[schalliol]

What do you all think about this service?  If you're not familiar, here's the summary from Apple:

If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.²
 
Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

​

1. 18 million songs for matching iCloud scans and matches your music with the 18 million songs in iTunes. So chances are your music is already in iCloud.

2. Listen at 256 Kbps

   Play back matched songs at iTunes Plus quality. Even if your original copy was of lower quality.

I wondered what Apple was going to do with Lala, which it bought and killed, and this is a great use of that company's technology.  For many of us here, we use lossless files, so I wonder how that will work.  It's certainly nice that at least 256Kbps AAC is in use.  I put my music files on my NAS and use mediarover to sync across Macs, but it seems like I could use iCloud if ALC will be supported.  Thoughts?

 

[sling5s]

I think it's a dream come true.  Take all your songs on your everywhere you go.  Amazing. 

 

[Koolpep]

The question is:
 
If I understand the match feature correctly this is what happens:
 
MacBook:
Ripped song from CD "Lalala by the Weinstein Jodlers" in ALAC
 
iPhone:
Can download above song for free in 256kbits AAC
 
iMac:
automatically downloads above song in 256kbits AAC
 
iPod touch:
can download above song for free in 256kbits
 
What happens to the original? Will it get replaced, or as Apple calls it "upgraded" ?
 
What happens after a year when I decide not to continue itunes match? As the files have no AAC I assume I can still use them legally, right?
 
How will Apple prevent people with a huge "torrented" or stolen library to just "legalize" all their stolen goods and make them "legal"?
Well...on the other hand if you see it this way: The songs are already stolen, damage is done, music industry sees no penny, so now with the match service at least they get a share.... actually quite smart...
 
EDIT:
In general all these changes to iTunes, the app store etc. are really customer oriented and absolutely "nice". Apple really steps up the competition and I like competition. I wonder with which offers google and amazon will respond. For us as consumers, it's great...

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

If you need access to your music library from portable devices, it's a great benefit at a super-cheap price. And probably the end of the portable music player with a hard drive.
 
P

 

[Coltrane]

Or, if you leave a home computer running:
 
Subsonic.org

 

[DaBomb77766]

I wonder, though, if it'll fix songs that are mislabeled?  That would be quite the bonus for me...a bunch of songs in my library are mislabelled and iTunes won't fix it since they weren't ripped from a CD.
 
Also, what'll happen to the songs that are already there?  Will it delete them or what?  Guess I'll have to wait and see.

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

It doesn't delete files from your devices or downgrade them to 256kbps, or I assume it doesn't, as there is no reason for it to do so. It just looks at what you have rights to and allows you access to the same material from their cloud so your legitimate library is available, without consuming drive space, from anywhere on any of your devices. Cool. 320kbps, which I've never been able to distinguish from lossless, would be even cooler. What it does with files that may be on your computer but you do not have legal rights to (and how it would know), I have no idea. 
 
P

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

Just to reiterate a few key points...
 
The process looks like this:
 
1. iTunes scans your media and only uploads albums it doesn't already have on file (by the way, DropBox does the exact same thing).
2. On your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, you can download 256 Kbps versions of those songs.
 
So some points to remember are:
 
 - No files on your computer will change. Ever. At all.
 - You are limited to 25,000 songs in the cloud.
 - (Not 100% on this) if you uploaded a ALAC file, you'll download one.
 
That last one I'm not sure of. I seem to remember reading something to that effect but I want to double-check. Personally, I'd much rather see it give me a 256 AAC, that way I don't waste space on my iPhone (where ALAC is kind of useless anyway).
 
Now, there are two other points I think worth considering:
 
1. For various reasons (not all nefarious) people are worried about the legal implications of putting their music in the cloud. Will RIAA see your tracks and decide to sue you? Will Apple say, "Hey, are you sure you own these?" and so forth. No one needs to worry because Apple is viewing the content under an automated system and is 100% file-agnostic. Now, add to that a bit in the Terms of Service which says Apple promises, in a very legally-binding way, that it will not show your data to anyone in a way that would allow them to identify you a specific user. In other words, while they may say, "1,000,000 have that new Katy Perry single," they can never say which 1,000,000.
 
2. Now, I know Apple likes to pretend you can't (at least in public) but you can pull files from an iPod, iPhone or iPad with a variety of different, legal third-party software. So, in theory, you could create a playlist of all your low-quality music in iTunes, re-download it from the cloud at a higher-bitrate, pull it off with some program and then replace the tracks in iTunes. DRM-free and all that.

 

[glt]

Quote:

... How will Apple prevent people with a huge "torrented" or stolen library to just "legalize" all their stolen goods and make them "legal"?
Well...on the other hand if you see it this way: The songs are already stolen, damage is done, music industry sees no penny, so now with the match service at least they get a share.... actually quite smart...
 
...

Yeap, they are trying to get the pirates to pay 25 bucks a year forever

 

[Eves]

What about using a mac notebook, which streams your music to your ipod which is connected to your amp/phones using the iCloud service?
I see an easy option here to just use iTunes as your music server without having to configure anything at all.
I can have iTunes Match make sure my rips are perfectly tagged and so on without having to do it manually after ripping with EAC.
 
Am I seeing this wrong, are there any better or cheaper options out there?

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

I don't know about better, but there's nothing Apple is doing that you couldn't. The difference is that this is significantly simpler than any home-grown solution. It's also built-in to the system.
 
Can you stream the audio from the iCloud or do you have to download to listen? Because I could see myself keeping my favorite tracks on my iPhone as lossless and them using the iCloud to stream whenever I want something else.

 

[Eves]

I think the iCloud will just sync all your devices, the difference for me is that I do no longer have to plug in the wire if I decide to upgrade my computer, also not having to drag anything anymore, and I hope I do never have to add a title/genre again.
If a Lossless file is on your iPod, added in iTunes, it will not be replaced or be lost.
 

 

[uofmtiger]

Quote:

I don't know about better, but there's nothing Apple is doing that you couldn't. The difference is that this is significantly simpler than any home-grown solution. It's also built-in to the system.
 
Can you stream the audio from the iCloud or do you have to download to listen? Because I could see myself keeping my favorite tracks on my iPhone as lossless and them using the iCloud to stream whenever I want something else.

I am wondering about the streaming aspect, too.  Obviously, with 20,000 songs it can't just sync everything to my iPhone.  I had Jukefly and Simplify that both streamed to my phone from my computer, but both are now out of business.  Before I go to another option, I would like to know how Apple will handle it.  I don't want to have to download songs when it is just as easy to stream...of course, an option to download would be the perfect combination.  Currently, I use Rhapsody which does both with their music, so accessing my own files in a similar manner would be nice.
 

 
 

 

[DougofTheAbaci]

I completely agree, Uofmtiger. The ideal would be the ability to stream your entire library and then download the tracks you want locally. That way when I'm just walking around the city I have access to my full library and when I'm on a plane I have access to those tracks I really care about.
 
I'm also wondering how easy the UI is going to be for downloading. For example, if I load a bunch of 128 Kbps tracks onto my iPhone, can I simply say, "Replace with higher-quality versions?" Could take a while. Fast internet or no, 32 GB is a lot to download.

 

[scompton]

I'm guessing it won't work for me.  I have a large library and usually play back with shuffle by album either with a playlist or my whole library.  I'll bet this will work more like an iPhone which won't do that.  I'm afraid they'll end up killing the iPod classic with something like this that will essentially be a downgrade.  I'll keep carrying my iPod classic and iPhone and hope they keep producing the iPod classic until the replace it with something with the same functionality.
 
Edit:  I also wonder if the match service will be overriddeable.  If it's no better than the get album artwork, it'll be pretty worthless.  That get's the wrong artwork for me about 25% of the time.  At least 50% of my library isn't in iTunes.