Have you been able to register for iTunes Match? What do you think of it, so far? Has it lived up to your expectations? What sorts of use cases do you see with it?
I'm thinking of trying it out tonight when I get home (and can hook up my full library of ~20K songs).
Discussion about
iTunes Match is now out! Share your impressions.
There are a couple of reasons why I like iTunes Match:
- Consistent iTunes library on multiple computers. With iTunes Match, any music I download onto my home computer instantly appears on my work computer. I no longer have to worry about manually adding new tracks to the iTunes library on all my machines; wherever I open iTunes, all of my music is there.
- Free upgrade to 256 kbps tracks. I have about 8,000 songs in my library and 2,500 of them had a bitrate lower than 256 kbps; mostly 192 and 128, though a few of them were 96 kbps files and they sounded pretty terrible. But iTunes matched them all, so I just deleted my local copies and redownloaded them from the cloud. For any matched tracks, iTunes will redownload a DRM-free 256 kbps copy from the iTunes Store, so they're yours to keep even when your iTunes Match subscription expires.
How did you get it to work with multiple computers? I have synced my iMac to iTunes Match, but now when I'm on my MacBook Air and trying to access iTunes Match, it's saying that it can only be associated with one library, and that I'll have to erase my current iTunes Match Library...
I figured it out. I had to restart the iTunes on my MacBook Air with a new library by first quitting iTunes, then restarting iTunes, immediately holding down option, then selecting Create New Library. Once I had created a new library, when I went to activate iTunes Match it no longer said anything about uploading the music from the MacBook Air, but rather just started syncing with the current iTunes Match library from the iMac at home.
I tried it during the beta about a month ago, and what I didn't realize is when I turned on iTunes match on my iPad (after running the iTunes match via iTunes on my Mac), it deleted all my local songs, and I had to download everything that I wanted from the cloud.
Basically I believe your music now syncs via the cloud, kinda like starting over. For me with a 64GB iPad, I bailed, I wanted my 30GB of music back without re-downloading.
I am curious to hear if it still acts the same way.
Basically I believe your music now syncs via the cloud, kinda like starting over. For me with a 64GB iPad, I bailed, I wanted my 30GB of music back without re-downloading.
I am curious to hear if it still acts the same way.
It most certainly does!
Very strange in my opinion. Everything is gone and I can't even find a way to sync from iTunes (the old way) while also using iTunes Match. On an Match-enabled iOS device the Music tab in iTunes just says "You're syncing via iCloud. Thanks for stopping by!"
So to get my 8GB or so of music back on my iPhone I have to download the files not from the MacBook sitting on my desk but from Apple's servers? What would you do if you had a bandwidth limit?
An obvious fix for the next update I'm sure.
Very strange in my opinion. Everything is gone and I can't even find a way to sync from iTunes (the old way) while also using iTunes Match. On an Match-enabled iOS device the Music tab in iTunes just says "You're syncing via iCloud. Thanks for stopping by!"
So to get my 8GB or so of music back on my iPhone I have to download the files not from the MacBook sitting on my desk but from Apple's servers? What would you do if you had a bandwidth limit?
An obvious fix for the next update I'm sure.
When activating iTunes Match on an iOS device you get a message that says
"iTunes Match will replace the music library on this device."
Tap Enable and everything is gone immediately gone.
"iTunes Match will replace the music library on this device."
Tap Enable and everything is gone immediately gone.
I love it! In its current iteration, at least on the desktop version of iTunes, it allows me to stream my music to my MacBook Air. I no longer have to keep my 50GB iTunes library on my 256GB SSD - it all streams!
It had this functionality for the first day it was out in beta, then they removed it, but it appears to be back. You don't seem to have to download a single song to listen to it. As long as it stays like that, it's totally worth the $25, in my opinion.
If iTunes Match allowed me to cache certain playlists to my mobile devices like Google Music does on Android, I would totally enable iTunes Match on my phone/iPad, but because it's all or nothing, it's not worth it for me.
It had this functionality for the first day it was out in beta, then they removed it, but it appears to be back. You don't seem to have to download a single song to listen to it. As long as it stays like that, it's totally worth the $25, in my opinion.
If iTunes Match allowed me to cache certain playlists to my mobile devices like Google Music does on Android, I would totally enable iTunes Match on my phone/iPad, but because it's all or nothing, it's not worth it for me.
I'm finding it terribly slow. Don't know if it's overwhelmed servers from all of us trying to get on, or the fact that my music is on an external HD. It took four hours+ just on Step 1 "Gathering information about your iTunes library." It's now on song 397 of 9243 songs checked during Step 2 "matching your music" and they seem to be taking over 2 minutes each! I may have to give up and try again later when the servers aren't so busy.
Follow up: It looks like iTunes Match will not be a good fit for me. I'm a musical theatre/classical/opera lover and I have multiple recordings of shows/scores and it listed many tracks as "duplicate" and didn't match them. I stopped the process before it got under way uploading the 2132 tracks of 9243, so I'm not sure if the duplicates would have uploaded. I'll wait until next month to try uploading the rest of my collection so I don't hit my data cap this month. Wonder if pop listeners will run into this with multiple covers of the same song?
I'm pretty careful to make sure the Album artists are different...Original Cast...Revival Cast...New Broadway Cast...it doesn't seem to make a difference. If iTunes has 5 different version of Gypsy available, I would think I could have access to all of them based on my CD rips...will have to investigate further....
Fired it up about 7pm EST yesterday, got through steps 1 and 2 in a couple of hours, it's now 6:15am the next day, and of the 1321 unmatched songs it has uploaded 600 songs.. not too shabby.. Maybe it will be done by this evening. I think that is a decent service for 7200 songs
We'll see how much hassle it becomes when I start organizing music from the cloud on my iPhone and iPad..
Google Music took me over a month to upload my library... and it is not a good experience on any of my IOS devices.. and even on the Google TV bluray box, it sucks when trying to access Google Music...
I am looking forward to upgrading those 192 kps songs in my library to 256 kps, and having all my music everywhere..
We'll see how much hassle it becomes when I start organizing music from the cloud on my iPhone and iPad..
Google Music took me over a month to upload my library... and it is not a good experience on any of my IOS devices.. and even on the Google TV bluray box, it sucks when trying to access Google Music...
I am looking forward to upgrading those 192 kps songs in my library to 256 kps, and having all my music everywhere..
Follow up,
Well the scan, match and upload was pretty painless, and it was a pleasant surprise to find out my entire library is streamable to my AppleTV 2 from the cloud now
And I am upgrading over 5000 songs that were ripped at less than 256kbps and matched by apple.. Using this :-
www.macworld.com/article/163620/2011/11/how_to_upg...
However, it is annoying and slow.. To re-organize my music on the iPhone and iPad by being forced to download it again from my library in the cloud...
And who knows how long it will take to re-download all those matched tracks (5000+) to my laptop..?
Once my music is in order on my phone, I will be happy, I listen to most of my music on that and the apple tv in the living room.. And occasionally on my iPad
I will just keep on downloading the matched stuff, and eventually it will be done... Bit like my experience with Google Music. But in reverse.. I am waiting for all my music to be downloaded instead of uploaded
All in all.. I am pretty happy, I have access to all of my music everywhere, and I will have upgraded 5000 of 7000 tracks to 256kbps... Well worth $25 in my opinion
Well the scan, match and upload was pretty painless, and it was a pleasant surprise to find out my entire library is streamable to my AppleTV 2 from the cloud now
And I am upgrading over 5000 songs that were ripped at less than 256kbps and matched by apple.. Using this :-
www.macworld.com/article/163620/2011/11/how_to_upg...
However, it is annoying and slow.. To re-organize my music on the iPhone and iPad by being forced to download it again from my library in the cloud...
And who knows how long it will take to re-download all those matched tracks (5000+) to my laptop..?
Once my music is in order on my phone, I will be happy, I listen to most of my music on that and the apple tv in the living room.. And occasionally on my iPad
I will just keep on downloading the matched stuff, and eventually it will be done... Bit like my experience with Google Music. But in reverse.. I am waiting for all my music to be downloaded instead of uploaded
All in all.. I am pretty happy, I have access to all of my music everywhere, and I will have upgraded 5000 of 7000 tracks to 256kbps... Well worth $25 in my opinion
It's not working for me at all. Getting a '4001' error every time i try to sync.
Using it at work and will probably have to leave before all the errors resolve
I certainly have my issues/complaints about the service so far (see earlier replies in this discussion) and my setup has thus far has hardly been smooth. One common problem is that on many albums 1 or 2 songs haven't been matched and are in the process of uploading, but I assume I can sort that out in the coming days as things calm down on their servers.
One experiment I just successfully completed that may be of interest to some:
When deleting and then redownloading old, DRMed iTunes purchases, sure enough you are given a fresh unprotected 256kbs copy. Thus comes to an end the surely lucrative $.30 per track iTunes Plus upgrade scheme. Strangely though, I am still able to click the link for the upgrade page while the Store frontpage is loading (once fully loaded, and after perhaps checking than I'm an iTunes Match subscriber, the link vanishes.)
Now I know this behavior is completely to be expected, if for no other reason than if Apple arbitrarily maintained the old upgrade offer they would need to keep a copy of every 128kbs song they ever sold for users to redownload.
One experiment I just successfully completed that may be of interest to some:
When deleting and then redownloading old, DRMed iTunes purchases, sure enough you are given a fresh unprotected 256kbs copy. Thus comes to an end the surely lucrative $.30 per track iTunes Plus upgrade scheme. Strangely though, I am still able to click the link for the upgrade page while the Store frontpage is loading (once fully loaded, and after perhaps checking than I'm an iTunes Match subscriber, the link vanishes.)
Now I know this behavior is completely to be expected, if for no other reason than if Apple arbitrarily maintained the old upgrade offer they would need to keep a copy of every 128kbs song they ever sold for users to redownload.
