the phone the next time I sync or does it stay? I see storage on device becoming an issue, which is ironic because this is a "cloud" service...
Thanks!
valbcrawford
June 10, 2011 at 2:32pm
I agree intellax. Hopefully, once we get the actual service, it will stream and not require downloading in order to play it on the device like the beta currently does. You definitely can't rock a party if your playlist is too big to download. :-)
ilikeimac
June 10, 2011 at 11:14am
Great questions, I was about to ask some of the same things. Does this mean I can access all my music from iTunes on any device, even if it doesn't have enough storage to hold my library? Does it also sync my playlists? Is there a web-based player?
I guess for people who go "PC free" it provides a backup of their music, so that's nice.
But if all my music is on all my devices, and I use iCloud/Wifi syncing to move new purchases to all of them, then this service only buys me (1) unlocked copies of my DRM'd music and (2) higher quality copies of any songs I have that are available in iTunes.
cdnair
June 10, 2011 at 9:48am
Knowing Apple, I have a feeling that this may be a dumb question, but if I paid for this service and had all of my non iTMS music upgraded, so long as I never acquire music from non-iTunes sources ever again, would I only have to subscribe for a year? Not that $25 is a major expense, even on my pathetic salary, but I'm just wondering if I have to subscribe for the rest of my life..
Ray Aguilera
June 10, 2011 at 10:37am
At this point, the details are still sketchy, but my understanding is that once you download the upgraded tracks, they're yours. You wouldn't be able to re-download once your subscription is up, though. Hopefully Apple will be filling us in on more details soon. Stay tuned.
