Title says it. I’m wondering if it is worth the $25 a year.
I think I understand the basics, but I’d like to know if it works as smoothly as promised.
So, any users? What is your level of satisfaction? Pros/cons?
Thanks,
mmm
I think it’s pretty awesome.
I have all my 10,000+ songs available anywhere I have internet access. Which means I can stream music from mu iphone to my car stereo without in places where there is lousy radio, but decent Cellular…
As a multi-device geek (imac, macbook air, iPad & iPhone), my experience is that it works flawlessly. Any music I buy on iTunes is immediately there on all the gadgets. All the old CDs and LPs that I copied onto the iMac are available on the other devices regardless of whether Apple’s library recognizes them or not. I can stream any of it, or download any or all of it into local storage on each device.
I actually forgot that I was paying Apple $25/year for the privilege. No question in my mind that it’s every bit as smooth as promised.
It’s also great if you have any lingering guilt of 15 years spent acquiring your discography from less-than-reputable sources. Effectively, it’s the recording industry selling you an indulgence. For $25, all digital sins washed clean.
What is the difference between iTunes Match and having them in iCloud ? My music shows up on the iMac and our iPhones and on don’t think I have iTunes Match enabled.
It’s for music you didn’t buy on iTunes. Whatever you bought from iTunes will always be available to you in iCloud whether you have Match or not.
With Match, any CDs you ripped into iTunes (or otherwise acquired somewhere other than iTunes):
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if iTunes has that music available, iTunes will “give” you their copy of those songs.
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if iTunes does not have that music available, Match will upload those songs from your computer onto their server, up to 25,000 songs I believe.
Once this is done, you can then delete all the music from your computer (after backing up to another local drive, of course), freeing up massive amounts of space.
I pay the $25 a year for iTunes Match, but I don’t use it to it’s fullest. What DCinDC says is true about freeing up space, but I keep a copy on my hard drive. Actually on multiple laptop’s hard drives. I have about 100G of music. Om my macBook Pro, that is 1/5th of my hard drive capacity, and On my MacBook Air, I keep a smaller subset of about 60G which is less than 1/4 my 256G hard drive.
I do this because I spend a fair amount of time in an area with 3G coverage and no wifi. Streaming or downloading is not an option that I want to choose all that often when I’m there.
I do have a number of tracks (mostly rare imports) that iTunes did not recognize, and they uploaded them to my Match account with no problem.
I’m very happy with it and it works perfectly for me, with one exception.
In the last iOS release Apple introduced family sharing which allows members of a family to share purchased apps, purchased music, and uploaded photos while still maintaining their own Apple Ids. This works for everything except iTunes Match. My family can share music any of us purchased from the iTunes store, but we can’t share music we ripped from CDs and “stored” in iTunes match. In order to share iTunes match music you have to revert to the old method of everyone sharing one apple Id.
When my 2nd hard drive (that had my iTunes library on it) was dying, I signed up for Match to try and save my library. It worked, but there are certain quirks to it.
I could not get it to upload all of my stuff until I converted everything into 256kbps AAC files. Any other file type and the process would eventually just freeze completely and never finish. Perhaps the problem was something else, but that’s what worked for me.
Overall it’s great and well worth the (actually pretty tiny) cost. I have a pretty large music library, and used to spend a fair amount of time moving music on and off of my phone (and my mp3 player, before that). Now, it’s all available to stream (or download, if I’m getting on a plane or going into the woods or something). Also, it comes with the ad-free version of iTunes radio, for less than the equivalent from Pandora.
I’ve had very few problems, although a handful of files (maybe a dozen out of ~10,000) insisted on being converted to AAC before they would upload. Never worked out what was up with that.
I will add a “me too” to all the positive responses given so far. Although I still have my music on my iMac and sync music to my iPhone/iPad, so I don’t really use it to manage disc space. (Good idea though!)
The only minor hiccup I had was a couple songs (out of thousands) that I was not happy got converted to the iTunes version. A few of the songs that I had either ripped or obtained through non-iTunes methods were not “radio edits” of songs. When iTunes Match compared my version, it thought it was the same as the “radio edit” version and I lost my original version. For example, I had an old song by The Movement called “Jump”. The lyrics to the chorus (is it a chorus in bad early 90’s techno?) are “Jump mother f-cker jump!” but the radio edit says something like “Jump everybody jump!”. I lost my version of the song and now only have the sanitized radio edit.
MeanJoe
So far I’m liking it, but a surprising number of my tunes are non-functional (they show in my iTunes but are greyed out). It is not entire albums, just random songs, probably 10% of my library.
Anyone know what I need to do to get them recognized by Match? These are not obscure songs.
Thanks,
mmm