Apple reopens iTunes Match beta to additional developers

Posted:
in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV edited January 2014
Apple has quietly opened up the beta for its iTunes Match service to a second batch of developers as the company readies it for launch this fall.



The Cupertino, Calif., company initiated the beta for the "scan and match" music service in late August, closing it to new testers within days.



iTunes Match is slated to arrive this fall along with iCloud and iOS 5 and will offer iTunes customers a way to match their non-iTunes purchased music with offerings in Apple's digital music store. Matched songs will then be made available via iCloud, upgraded lower-quality songs to a bitrate of 256-Kbps.



MacNN noted on Saturday that a small number of testers report receiving notification that the service had been "expanded to additional developers" located in the U.S. Participating developers must still pay the $24.99 annual fee, though they will receive an additional three months of service for free with their subscription.



On Friday, Apple issued the eighth beta release of iTunes 10.5, with improvements for iTunes Match.







The iTunes Match beta drew attention late last month when it was initially revealed that the test version carried support for instantaneous playback from the cloud. An Apple spokesperson quickly clarified that the feature was not actually "streaming" playback as some had called it, as the file still needed to be stored on an iPhone or iPad.



A subsequent update to an iOS 5 beta removed the ability to instantly play a song by downloading it to a temporary cache. As of beta 7 of the forthcoming mobile OS, playback initiated from iCloud will cause the song to be saved as a file in the device's local music library.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 23
    We have established a society of robots who find and root out all sort of aggression. For this we are blessed with peace throughout the universe. So I give you, what we call iTunes Match. This is the only means to perpetuate ones own soul to happiness in this universe. Live long and prosper
  • Reply 2 of 23
    Finally!
  • Reply 3 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by AppleInsider View Post


    Matched songs will then be made available via iCloud, upgraded lower-quality songs to a nitrate of 256-Kbps.



    I don't know what all the excitement is about. I hear that nitrates are very bad for you.
  • Reply 4 of 23
    I hope Apple makes some serious revisions to iTunes which, although popular, I feel is one of Apple's worst products.
  • Reply 5 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bloggerblog View Post


    I hope Apple makes some serious revisions to iTunes which, although popular, I feel is one of Apple's worst products.



    I'll bite. What does this have to do with the thread and what needs 'serious revision'?
  • Reply 6 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    I'll bite. What does this have to do with the thread and what needs 'serious revision'?



    TBH, there's a point. iTunes has built up quite a bit of baggage over the years and as we all know, while it is 64-bit now, it doesn't use many native Cocoa elements and has to be constantly updated to maintain it's consistency with OS X since it is dependent of the standard frameworks instead of extending on them.

    The biggest example is scrolling behavior/scroll bars in Lion. Instead of extending the UIScrollView elements that are a part of Cocoa and working from that, iTunes rolls its own scroll lists, which developers obviously worked very hard to mimic OS X. However, the downfall of not being a native element is you lose the ability to hand the behaviors to OS X to handle (the work is put solely onto iTunes which can create performance issues when coupled with other tasks) and the devs must work extra hard to get the bars to look and behave natively (which doesn't always work out, e.g., lack of bouncing at the ends of lists or the lack of blurring of content behind them when visible).



    Scrolling is one of the more noticeable examples, but it's obvious throughout iTunes that Apple rolled a lot of their own code to make iTunes "fit" and work independently of it's environment,H which is a results of good ol' Carbon (Carbon stacking is complicated to break from as new "chunks" are written with Carbon as the base because everything else is dependent on it). iTunes is starting to get bloated, not in the sense of what it does, but how much old code it's carrying and how it's holding onto relic coding that is "hacked" to work the way they need.
  • Reply 7 of 23
    matrix07matrix07 Posts: 1,993member
    Does anyone know will iTunes Match give you lyric? Since instant playback is confirmed I think I could try this. $25 a year is very cheap for this service but unfortunately, all my songs has lyrics and I don't want to re-add them again. I'm guessing i will lose all my lyrics when iTunes matches?
  • Reply 8 of 23
    aaronjaaronj Posts: 1,595member
    I'm more excited about iTunes Match than any other element of iCloud, other than documents.
  • Reply 9 of 23
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    "Apple has quietly opened up the beta" ... this would be to people who signed an NDA I assume?
  • Reply 10 of 23
    I'm still not sure I want to pay $24.95 for iTunes Match. If I turn it off, I loose all the synced music on all devices and will have to sync device by device again. What happens if I don't have good Internet connection? I also wonder how well it matches album art and lyrics
  • Reply 11 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bloggerblog View Post


    I hope Apple makes some serious revisions to iTunes which, although popular, I feel is one of Apple's worst products.





    Which product(s) are worse than iTunes? It is bloated and buggy.
  • Reply 12 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by winstein2010 View Post


    I also wonder how well it matches album art and lyrics



    Album art is one of the worst aspects of iTunes.



    Too often, if you have a classic album that is not sold by Apple, you get album art from a motley collection of Greatest Hits albums, screwing up your view and requiring much PITA manual editing. I never use the automagic feature, given that I listen to a lot of non-Top 40 music.
  • Reply 13 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by ConradJoe View Post


    ...requiring much PITA manual editing?



    Right-click the album. Drag in the image you want. Auto-applies to all songs.



    OOOhooooohoooooo? SO HARD.
  • Reply 14 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by tylerk36 View Post


    We have established a society of robots who find and root out all sort of aggression. For this we are blessed with peace throughout the universe. So I give you, what we call iTunes Match. This is the only means to perpetuate ones own soul to happiness in this universe. Live long and prosper



    We Eloi do love our iTunes Match!
  • Reply 15 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by digitalclips View Post


    "Apple has quietly opened up the beta" ... this would be to people who signed an NDA I assume?



    AFAIK, there is no NDA specifically for iMatch -- though it requires an iTunes beta only available to Developers (who are under NDA).



    I am hitting it with two big guns (two computers with libraries of over 17,000 songs each -- lots of duplicates), then 3 others (less than 2,000 each).
  • Reply 16 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post


    Right-click the album. Drag in the image you want. Auto-applies to all songs.



    OOOhooooohoooooo? SO HARD.



    In truth, it isn't that hard, but it is both harder and uglier than it really needs to be. The ability to manually edit the iTunes database is clearly an afterthought on the part of the iTunes developers and the UI is pretty awful.



    I'd like to see Apple put out a proper power user tool for editing both the iTunes library and the iPhoto library and all the metadata they contain, but there doesn't seem to be enough people interested to make it worth their while.



    I am still looking for a simple metadata editor for iTunes, but they all seem to be crap or they only access the same pieces of data that iTunes will allow you to see. I find it hard to believe that there are so few people who seem to want that level of control, but that's the way it is I guess.
  • Reply 17 of 23
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by digitalclips View Post


    "Apple has quietly opened up the beta" ... this would be to people who signed an NDA I assume?



    When they first opened it up to devs weeks ago, there were many more than expected signups so they closed it and have only now reopened it. I just got another notification of the new availability yesterday however I still have zero interest in this application.
  • Reply 18 of 23
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mstone View Post


    When they first opened it up to devs weeks ago, there were many more than expected signups so they closed it and have only now reopened it. I just got another notification of the new availability yesterday however I still have zero interest in this application.



    Like we care that you have zero interest.
  • Reply 19 of 23
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Realistic View Post


    Like we care that you have zero interest.



    You are right I don't have much in common with people on this board anymore. Maybe I'll try to find an exfanboy forum. Nothing Apple has done since Snow Leopard has been worth a damn. I really started losing interest with spelling correction, smart covers and it has only gotton worse with Ping, Lion, FCP, 30% subscriptions, iAds, iCloud, the demise of MM, and now iTunes Match. All bogus crap. I'm definitely not renewing my dev account. That is for sure. Yes you can make money with iOS apps but I already have enough money.
  • Reply 20 of 23
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,192member
    Music management on iOS devices looks tedious.
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