In iOS 6, iTunes Match Actually Supports Both Streaming and Downloading of Music

Yes! I can't wait for iOS 6 to come out. I'm so excited

AWESOME! Then I'll finally sign up for Match. Don't have room on my iphone to store much music, but if I can stream it...

They'll probably make it for the 4s only like all the other cool iOS 6 features.

Would be cool if it's an option. Sometimes I wish it could stream, but at the same time I like that it stores songs for when I'm in the subway or in a crappy data area.

Suppose I could just sync a small playlist and stream the rest.

I wish they would also make the Previous track button work with iTunes match. Now all it does is restarting the track and it's pretty annoying.

Didn't they have streaming available in an iOS 5 beta last year? What's to keep Apple from taking it away in a later beta? Anyone have any ideas on what would lead them to change their opinions on how the service should be used? I won't hold my breath to see if it sticks.

There is no reason you should have any lower than an iPhone 4 once the new iPhone comes out. You will be able to sell your iPhone 4 for the cost of a new one under contract on ebay or craigslist. Stop complaining about missing features, you are not supposed to have a phone for longer than 2 years.

Great news! Can't wait!

Nice. Glad to hear this news. Local storage just became a little bit more obsolete.

Just too bad we don't live in a world of unlimited data anymore.

The title seems strange, iOS 6 actually supports.....
I like Arnold's style the best, and then Eric, and then Jordan's...no offense

But it's not Spotify. You can't search for an artist you don't have and stream can you?

Wow, now this is some great news. This is gonna free up some space from my packed full iPad.

Also it would be cool if the Apple TV could stream photos from the external HD attached to my router without the need for my Mac to be on. This would free even more space on my iPad since I use it to stream photos to my Apple tv instand of having to boot up the Mac just to stream.

But did they fix the clean version only issue? If so, I'm sold

Hopefully they'll do something about the performance of iTunes Match and the censoring of imported explicit albums in iOS 6. Right now iTunes match slows my iPod touch 4th gen to a crawl, even when I'm not downloading music and it makes iTunes unbearably unresponsive when I am using it. I don't know why Apple can't figure out what Amazon, Google and Dropbox have already done with no problems, but it's the worst cloud storage service I've ever used. I'd stop using it altogether if that didn't mean having to go back to using a cord to get my music on my iPod all the time. And even then on some days I think the cord would be better.

afurry13 said:

There is no reason you should have any lower than an iPhone 4 once the new iPhone comes out. You will be able to sell your iPhone 4 for the cost of a new one under contract on ebay or craigslist. Stop complaining about missing features, you are not supposed to have a phone for longer than 2 years.

Click to expand...

Some people haven't had their iPhone 4 for 2 years. You can still buy an 8GB iPhone 4 from a lot of carriers.

This is completely untrue. I tested this last night myself. If you turn off iTunes match all the songs you played are still there. I tested on my iPad (where I don't normally play any songs from iTunes Match) and if you look in "about" in settings it shows the number of downloaded songs on the device. Confirmed it in iTunes in the device contents drop down. I think they just removed the cloud icons to clean up the look of it (they could return). Personally I wish they would let you put a limit on the amount of space you reserve for music. Eg. 2GB, once reached it can automatically remove the least played songs.

Is it possible to still do a hybrid approach, e.g - any song that is fully streamed will be saved? If you just set iTunes playing an album for example, and you intend to replay it later, then I think the hybrid method might be better.

I just hope they fix all the missing artwork and "Unknown Album" bugginess before they add new bells & whistles!

The same thing happened last time with iOS 5. I have my fingers crossed that it will stay streaming as I won't have to buy a 64GB phone, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is changed before it is released.

I actually don't want to kill my data bill every month with streaming. It seems the lack of cloud icons will be confusing as to which songs are downloaded vs. available for streaming... and the article doesn't actually say how you tell it to download instead of stream.

musio said:

But it's not Spotify. You can't search for an artist you don't have and stream can you?

Click to expand...

No, it's not Spotify but for 25 bucks a year (unlike Spotifys 10 bucks a month or whatever,) this is a great deal for people who want to access their huge iTunes Music Collections anywhere they are wheres theres wifi without having to deal with syncing and taking up space on their iOS devices. Count me in, i'm sold!

i wish you could still sync music with itunes even though you have match enabled. main reason why i only use match to upgrade my songs as of right now

As a developer I thought this was a bug. In the UK on my train journey 3G is dotted so streaming is far from my best option. I have no way now of knowing what's downloading and what's just steaming or how to download. I say bring back the cloud icon for downloading and just tapping the song for streaming.

I also noticed I was streaming lower quality versions when not on wifi. It seemed like the quality was adaptive like QuickTime streams are.