How to Use iTunes Match

[MacRumors]

For $24.99 per year, or about two dollars per month, iTunes Match keeps all of your music in iCloud so you can access any song at any time from any device instead of picking and downloading your favorite playlists every time you sync your device. Plus, Apple will provide you with high quality playback using 256 Kbps AAC DRM free versions of your music, even if your original copy was lower quality.

Some users may not be entirely familiar with how the service works, so we've put together this tutorial that explains the process of how to subscribe to and use iTunes Match on your computer and iOS devices.

How iTunes Match Works

In November 2011, Apple released iTunes Match in the United States, gradually expanding availability over time and now offering the subscription service in over 115 countries. The service is designed to let you store up to 25,000 songs in iCloud that can be accessed from any Apple device at any time. Music you have purchased through the iTunes Store does not count against your maximum capacity.

Every song that you've added to your music library in iTunes via CD or digital download, including music from the iTunes Store or another source, can be stored in iTunes Match.

Once you have subscribed to the service, iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store, and those songs are automatically added to iCloud. Songs that don't exist in the iTunes Store already are uploaded to iCloud from your computer. Once songs are made available via iCloud, you can play back music on any device that your Apple ID is connected to. Up to 10 devices are supported.

On a PC or Mac, music is streamed over the air, although you can download songs to your computer by selecting the iCloud download button. On iOS, songs download to your device as they are played, and you can also manually download music by tapping the iCloud download button. You can only stream songs on Apple TV.


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Article Link: How to Use iTunes Match

 

[Derekuda]

Itunes match is a waste of money when you have services like google play which let you store thousands of songs in the cloud for free.

 

[kirky29]

Personally I find iTunes match to work sometimes...and then sometimes not...

I switched to Google music about two years ago, its fast, cheap and just great....

 

[DavidTheExpert]

Yet ANOTHER link bait garbage article from Lory Gil. Every one of her articles starts with "How to..." with information that is already easily available directly from Apple's website and a million other blogs. It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

 

[rcouter]

Some songs won't match

I have over 12,000 songs in iTunes match. It is frustrating when I add a newly purchased CD that is ripped and iTunes matches 7 or 8 of the 12 songs on the CD. Going into the iTunes store and verifying the CD is in fact there just makes me even more frustrated!

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

If only it worked as advertised. Instead most experience nothing but problems with it.

Had it for a year. Always failed to fully complete the process because of random errors and just randomly stopping. Called Apple and they wanted me to pay an additional $19.99 for the single support incident to solve the issue. So pay $25 for the service then $20 more to make it work as it's suppose to.

 

[talmy]

I signed up solely to clean up my old low-res music. For that it was worth the $25. I've got no interest is storing in the "cloud" so after the initial up then down load I never used iTunes Match again. On the other hand I like iTunes Radio, and I guess I'm the only one.

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It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

I'm looking forward to these!

 

[viettanium]

50.000 songs limit, please!

 

[evil_santa]

I find that I have to log out then back in almost every time I use it on my MBA, makes it almost unusable!

 

[seanjs]

What happens when you reach the 25k limit? How do you manage your songs then? Can you select which 25k songs to match? I'm about to hit my limit and have no idea what to expect.

 

[26139]

Huh?

Has worked great for me.

Yearly fee alone was worth it to upgrade all my low-quality stuff.

 

[elmateo487]

Yet ANOTHER link bait garbage article from Lory Gil. Every one of her articles starts with "How to..." with information that is already easily available directly from Apple's website and a million other blogs. It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

Dude. You are spewing hate. Chill

 

[2457282]

I hope that they reconcile this with iCloud drive. These two don't make sense. At least have itunes match and then throw that in for free if you sign up for iCloud drive. Otherwise, I need to move my music to icloud drive and dump itunes match.

 

[WildCowboy]

Yet ANOTHER link bait garbage article from Lory Gil. Every one of her articles starts with "How to..." with information that is already easily available directly from Apple's website and a million other blogs. It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

It's safe to say we won't be going that far.

We have such a great forum community here dedicated to discussion and troubleshooting, so we thought how-tos would be a natural extension of what people are already talking about in the forums and why many people even come to MacRumors in the first place.

It's still early and we're still feeling out what directions to take with these, but so far they are proving fairly popular.

Not every article is going to appeal to every reader, but we're hoping to develop a good mix to target the vastly different types of people who visit the site on any given day. Feedback (particularly constructive) is always appreciated.

 

[3282869]

Plus, Apple will provide you with high quality playback using 256 Kbps AAC DRM free versions of your music, even if your original copy was lower quality.

Yet if the track is above 256Kbps, it will lower the matched quality.

 

[seamer]

It's safe to say we won't be going that far.

We have such a great forum community here dedicated to discussion and troubleshooting, so we thought how-tos would be a natural extension of what people are already talking about in the forums and why many people even come to MacRumors in the first place.

It's still early and we're still feeling out what directions to take with these, but so far they are proving fairly popular.

Not every article is going to appeal to every reader, but we're hoping to develop a good mix to target the vastly different types of people who visit the site on any given day. Feedback (particularly constructive) is always appreciated.

I've been using Match since it came out and I still don't know how it works at a deeper level. My Apple TV never seems to want to update its music cache, and play counts made on a device set to streaming over MM never seems to update play counts on my main computer. More explanation in areas like this would help.

 

[gtkriz]

I don't get it really. I can do everything described in that article, yet I have no iTunes Match-subscription. I can access all my music on all devices by clicking on the little clouds without having the actual files on the device.

So I wonder... what does iTunes Match actually do?

 

[rikscha]

My artwork keeps disappearing which is highly annoying. Every now and then I make the effort to add back all the missing artwork, only to discover a week later that some other artwork has been deleted...

Even for matched music this happens all the time. before I went in the cloud, I had artwork for all my music, well, not anymore..

P.s. i even corrected a lot of my old artwork, artwork that didn't have the correct format (600x600).
I deleted the old artwork and replaced it with a complete different one.
after a week or so the old deleted one would reappear. what a joke.

 

[WildCowboy]

What happens when you reach the 25k limit? How do you manage your songs then? Can you select which 25k songs to match? I'm about to hit my limit and have no idea what to expect.

From what I've seen, iTunes doesn't handle things particularly gracefully when you hit the limit. It starts generating server errors and the like.

You can't manually select which songs to include in iTunes Match...it's all of your library or nothing. So once you get up to the limit, really the only solution if you want to keep using it is to split your library into two. It's not ideal.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201596

 

[bddddat]

It works great for me except for when I download and add in new music (which I do very regularly). I always get an error message and have to sign out of iTunes and then sign back in and reactivate iTunes match. It's an annoying cycle.

 

[WildCowboy]

I don't get it really. I can do everything described in that article, yet I have no iTunes Match-subscription. I can access all my music on all devices by clicking on the little clouds without having the actual files on the device.

So I wonder... what does iTunes Match actually do?

You must be talking about iTunes-purchased music, which is accessible on all devices through iTunes in the Cloud.

iTunes Match is a similar experience, but for all of your ripped and downloaded music acquired from outside of iTunes.

 

[user418]

I signed up solely to clean up my old low-res music. For that it was worth the $25. I've got no interest is storing in the "cloud" so after the initial up then down load I never used iTunes Match again. On the other hand I like iTunes Radio, and I guess I'm the only one.



I'm looking forward to these!

Hmmmm, never thought about that. So even after you discontinue iTunes Match the 256 Kbps AAC DRM versions of my library that I downloaded from iCloud do not convert back to the original lower quality ones? Thank you for that information.

 

[gtkriz]

You must be talking about iTunes-purchased music, which is accessible on all devices through iTunes in the Cloud.

iTunes Match is a similar experience, but for all of your ripped and downloaded music acquired from outside of iTunes.

ah... got it, thanks... actually it is 98% iTunes-purchased music, only a couple of albums ripped from CD that are not available on iTunes (although those are also available through iTunes in the Cloud).

 

[captain cadet]

Some users may not be entirely familiar with hoe the service works,

Should that be how?

 

[mKTank]

Itunes match is a waste of money when you have services like google play which let you store thousands of songs in the cloud for free.

You don't really get it then.