The most prevalent problem I’ve had in recent years is a constant lack of hard drive space for my music library. I have a 75 gb library and I feel like I’m always running out of space. iTunes Match, released in November from Apple, has finally helped me alleviate this.
The idea is this: Apple has a bunch of music on it’s servers and we have a bunch of music on our computers. A lot of that music matches. So there’s no reason to have to upload all of our music to Apple when they have it already. iTunes Match scans your library, matches all it can, and uploads the rest. You can then choose to remove the physical files from your computer, remove the ones you rarely listen to, etc. You can re-download or stream it whenever you want from your computer, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, or Apple TV. iTunes Match is $25 a year. Click this link for more info on Wikipedia.
I have 15,928 songs in my iTunes library, all cleanly labeled, all with album art. Most of what I have you can buy on iTunes, I have almost zero bootleg or rare stuff. Match recognized 11,000 songs and matched them, and had to upload the remaining 4,000-5,000. I was concerned about how long the “matching” and “uploading” would take, since Google Music ran on my computer for like a week and only uploaded about 1/4 of my library. The answer is: about 17 hours. I started the process at work where internet is atrociously slow at about 1pm. I closed my laptop for my 1-hour commute home around 4pm, then plugged it in and started it again at about 5 and let it run all night. I had to leave for work again at 6am, so I closed it again, but it was almost done. It took about 2 hours to finish once I got back to work. So really, one night and it was done. Match was very smart about picking up where it left off, too.
Now, how does this change iTunes for me? Well, there’s little clouds next to all my music on my computer, except for about 20-30 that iTunes actually couldn’t find the files for (probably deleted long ago). I can now listen to my whole library on my older MacBook Pro with no downloading at all, no hard drive space lost! I can also download music from the cloud to my iPhone as I want, then delete it if I need more space, then download it again if I want to. Here’s some images – the clouds represent music that’s not on my iPhone, but I can download:
In the second image, note you can “Download All,” and in the third you can see that it is possible to download from iTunes Match over 3G, but it’s turned of by default.
So far, Match works great for me. It takes about as long to download song to my iPhone over wifi as it would to purchase and download them outright from iTunes. The option to stream the music is reserved for the computer-based iTunes and the Apple TV, though You’re required to download songs in order to play them on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.
I’m open to questions, so ask away! I know I had lots before I signed up, but I’m really happy that I did.
Tags: apple, ipad, ipad 2, iphone 4s, itunes, itunes match, itunes match over 3g
One point that I’m sure is clear to you, but perhaps not your readers, is that music will start playing on an iOS device shortly after selecting a track you haven’t yet downloaded, even over 3G. This is substantially similar to streaming, though of course the end result is that the track is downloaded and remains on your device after you’ve finished playing it. Additionally, if you simply start playing tracks without first downloading them, iOS is smart enough to start fetching the next track even while the current track is playing.
As you point out the model is quite different than either Google Music or Amazon Cloud Player. But, on whole, I think it’s substantially better for those who enjoy listening to their music (as opposed to those who enjoy fiddling with computers and have a parallel need to ensure constant network connectivity).
Now that I’ve had some time with it, I’ve seen all the above Scott! I noticed the album art doesn’t always show up right away, sometimes not until halfway through a song.
I’ve also discovered that activating Match changes the way you sync music on your iPhone – you cannot control it through iTunes any longer, it’s 100% added, removed, and managed on the iOS device.