iTunes Match Launches in 19 New Countries: Latin America, Baltics, Netherlands

[MacRumors]

Earlier today, we noted that iTunes Match had begun going live in Netherlands, following last week's news of an agreement between Apple and Dutch copyright oversight group Buma/Stemra.

But as Apple now details on its iTunes Match availability page, the service actually launched in 19 new countries today, focusing on Latin America, the Baltic states, and the Netherlands.

The full list of new markets includes Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Guatemala, Honduras, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

Today's additions bring the total number of countries with iTunes Match availability to 37, with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Netherlands also gaining iTunes in the Cloud compatibility with music and music videos for the first time.

The Latin American countries seeing iTunes Match debut today already had the iTunes in the Cloud functionality, which allows users to re-download purchased content any number of times to devices associated with their iTunes Store accounts.

Article Link: iTunes Match Launches in 19 New Countries: Latin America, Baltics, Netherlands

 

[justperry]

Why is this on page one while the other one is in iOS page (2), should have been both in iOS Blog.

 

[r.j.s]

Why is this on page one while the other one is in iOS page (2), should have been both in iOS Blog.

Why would this be in iOS blog? It is about iTunes, not iOS.

 

[kylebshr]

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iTunes match is rolled out in more countries than WP7 has languages

 

[WildCowboy]

Why is this on page one while the other one is in iOS page (2), should have been both in iOS Blog.

19 countries > 1 country

Apple more than doubled the number of countries with iTunes Match support.

 

[ghostface147]

Doesn't matter where they launch it, I think it's terrible overall.

 

[BillyBobBongo]

Hmm, still not able to download previously purchased items from my wife's Dutch iTunes account. The 'Purchased' tab is now there, it just keeps telling me to try again later. Will wait for that to start working before I sign her up for the iTunes Match service.

 

[jeremyshaw]

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iTunes match is rolled out in more countries than WP7 has languages

Lol! WP7 supports... 25 languages o.0 IMO, one of the big reasons why iPhone was popular, was it's almost full language support (on EVERY device - people who cooked WinMo ROMs know what I am talking about) right on the get-go.

 

[danieldk]

Hmm, still not able to download previously purchased items from my wife's Dutch iTunes account. The 'Purchased' tab is now there, it just keeps telling me to try again later.

Works for me now, both in iTunes on the Mac and on my iPhone.

 

[blow45]

quick question for itunes match:

why not for audibooks too???? (and to a lesser extent podcasts and itunes u)

 

[Henk Poley]

Say I have this setup:

(1) My MacBook with podcasts that sync to my iPhone.
(2) Mac at home with my full music collection, that I stream when at home.

Can I just enable iTunes Match at (2) and on my iPhone? Or does that break syncing of the podcasts?

Edit: also. given that I have a couple of rare Dutch albums, is there a problem with storage requirements on Apple's side? Or is that included in the €25?

Edit2: Answers:

You can enable iTunes Match on multiple iTunes installations
There is a storage limit based on number of songs. But iTunes Match will subtract any songs that are already know in the iTunes database. The remaining portion of songs should be less than 25 000.
Podcasts and playlists are synced to iPods and iPhones from a single iTunes installation.

 

[Ballis]

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Bah. Still nothing in Scandinavia :-(

 

[striker33]

Don't even bother with this service. Match will never successfully match all of your songs, even if your whole library is ripped from CD. You'll then spend hours, days, maybe even weeks downloading as many different sources of certain tracks just to get the thing to match it properly.

Most of my CDs for example have many tracks that werent matched, purely because on the CD, the tracks are correctly split, where as on itunes, Apple have decided that they need merging before they are suitable to be added to the store.

And then even if everything is correct, i.e. track name / length / artist etc, then you need to pray to the gods that it actually does match.

After a week and a half of hard work, I've managed to get it from 1000+ unmatched songs down to about 77. The remaining 77 are proving impossible to match.

 

[ombrenelcielo]

this should come soon to Finland or I will open a US account soon!

 

[om1]

Don't even bother with this service. Match will never successfully match all of your songs, even if your whole library is ripped from CD. You'll then spend hours, days, maybe even weeks downloading as many different sources of certain tracks just to get the thing to match it properly.

Most of my CDs for example have many tracks that werent matched, purely because on the CD, the tracks are correctly split, where as on itunes, Apple have decided that they need merging before they are suitable to be added to the store.

And then even if everything is correct, i.e. track name / length / artist etc, then you need to pray to the gods that it actually does match.

After a week and a half of hard work, I've managed to get it from 1000+ unmatched songs down to about 77. The remaining 77 are proving impossible to match.

Why? If they do not match, just upload them and be done with it.

 

[Floris]

Terms of Services in many countries changed to

"do not upload pirated content >> you go jail!"

Since downloading in the Netherlands for personal use is ok, but uploading is not, small catch22.

 

[Cybbe]

Don't even bother with this service. Match will never successfully match all of your songs, even if your whole library is ripped from CD. You'll then spend hours, days, maybe even weeks downloading as many different sources of certain tracks just to get the thing to match it properly.

...

After a week and a half of hard work, I've managed to get it from 1000+ unmatched songs down to about 77. The remaining 77 are proving impossible to match.

It matched about 10000 of 13000 songs, acquired via a variety of primarily non-commercial sources. That's not great but about as expected.

But I don't understand why you need everything matched. You can still upload unmatched songs. If you use iTunes match to upgrade low bitrate songs then fair enough, but its still a decent deal for cleaning up an old music library with songs of dubious ripped quality.

 

[milo]

Oh, you poor things.

Shame Apple didn't work more of the bugs out first before expanding the release.

 

[rstansby]

There is a storage limit based on number of songs. But iTunes Match will subtract any songs that are already know in the iTunes database. The remaining portion of songs should be less than 25 000.

WRONG!
The songs you have purchased from iTuned don't count towards the 25,000. All other songs do (regardless of whether apple has them in their database.

 

[ossifer]

After a week and a half of hard work, I've managed to get it from 1000+ unmatched songs down to about 77. The remaining 77 are proving impossible to match.

Don't you understand? You're now supposed buy the remaining 77 tracks from the iTunes Store™...

 

[frumpsnake]

Removing iTunes-purchased songs from the list, I have 17,873 songs to match.

15,366 (86%) were correctly matched, 2481 (13.9%) were uploaded, and 26 (0.1%) are "Inelligible". Of those, 24 of those are silent/gap tracks I don't care about. Only 2 of them are actual songs with extended periods of silence that cause the average bitrate to drop too low. I haven't bothered to re-rip them yet.

There are some strange instances where the majority of an album's tracks are matched but a few are uploaded. Some of them are understandable like country-specific bonus tracks, others are just odd, but overall I'd say 95% of my music was either matched correctly or isn't available in iTunes and can't be matched anyway.

The "inelligible" bitrate limitation is annoying considering it serves no purpose (I presume you can take your crappy low-bitrate Napster MP3s, transcode them to 320K, match them, and replace with iTunes versions) but other than that...

It's not without its flaws but it works well for me and definitely worth the inconvenience of only matching the majority of my music.

 

[trrll]

Match performance

In my library of 18,000-odd songs, almost all of which I personally ripped, I'm getting a failed match frequency of under 1%. That seems pretty good to me. And I'm very impressed with the transparency. I can rip a CD at work and go home and play it on my AppleTV.

 

[Sandstorm]

I'm truly happy that Baltics are included. Now the only thing missing from our iTunes store is TV shows.

 

[ossifer]

Old CDs

In my library of 18,000-odd songs, almost all of which I personally ripped, I'm getting a failed match frequency of under 1%. That seems pretty good to me. And I'm very impressed with the transparency. I can rip a CD at work and go home and play it on my AppleTV.

Apparently the issue is how close your CD rip is to the current iTunes offering. If you bought the CD yesterday, it will very likely match everything. But if you're an old guy like me who bought most of his CD collection in the mid '80s, those albums have been re-issued multiple times, and don't match well...

This was the big draw for me -- getting improved quality through matches. Some of these early CDs (in the early era of CDs as a technology) were horribly produced. Some match, and the sound quality is distinctly better. But it's horrible to listen to a whole album and have half the songs be of low quality...

Unfortunately the best method I've found to correct this is to hunt for a different rip (or multiple) and try matching it... Second best method is manipulating tracks length and tags to match what iTunes currently has... Useless methods are re-ripping and format conversion... Of course another method would work perfectly--buying the unmatched songs, but my unmatched (or rather "should-have-matched") count is currently at 525 songs or about another $600 for this iTunes Match "service"...

 

[Daikyouju]

Hi everyone, i'm from Lima, Peru.

I feel really disappointed because today i purchased iTunes match service and after 20 attempts it was unable to match my library (around 7000 files) I tried everything on the apple discussions forum, recreating library, removing sc info folder, etc. and it just don't works.

For troubleshooting purposes, i had to remove all music, added back a couple of albums (28 songs in total) and tried matching just those 28 songs. No luck

Now i am upset because i had to remove ALL MY MUSIC from my library leaving just one file, and nothing!! hours upon hours of waiting for nothing. It's still stuck in Step 2. It is a waste of time.

BTW, i'm on an iMac 21'5 (mid 2011) with 16GB RAM, latest version of iTunes (10.5.2 64bit)

So i am sorry to say so but i've realized that iTunes Match is a flawed service. Hope they refund me as requested otherwise it will be a complete scam.