One of iCloud's most anticipated and innovative features is finally live. Apple had announced that the iTunes match service would be functional by the end of October 2011, but missed the deadline by just under a half a month. Was it worth the wait? Is it worth the annual charge of $24.99 for a maximum of 25,000 songs? We put it through its paces to find out for you.
The iTunes Match is a piece of Apple's iCloud online storage service that backs up all music in your iTunes library, whether you bought it from the iTunes Store (before or after DRM), ripped it from a disc, or acquired it from another online source. Match checks your music against Apple's own huge stored library of over 20 million tunes, and if there's a match, there's no need to upload from your computer to the cloud. In fact, if Apple's copy is of a higher fidelity than yours, you'll get that better version in the bargain. Apple stores music as 256-Kbps AAC files ("iTunes Plus").
Once I ran the newly installed, Match-capable version, Apple didn't put up any obvious notices about the new capability. If you switch to the iTunes Store view from the left panel choices, you'll see a new (and marked as such) iTunes Match link on the right panel. Clicking this or choosing "Turn On iTunes Match" from the app's Store menu gets you to the signup page. If you're lucky (as I was), the service won't be temporarily blocking new subscriptions due to "overwhelming demand."
If you bought all your music on iTunes, even before the switch to non-DRM music files, setting up iTunes Match will take very little time. But the beauty of the service is that it doesn't require all your music to have been bought from the iTunes Store. Indeed, the iTunes in the Cloud component of iCloud has already been available, since October 12 with the iCloud launch, but that only worked for relatively recent iTunes music purchases.
iTunes Match's Three-Step Process
Once you've got the right iTunes version and okayed the charge, iTunes Match starts going through its three-step setup process: Gathering information about your iTunes Library, matching your music with songs in the iTunes Store, and uploading the remaining music and album art. The page told me that I could continue using iTunes while Match was in progress, but I wanted to keep tabs on it.
Of my library's 495 songs, 293 were found in Apple's vaults, while 202 had to be uploaded (I have weird taste that often involves small labels). During this last step, the window shows how many songs are currently available on iCloud to all your devices.
The matching step took just a couple of minutes, while uploading took place at a clip of 125 songs per hour over a mediocre Internet connection. Of course, the length (and bit rate) of your songs and speed of your connection will be factors. In any case, this process is a lot quicker that what you'd have to do with either Google Music or Amazon Cloud Drive. With those services, you have to upload everything. And keep in mind that typical Internet broadband connections' upload speed are commonly a fifth of their download speeds.
Match on iOS Devices
Once the matching is done on one computer's iTunes library, the resulting page in iTunes tells you how many song are available, and how you can access them from other devices—Apple is pretty generous here, allowing you to connect to ten of them, whether they are iOS devices or computers running iTunes. To do so on an iOS device, you go into Settings, choose Music, and then turn on the slider for iTunes Match—it's the top choice, helpfully. The first time you go to this settings page you won't see the choice immediately, but it will pop in in a second—a cool example of Apple's ability to add a feature without a full OS update. Sliding this setting's slider asks for another iTunes account login.
But right after you do this, there's a bit of a buzz-killer—the old "only from one library" limitation takes effect—meaning you'll lose any music you've got on the iOS device but not in your computer iTunes library that you Matched. If you've been syncing the mobile device to the library you Matched, this will be no problem at all, though. So make sure all your devices are synced to that one account before you get started! It's interesting to note that you cannot use iTunes Match without a computer—so much for a tablet-only, post-PC world, for now.
For syncing in the other direction, from iOS devices to computers, don't forget that iTunes in the Cloud still is in effect. Anything you buy on the mobile from iTunes—the only way to acquire music on an iOS device—will show up in any of the account's other machines, and the same ten device limit applies for this service, too.
Match on Other Computers
Most of us have more than one computer these days—at least a laptop and a desktop. I started this testing with a Macbook, and wondered if my second machine, a ThinkPad, would be considered to have a separate iTunes library, requiring another Match account. Fortunately that wasn't the case. As long as I'd signed into the second PC with the same Apple ID (that last point is important!), I could get all the music Matched from both machines.
To do this after updating that to iTunes 10.5.1, you use the same "Turn On iTunes Match" choice, but this time, thankfully, instead of being asked for another $24.99, the signup page shows an "Add This Computer" button. Clicking on this brings up the standard account password sign-in box, with its own "Add This Computer" button. This adds the new cloud icon to the left panel, which then goes through the same process.
Keep in mind that you can only Match to the same account on one computer at a time, but you can match the others later. After waiting for my Macbook to complete the matching process, I started it on The ThinkPad, and when all was said and done, I had 714 songs available from all my iTunes-capable devices (495 from the original Macbook library).
I noticed three different kinds of cloud icons in the second computer's library: one with a download arrow, another with an exclamation point, and a third with a diagonal line through it. The last type was simply for duplicates, but the exclamation points denoted an error. In every case, those were entries that also had duplicates, so it really wasn't a problem. A cloud icon also now appeared next to the Music section of iTunes' left panel. Apple's typical laconic Help fails to point out these different icons' meanings.
Unlike iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match appears to be a true cloud service when played from a computer: You don't have to download the complete song and permanently save it to your device or computer in order to play it. But you do have the option to download songs to local storage, by hitting the cloud icon with the down arrow. On iOS devices, however, once you play a cloud tune, it's downloaded onto the device's storage.
I also wanted to test whether, if I ripped music at a higher bitrate than iTunes Plus's 256, it would be maintained or downgraded after syncing to the cloud. A new Store menu option let me choose "Update iTunes Match," which I hit after ripping a new CD at 320Kbps. Then, I checked the new tunes' bitrate on another machine in the account by hitting the same "Update" choice. Indeed, the tunes on the second computer were at 256Kbps, rather than the 320Kbps that showed up on the first. Personally, I'm serious about music, and yet I can't tell the difference between 256Kbps and higher bitrates. But there are certainly purists out there for whom 256 won't be high enough, and this small group of people will probably want to avoid iTunes Match.
A Perfect Match?
Apple has finally made it so that all your music can truly be synced on all your devices (well, up to ten of them), whether the music was bought on iTunes or not. From the early days of just being able to sync a device to one computer, we've progressed to a much happier situation in which we can get all our music from multiple devices and computers. And the absolutely unique capability of not requiring you to upload all your music has Google and Amazon beat on at least this one measure, not to mention that you may get higher sound quality than your original copies. If having high-quality versions of your all music available to you on multiple iTunes-capable devices is important to you, as it is to me, iTunes Match is one of the best 25 bucks a year you've ever spent. It's the final, and critical piece of iCloud's music services.
For more from Michael, follow him on Twitter @mikemuch.