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I understand curtisinoc. I'm right with you there. It would be hard to estimate how many of those fine customizations I've made to tags over the years to unify how everything appears, works with other stuff (even :apple:TV lists) and so on. It would be a fantastic (even Apple-like) touch to leverage our own tagging adaptations linked to the underlying audio track when ours differs somewhat from theirs. That might be hoping for too much, but it would sure be a nice touch.
 
I understand curtisinoc. I'm right with you there. It would be hard to estimate how many of those fine customizations I've made to tags over the years to unify how everything appears, works with other stuff (even :apple:TV lists) and so on. It would be a fantastic (even Apple-like) touch to leverage our own tagging adaptations linked to the underlying audio track when ours differs somewhat from theirs. That might be hoping for too much, but it would sure be a nice touch.

Well stated . . who knows???? Maybe they already thought of this, but I doubt it :rolleyes:
 
People are talking what about pirated music?

Well to me people will pirate music. The music industry can't stop it. They just sue the ones who sell the pirated tracks. But Jonny home pirater who just uses the pirate tracks for his own entertainment will never get sued. it would cost the record industry more in lawyers fees then they would get back in a successful settlement.

So this $25 I say is a pittance of a fee. But it's a way of generating income from pirated music. I'm sure Apple is just using this money in part to upkeep the icloud servers. Apple figured out a way to get cash out of people who pirated (avoided paying for the music). The record industry got no money from the pirates. So +1 to Apple for a pretty nifty idea.

And on the other side the pirates have the piece of mind of legitimising their music. Sure it's not for the audiophiles. For most people who could not afford or chose not to pay for music in the past, it's a great deal. $25 to in essence legitimise our past crimes. Anyone who complains about this is either not the intended target audience of this service or just unfairly paying out a good service.

And about the Amazon/Google services. I'm sure the record industry lawyers are busy at work trying to find a way to find any little law they have broken so they can clamp down on them. But lucky for Amazon/Google the loophole they are using seems pretty solid for the time being.

It really shows the character of Apple here. Sure Apple is not god. But they didn't follow the same immoral path of Amazon/Google. They struck up the deal with the record industry. They did the right thing. To make sure all parties are involved and happy.

When this $25 service comes to Australia will I get it? Heck yes. It's brilliant. 25K songs a year and not 25K forever would make it even better. But I think time will tell which it is.

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And I have a question.
What if itunes match gets it wrong? And incorrectly tags my songs and I get the wrong stuff in return? I've often thrown in CDs into itunes and what itunes says the CD is, is very wrong. To this end I'm going to make a backup of my itunes folder before I do this itunes match just incase it gets a few wrong. Then I can get the borked up matched tracks from the backup.

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This thread is filled with iOS users jubilant that they now think they can covert their illegally downloaded files.
Of cause. Apple found a way to make money off the pirates. That is something the record industry could not do.

Also it makes more money of people people who actually bought the CDs from the store. Sure I could re rip them in 256 AAC. But finding and ripping almost 1K cds (many of which are singles) would take a very long time. I'm sure many people would be willing to pay $25 to have it all done for them and much quicker too.

Sure there are many ways to cheat the system. But I'm sure Apple is not worried about one or 2 tracks. But for the large libraries it would take either too much time or too much expertise for the average person to do. Mush easier to just pay the $25 and get Apple to do all the work for you.

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Another question.
Sure the Match will find tracks with exactly the same meta data as in the cloud. But what about people like me? I've edited the track titles and other various parts of the store bought cd ripped tracks I own. Will these meta data edited tracks be correctly matched or even matched at all from the cloud?

I don't want to have to re-edit 2k+ tracks one by one to be just how the cloud likes them to get the match. I think this is something we will find out in due course.

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If this is a streaming service from the cloud. It'll use our bandwidth. Say hypothetically 2MB per minute of music. And say 4 weeks a month. That's 168 hours in a week x 4 weeks x 2MB a minute. That's 1344MB a month if you stream the 256 AAC every second of the day. That's ok for most Mac users. But for iOS users who are on like 500MB a month and stuff like that, this could seriously eat into their bandwidth caps. That's if this is taken to be a streaming service and not an file upgrade service.

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I just had another idea.

If this is a streaming service it would do 2 things.
1. Make the ipod classic less attractive to purchase.
2. Make the smaller flash HD iOS devices much more popular.

You could have your 20,000 music list on your 16GB iOS device. And listen to any track you want. You'd just need enough free ram (or whatever) to buffer the stream. And you're good to go. So you would need to have a 160GB hard drive in your pocket (ipod classic) to have all your tracks at your fingertips.

Sure having a device spitting out 3G and Wi-Fi so close to your crotch all day makes me a little nervous. But it could push more sales of the iOS devices. People then could have one device with all their apps, and whatever on it, and all of their music (through icloud streaming) on it too.
 
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Has anyone noticed that Apple isn't counting songs you get free on iTunes (i.e. free song of the week, Starbucks, etc) as purchased items?

It shows under the purchased section but is not included in the "re-download purchased items" section.
 
The ONLY model that fits with everything that was shown at the WWDC keynote and which also fits everything that Apple has yet posted on the topic indicates that iTunes Match will be a download/sync service that won't support streaming. That's it, and if you argue for anything else you are just introducing your own assumptions or rationalizations about the service (given what we actually know at this point in time, this could change with clarifications from Apple).

Now, the question of what songs will be matched is another issue. Perhaps Apple has developed a method to eliminate content which has come from the most commonly pirated sources (I doubt it). Maybe they are thinking that anyone who has pirated a large amount of music would think twice about allowing Apple to scan their entire collection. In fact, the terms of use for iTunes Match might actually address the pirating issue (i.e. "Warning, the music will be randomly checked for pirated content."). How would they do this, I don't know. But just a little FUD could prevent the significant pirates from trying to use iTunes Match.

In any case, I put my bet on the fact that iTunes Match will be a simple download/sync service just like the remainder of Apple's iCloud.

Another unanswered question might be what happens if you have protected iTunes content in the old 128Kbps format and you subscribe to the iTunes Match service. My GUESS is that nothing happens, you won't get downloads to replace those songs in the new iTunes Plus format. Is that somewhat of a slight or insult to the existing iTunes customers who may still have a large amount of this lower-quality, DRM'd content? Yes, probably, but you still get the automatic sync for that music without even having to pay for iTunes Match.
 
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One can only presume Apple worked out a deal with the record labels in the US. Jobs did say matching is for music owned by the user. He did not say pirated music would be "forgiven" if you use iCloud.

For what I can see, iCloud gives more evidence that pirates do not own the music in the first place.

I see the $24.99 an attempt at getting some money that they aren't going to get in the first place.

Australian Newspaper

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/mp3s/apple-icloud-legitimises-music-pirates-20110607-1fq76.html

Copyright law expert and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland Kimberlee Weatherall said that even if people passed their pirated music collections through iCloud they could still be targeted.

"You could still be sued for the act of downloading, which involves the making of an unauthorised copy not covered by any licences Apple might have," Weatherall said.

"It makes sense for the labels to license and get a cut from these uses – at present, they get nothing from any unauthorised downloads and uses of unauthorised downloads."
 
Why are people talking about streaming? Match has been fairly clearly described as a replication and storage service. The intention is that any music you've ripped into your iTunes library yourself at less than 256kbps AAC will be overwritten on all your Apple devices with a perfect 256kbps AAC copy direct from the publisher. At any time you will be able to erase the song from a device and be free to download it from iCloud again. There is no streaming service; no streaming service was announced. I watched the whole Keynote and I've read a fair few tech articles today so I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed.

I think this is ideal for me as it will allow me to store my ripped CD at reasonable quality in the cloud and I won't have to worry about backing it up at home saving a lot of money on disk space and time and hassle trying to fix rips that haven't worked which is a real PITA. I will bite Steve Job's hand off to pay as little as $25 for this service. A professional ripping service in the UK will charge £1000 for 350 albums on a 1TB disk. That's a lot of years at $25 for 25,000 songs although, of course, Apple only has to store each song once for all of us plus a row per song owned by each customer on its database somewhere.

I'm a bit of an audiophile and I really want my collection ripped to lossless FLAC but for listening on the move through my iPhone, 256kbps AAC is a perfect size to quality compromise not to mention the sheer simplicity of propagating the library over my MBA, iMac, iPhone and iPad. Apple has some real thinkers working for it and Amazon and Google won't be catching up for a long time I'm sad to say.
 
Why are people talking about streaming? Match has been fairly clearly described as a replication and storage service. The intention is that any music you've ripped into your iTunes library yourself at less than 256kbps AAC will be overwritten on all your Apple devices with a perfect 256kbps AAC copy direct from the publisher. At any time you will be able to erase the song from a device and be free to download it from iCloud again. There is no streaming service; no streaming service was announced. I watched the whole Keynote and I've read a fair few tech articles today so I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed.

I think this is ideal for me as it will allow me to store my ripped CD at reasonable quality in the cloud and I won't have to worry about backing it up at home saving a lot of money on disk space and time and hassle trying to fix rips that haven't worked which is a real PITA. I will bite Steve Job's hand off to pay as little as $25 for this service. A professional ripping service in the UK will charge £1000 for 350 albums on a 1TB disk. That's a lot of years at $25 for 25,000 songs although, of course, Apple only has to store each song once for all of us plus a row per song owned by each customer on its database somewhere.

I'm a bit of an audiophile and I really want my collection ripped to lossless FLAC but for listening on the move through my iPhone, 256kbps AAC is a perfect size to quality compromise not to mention the sheer simplicity of propagating the library over my MBA, iMac, iPhone and iPad. Apple has some real thinkers working for it and Amazon and Google won't be catching up for a long time I'm sad to say.

Is my iMac considered a "device"? I think that's the main question still. Does this "upgrade" your original library for people with lower resolution rips. Hell a lot of my library is 128kbps AAC CONVERTED from MP3. There is mucho room for improvement.
 
In US does itunes have full coverage of music? In Japan, not all record labels are onboard with itunes. I guess these will need to be uploaded to the cloud from your mac/pc?
 
Has anyone seen anywhere if it will be possible to buy extra cloud space and if so for how much?.
The 5gb for free is a nice size, and apparently items bought from itunes won't count towards this but for thoise of us that has 25gb+ of music that has been imported from CD's more space will be a requirement.
 
Is my iMac considered a "device"? I think that's the main question still. Does this "upgrade" your original library for people with lower resolution rips. Hell a lot of my library is 128kbps AAC CONVERTED from MP3. There is mucho room for improvement.

I would say so. After all, iPad 2 and soon iPhone 4S/5 have dual core CPUs and are as powerful as fairly recent general purpose netbooks It's not a demotion of the iMac but a convergence of desktop, laptop and pocket devices into a general purpose computing device category IMHO, each suited to specific use cases and all connected via the cloud. It's been a long time coming though. This type of ubiquitous computing whereby your own unique, configuration can be replicated across any device was envisaged a long time ago.
 
Personally all I see is having to pay 25 bucks to Apple so that they move some music between devices... I can do that myself and it's not as tedious as SJ put it to be. I do like the 256kbit upgrade though.
 
Has anyone seen anywhere if it will be possible to buy extra cloud space and if so for how much?.
The 5gb for free is a nice size, and apparently items bought from itunes won't count towards this but for thoise of us that has 25gb+ of music that has been imported from CD's more space will be a requirement.
I might be wrong, but I think if you sign up for iTunes Match, the limit is in number of songs, not in GB. The free 5GB is just for documents etc, afaik.

But it would be interesting to find out if there will be upgrade options for "iDisk" space.
 
I *tried* reading through this thread. Most of it is conjecture or extrapolation of the ambiguous information supplied by Apple. Everyone is doing their best to understand. It's frustrating although since this doesn't officially launch for a few months (iOS5 anyway) I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I don't think this can be definitely answered but...

My understanding (probably wrong) if you pay the $25/yr.
> The cloud app scans your music and identifies the music per its "massive library".
> Any songs not originally purchased by iTunes will be "matched" to the legitimate iTunes copy.
> Any of my songs not found will be uploaded to the cloud.
> All of my iDevices will look to the cloud (assuming I permit it) and any music not on the device will be downloaded to the device so that all devices are in sync with what is in the cloud. These songs will be in Apple's AAC 256 bit rate format except for the ones uploaded which will remain as is.
> I can cancel my subscription and *keep* the shiny new iTunes approved music?

I wonder how it handles it when a device is full? Can I choose which items to sync? The 256 bit rate AAC files are going to be larger than many of what I have now so odds are their total storage will exceed the size of one or more of my devices. :confused::confused:
 
Sorry if this has been mentioned elsewhere, but I think the talk about a piracy amnesty (effectively) is a case of jumping the gun?, isn't it the case that when you rip a cd that you own using iTunes it places iTunes meta data into the encode files, perhaps that's how they are matching, by decoding the meta data into the grace note ID (and perhaps using acoustic fingerprinting) to determine the track?

I would not be surprised if it only applies to music ripped using iTunes, so music gathered from other means would not be matched (although would still be uploaded as part of the 25,000 limit). Still, it would be a pleasant surprise if this where not the case.
 
I *tried* reading through this thread. Most of it is conjecture or extrapolation of the ambiguous information supplied by Apple. Everyone is doing their best to understand. It's frustrating although since this doesn't officially launch for a few months (iOS5 anyway) I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I don't think this can be definitely answered but...

My understanding (probably wrong) if you pay the $25/yr.
> The cloud app scans your music and identifies the music per its "massive library".
> Any songs not originally purchased by iTunes will be "matched" to the legitimate iTunes copy.
> Any of my songs not found will be uploaded to the cloud.
> All of my iDevices will look to the cloud (assuming I permit it) and any music not on the device will be downloaded to the device so that all devices are in sync with what is in the cloud. These songs will be in Apple's AAC 256 bit rate format except for the ones uploaded which will remain as is.
> I can cancel my subscription and *keep* the shiny new iTunes approved music?

I wonder how it handles it when a device is full? Can I choose which items to sync? The 256 bit rate AAC files are going to be larger than many of what I have now so odds are their total storage will exceed the size of one or more of my devices. :confused::confused:
I think it's going to be like the "Purchased" tab is in the iTunes app - you'll see all of your music in there and you choose what you want to have on your device, it downloads, and, I would presume, there'll be a "remove" function as well. It has to function how iTunes functions on computers now - you have to have the choice of what you want and how much - or else this is a complete failure.

As for cancelling and keeping the files, I think people are being tremendously naive about this. Apple's going to lock this down with some kind of safeguard - DRM, whatever you want to call it - to prevent exactly this from happening. They're not stupid.
 
I think everyone should read this. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2...bout-itunes-match-your-questions-answered.ars

There are no loopholes as I wrote earlier. The service is exactly as Apple described it. Even pirated music counts. So technically we can upgrade any mp3s that we have in less than 256 to 256. For me this is fantastic as over half of my collection of 15,000 songs is less than 256!

Very nice, thanks for sharing that link.

It makes sense if you think about it. Music you downloaded, got from a friend or otherwise obtained without paying is in your possession already so the RIAA/artists have no chance of ever collecting royalties from that music. Suddenly, all these people pony up $25 - even if only for one year - to legitimize those music files and they get a least something and even a 3 year old will tell you when it comes to money, something always beats nothing.

They'll never recoup the money they would have received if people bought all that music to begin with but there are millions of :apple: iPod. iPhone, iPad owners so that $25 can add up to quite a hefty sum!
 
Cap.

I honestly call this DOA because we have to pay a $25 a year label tax. Compared to Google Music same 20k worth of songs is 100% free. Apple we have to pay $25 a year to have access to the same songs we already paid for.

Google stuff is in beta and not may folks have it (developers mainly). Once, it is out of beta, we will learn the price. I have read somewhere that it is streaming the higher quality songs they match for non-itune music. So, they are not giving you those versions.

It is better to download a song. That way you can re-listen to it over and over for a period of time. Googles' way is that you would have to upload all of your songs and stream constantly. Way isp are capping our bandwidth, apple's solution is better.

If you have a lot of music, itune match is for you. If you have 250 songs, it cost ten cents per song. If you have more than 1000 songs, it is basically free. It cost less than .001.

For me, itune match is cool, not needed. I listen to radio or whatever. Pandora is for me. I like the idea that I can re-download a music that I have bought from itune.
 
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For all you posters asking about pirated music...PLEASE DEFINE PIRATED MUSIC.

It's pretty straight forward really; any music you have acquired in a way that is not sanctioned by the copyright holder, which in most cases means music that you haven't paid for (if the copyright holder chooses to give it away for free, ofcourse it's not pirated)
 
I'm just pointing out sources for free audiobooks and software.
And as I posted earlier, people with 20,000 digital songs are most likely pirates. Not all. But a crushing majority. Most people don't own 2000 albums that they have ripped, nor have they bought 2000 albums on iTunes.

I am one of those people who have 2000 CDs and have ripped every one of them to my iTunes library. I only have about 200 songs purchased from Apple and another 1000 off Amazon (many sample albums and a few large classical album collections). I downloaded the new iTunes and can see all my old purchases with the little cloud icon on my iPad. I even downloaded a few. When the Cloud is available I will buy and see how much of my music will be matched. I ripped my music at 360VBR so it's more of a convience to be able to load off the cloud if I forget to add something to my Pad. A lot of my music I would not even have to load as I don't currently listen to it but I simply keep everything backed up.
 
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