Apple announces iTunes Match music service for $24.99 per year - Page 5

I wonder if there will ever be any features that facilitate sharing of the songs you upload (the ones that do not get matched by existing iTMS content). So, if I have my original music on my mac, and it gets uploaded to iCloud, can I authorize a friend to listen to it?

I'm curious about how sharing any document in iCloud will work, actually.

They won't update the sound quality of songs NOT on Itunes. Apple says they update to 256k on MATCHED songs, which means songs only from Itunes. They don't actually take each song and remaster it into 256k.

Basically what they are doing is taking your Itunes music and converting to higher quality, which you can do yourself in Itunes. Now the only way to upgrade the quality of your non-Itunes music is to re-import the tracks to 256k straight to Itunes.

The $25 is for allowing you to have your music synced and backed up to their iCloud, so when you lose your iPhone and get a new one, your music just downloads. If you stop paying $25 what happens is you will still have your music on the cloud but if you try to upload more stuff without paying another $25 it won't let you. Not that big of a deal you will just have it on your computer and it won't sync with iCloud.

For example, If somebody bought CDs all their life and never had Itunes until iCloud comes out, then they pay $25 for one year and they sync half of the CDs in that year and then doesn't renew for another year, he would just have that music on the cloud to sync and download and the other half would just be on their Itunes local hard drive unable to sync until he pays $25 again.

I seriously doubt Apple will cut you off from your own non-Itunes music that you originally had (and most likely BOUGHT). That's like saying hey give me $25 a year or you can't get your music of our cloud! Apple customers would be rioting outside every Apple store coast to coast.

Not off iCloud, but you can use the Airdrop if you get OSX Lion and link to someone else who also has Lion via WiFi and share files that way.

Wrong. They update all matched songs.


That's right, they dont delete your local files anyway so how could this happen?

If I transfer some of my old scratchy LP's on to my computer and iTunes had nice clean versions I could essentially finally replace some of my albums with clean digital copies???

Red

Since there seems to be a bit of confusion about what matching and "in iTunes" means: Apple will replace (provide access to download) any music file you have (which will be "in iTunes" regardless of whether or not you purchased it through iTunes) if Apple has that song in their iTunes data base. The "upload your own" bit just comes in when the song has no match with Apple's servers, and is what counts against the 25,000 song limit. Obviously Apple can't provide a higher quality copy of music they don't have.

So all your low quality rips or LP transfers or otherwise acquired music may be eligible for a quality upgrade assuming that 1) its current quality is less than 256 AAC and 2) Apple has a copy of that song in their iTunes data base.

To get a good idea of what will be a match and is available in iTunes choose/highlight Music in Library section of your iTunes sidebar then go > View > View Options > Show Columns. Select, Kind, Purchase Date and Release Date. When finished click Ok.
Distinguishing info should now appear when View as List or View as Cover Flow are selected.

I think that just shows you which songs you originally purchased from iTunes (unless they've changed it up in the latest release).

The cool thing about Match is that they'll give you an AAC 256kbps copy of any tune you have that exists in Apple's iTunes library, no matter where you originally got the song.

I wonder about titles with multiple releases. Like 'remastered' titles.

For instance, there have been two releases of the Beatles. If I have the 1980s Sgt. Pepper, will I get the 2009 Sgt. Pepper?

Or none at all.

There have been multiple releases for Lots of artists. Queen, has now had three.

if they have both, and you tag correctly, then they will match correctly.

( Of course a few months ago the matching wouldn't have worked for The Beatles)

Well, they won't have the originals, digitally. They never existed.

Pointless for me to even speculate. Nothing will be for sure until iCloud is launched in 'Fall.'

Fall, btw, lasts until December 22.

Sigh.

That's all it is. The whole point of the big push for iCloud is to facilitate "Computerless" activation, management and storage for all IOS devices. When implemented all syncs will be with the iCloud, not iTunes. To that end all the cloud is doing is push music to your devices.

While experimenting with IOS 5 and iTunes 10.5 Betas, I purchased a song from my PC. It downloaded from the Cloud, didn't stream. It was also automatically downloaded to my iPad without any action on my part.

So the remaining $64 question is what happens to those "Matched" songs downloaded to your devices when you unsubscribe from the Match service. Will they be automatically deleted from your devices. I suspect so. If the Cloud can "push" a song automatically it can sure "suck" one too!

Exactly -- if a ripped song in your library lines up with a song that's already available for sale on iTunes (what James Maxx said in his first paragraph), then the iCloud version of the song (which gets pushed to all your iDevices) will be the iTunes version, in all its 256 kbps glory.

BUT, if a ripped song in your library is not available in iTunes, then it will not be updated to 256 kbps, and the iCloud version which gets pushed to all your devices, will be an exact copy of your original file, at its original bitrate, whatever that happens to be.