iTunes Match arrived in UK, and overall it really is very good!!!
I enabled it in iTunes (paying the 20 odd pound) and it did it’s stuff for a few hours. I have approx 3000 songs so the 25000 sony limit set by Apple was not an issue for me. Of the 3000 songs about half were already purchased from iTunes so it cleverly just links to the Apple iTunes copy in the iCloud. Of the rest which were rip’s from my own CD’s, iTunes matched most of them with the equivalent high quality iTunes version (more about that later). Where they were not matched (not many) the track was uploaded to the cloud.
Ok so my music collection is now backed up to the cloud, so what does that give me:
- A backup obviously
- Now available to any iOS 5 device, other laptop/mac iTunes or even AppleTV
- iOS 5 devices can now see all music/playlists in the iCloud not just the ones you used to sync with iTunes. They can be downloaded straight to the device anytime.
- AppleTV using new Music menu can play music straight from the iCloud – it cleverly buffers the songs so no waiting even on my 3meg broadband connection.
- For all matched songs I can now download the iTunes 256kbps version if I want.
- After switching it on my iPhone, there was a nervous moment as all my playlists disappeared, they did come back but with one notable exception. The purchased list no longer appears.
- If I change the Album cover art on some songs, it gets replaced by iTunes Match next time I do a sync.
- I had a few songs that were stuck waiting sync on the first pass, but this was rectifed later by going to iTunes Store menu and selecting ‘Update iTunes Match’ – much quicker second time.
A little tip, for all the songs that were matched. If you want to get the iTunes version in your iTunes collection instead of a poorer quality local version, then unfortunately there is no update all button. You can however use a iTunes smart playlist. Create a new smart playlist with the following criteria:
- iCloud Status is Matched
- Kind is not Matched AAC Audio File
This will create a new playlist of all the songs in your library which were just matched to an equivalent iTunes version. Selecting songs and option delete will prompt you, do you want to delete, make sure you DONT select delete the iCloud version.
The song will now be replaced with a download link to the iTunes version. You can do this for as big a selection as you feel confident with or have time enough for the download.
One last point, I think my experience was so trouble free, because my iTunes library was already in a very neat and tidy state before I started. I receomend spending a little time making sure your library is in order, songs are correctly named with meta data and relevant album cover art etc. before starting. Obviously make sure you have a backup as well first.
If you happen to have any songs in your library that came from dubious sources (not that anyone has or should) and you don’t want to share with Apple, then you might want to remove from your library before running iTunes match.
