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iTunes Match – Matches Your Music to iCloud, Beats Google and Amazon

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As part of the new iCloud service announced at WWDC today, Apple also announced a cool new way for you to get your music into the cloud without spending a week or two uploading it all — iTunes Match. Yes, we are talking about, your music, as in the music you have ripped or purchased from other places outside of iTunes.

itunes match

iTunes Match, is Apple’s answer to the upload problem, and to the quality problems that some users may experience with their early ripped music. Rather than upload all of your music, iTunes Match will look at your music collection and for any files that match up with the 18 million iTunes songs will be added to your iCloud library without the need to upload. For songs that aren’t matched, you can upload the remaining songs.

The matching won’t completely remove the need to upload songs to your iCloud library, but it will be a great start and much more friendly to the average consumer than uploading thousands of tracks. An added bonus is that your matched tracks will play as 256 Kbps iTunes Plus quality, even if you had a lower quality version ripped.

While Steve Jobs likes to go overboard in claiming an edge on the competition at times, it is clear that Apple has taken the right approach here. We spent the good part of a week uploading over 5,000 songs to Google Music and still haven’t finished uploading. If we had iTunes Match 90% of our songs would have been available in a high quality version in minutes, not weeks.

The iTunes Match service will arrive this fall alongside iOS 5 with a $24.99 a year price and will be another part of iTunes, in addition to the standard iCloud service that puts your iTunes purchases in the cloud.

8 Comments

8 Comments

  1. Laughapple

    06/06/2011 at 9:18 pm

    How does this beat Google? Apple will charge you a yearly $25 subscription to upload music you may have purchased from another online music store to the cloud. In other words, you will be paying for the music twice!

    Google allows you to upload your music to the cloud, and yes, it takes a couple of days, but you don’t have to pay for it again, incidentally, neither does Amazon. If by Apple beats Google and Amazon you mean, they’ve found a way to make money off of your already purchased and already owned music, then I guess I see your point.

  2. Yogh

    06/06/2011 at 11:19 pm

    Is that $25/year price just to keep uploading/matching ripped music in years to come or to continue to be allowed to access all of your music that has been matched?

  3. Anonymous

    06/07/2011 at 12:50 am

    I agree – you will probably end up paying that $25/year for several years.
    In the end costing you a hundred bucks or more (double – triple that??) for what exactly ?
    Saving a little time at some point?
    Time I would just be off living my life while the computer uploads away anyway?
    Even for one year at $25 I don’t think it is that good a deal.

  4. Anonymous

    10/11/2011 at 1:14 pm

    If ur like most people who download music illegally some of the quality of rips sound bad. I might pay $25 for them to replace my lower quality rips. The problem I have is they don’t give u much space. If they did like Amazon MP3 and made it unlimited …it would be a great deal!

  5. Andy Youings

    12/23/2011 at 11:05 am

    Is anyone else noticing odd results when listening to older/mono recordings? I’ve matched my library and The Beatles’ Abbey Road has some very odd tracks listening back – it’s as if certain channels have been turned down and others up. Is it just me?

  6. Nnooosh

    02/16/2012 at 8:01 am

    If iTunes supports uploading music from my purchased CD collection to my iPhone, why would Apple charge me to back them up in case their device failed?

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