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'iTunes Match' Allows Both Streaming and Downloading of Music
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Would you care to explain how Apple or anyone for that matter would be able to determine if a track was ripped from a CD or downloaded legally or illegally?
I think that the Music industry has finally come around to the obvious conclusion that they can't do anything to stop people downloading music illegally. Apple is paying them a butt-load of money to enable this service. I'm sure one of the big arguments that Apple made during negotiations was that you will now be able to get some income from those songs that are part of our user's libraries.
I have a few questions I'd love to get answers on:
1) Will iTunes Match make podcasts downloaded in the podcast section of my iTunes available for streaming & download?
2) Someone on the forums indicated that iTunes Match will allow for playlist streaming, but they also said something about playlists playing from track one. Does that mean that when using iTunes Match to stream a playlist, you won't be able to enable the "shuffle" feature?
3) Assuming that playlists are accessible through iTunes Match, if I have a song in my iTunes library that I've also put in 3 different playlists, would that count as 1 track from my 25,000 cap or would it count as 4 tracks (with the playlist uses also counted towards the cap)?
4) Last question, and I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this one, but I'm just double checking - will iTunes Match only be a feature of iOS 5, and therefore not available to owners of the iphone 3G? Anything above iOS 4.2 is not supported on 3G.
Thanks if anyone can provide any answers to this stuff!
1) Will iTunes Match make podcasts downloaded in the podcast section of my iTunes available for streaming & download?
2) Someone on the forums indicated that iTunes Match will allow for playlist streaming, but they also said something about playlists playing from track one. Does that mean that when using iTunes Match to stream a playlist, you won't be able to enable the "shuffle" feature?
3) Assuming that playlists are accessible through iTunes Match, if I have a song in my iTunes library that I've also put in 3 different playlists, would that count as 1 track from my 25,000 cap or would it count as 4 tracks (with the playlist uses also counted towards the cap)?
4) Last question, and I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this one, but I'm just double checking - will iTunes Match only be a feature of iOS 5, and therefore not available to owners of the iphone 3G? Anything above iOS 4.2 is not supported on 3G.
Thanks if anyone can provide any answers to this stuff!
On 4), it's doubtful. Since the music app in iOS 5 is what supports it, they'd have to release a special update to 4.2 to allow for that. You're probably SOL.
I bet they upload the lossless to the server and downconvert to the 256 for streaming
google music beta does the same (but down to 320)
You're gonna have to explain this to everyone.
Back on topic, though, beyond upgrading all your songs, I just don't see the point of this. ATM, I've got 20 gigs of my music on my phone. I hit shuffle and I'm listening all day. Why would I not want music actually on my phone again? No data plan on earth is going to allow for streaming my own stuff back to me all day.
I love the idea of iTunes match, but I suspect it is a giant ball of lawsuits just waiting to explode. iTunes watermarks all of your tracks with your Apple ID, so all it takes is for your account to get compromised or your iPod stolen, and all of a sudden your entire match library is a torrent. Get ready to say hello to the RIAA at that point, and good luck trying to prove you didn't upload those tracks.
Thanks for the info. Is there any sort of "upgrade" process where lower bitrate files are automatically (or manually) swapped to the 256 files? If so, does it keep both versions or delete the lower bitrate version?
Other questions...
Do playlists, star ratings, play count, last played, tags (including things like comments and lyrics) stay intact on the computer? And on mobile devices, do user star ratings show up for downloaded or streamed songs, and are tags the ones from Apple or the ones on the user's home machine (I know getting the proper tags from home is probably a stretch but certainly possible)?
And what about smart playlists, are they able to update on the fly with mobile devices and automatically fetch songs? Do streamed plays update the play count and last played data?
It would be great if people who have access to the beta could test some of these things out - thanks in advance.
In the case of libraries with more than 25k songs, they REALLY need to add some user controls for excluding things. Even without the limit, there are lots of things that I simply don't want uploaded because I'd never want them on the road.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
Seen it asked a few times but have not seen an answer yet. Can anyone describe how custom tagging or artwork are handled?
Are corrected/custom tags retained when browsing iCloud?
If you download a file from iCloud, does it arrive with your custom tags to match others that may already be on your device, or does it arrive with iTunes default stuff.
What about songs that iTunes might recognize as existing on multiple albums (ie, the same song could appear on the original album, multiple compilations, soundtracks, etc) Will the service properly recognize and file the song where you had it?
Thanks for any insight...
Seen it asked a few times but have not seen an answer yet. Can anyone describe how custom tagging or artwork are handled?
Are corrected/custom tags retained when browsing iCloud?
If you download a file from iCloud, does it arrive with your custom tags to match others that may already be on your device, or does it arrive with iTunes default stuff.
What about songs that iTunes might recognize as existing on multiple albums (ie, the same song could appear on the original album, multiple compilations, soundtracks, etc) Will the service properly recognize and file the song where you had it?
Thanks for any insight...
I have 3100 songs that I personally ripped with EAC and converted to ALAC. I have been unsuccessful in completing the iTunes match process, as each attempt it gets to 99% on step 2 and then stalls.
However, when i access my iTunes match library via another Mac or one of my idevices, i can see the majority of my music and I have the option to stream or download. What is especially interesting is that when i download the songs from the cloud, it downloads my original ALAC version with an additional meta tag that contains my account name. This has been the case so far with every song I have downloaded. My library is over 80 gigs, and the appleid i am using for iTunes match has not been converted to iCloud. Therefore, it seems there is no storage limit at present for housing songs that did not find a match.
edit: The uploaded music retained my album art and meta tags.
However, when i access my iTunes match library via another Mac or one of my idevices, i can see the majority of my music and I have the option to stream or download. What is especially interesting is that when i download the songs from the cloud, it downloads my original ALAC version with an additional meta tag that contains my account name. This has been the case so far with every song I have downloaded. My library is over 80 gigs, and the appleid i am using for iTunes match has not been converted to iCloud. Therefore, it seems there is no storage limit at present for housing songs that did not find a match.
edit: The uploaded music retained my album art and meta tags.
Why is streaming such a big deal, versus downloading? I figure I would rather load up the iPod with a bunch of stuff and listen to it; when I get bored I can dump some of what's on there and download more. It also means I can listen to a song more than once without using more data. An explanation why streaming is better please?
You're gonna have to explain this to everyone.
Back on topic, though, beyond upgrading all your songs, I just don't see the point of this. ATM, I've got 20 gigs of my music on my phone. I hit shuffle and I'm listening all day. Why would I not want music actually on my phone again? No data plan on earth is going to allow for streaming my own stuff back to me all day.
Steal the music yourself and check to see if it is bit by bit identical i guess. not an efficient method though.
Frees up space on your iphone/ipod touch for apps, movies, games, photos etc. It also allows you to buy a smaller iphone. It also allows those with very large music collections to have access to all of it anywhere they have a data connection. It essentially gives your iphone an unlimited amount of storage when it comes to music (assuming you don't have data caps to worry about).
That being said, I still have unlimited data and downgraded to the $10 messaging plan on AT&T, so I'm in it for the long haul and a feature like this makes sense to me.
As I said earlier the "streaming" is more of a "buffering" than anything else because even if you stream a song it will wind up being listed under usage in your IOS usage preference.
You can go into the preferences for apps and see the amount of data that is stored on you IOS device and delete it accordingly.
Guessing that usage data is dynamically changed depending on the storage capacity.
Kind of like the Apple TV2
I'm still playing with this stuff so I'm not exactly sure though so take this with a grain of salt.
[edit]
Oh. For you folks getting the dreaded "error 4010" that is the genius error on the iTunes store.
[/edit]
Has anyone been able to determine the streaming quality? As much as I would appreciate 256kbps streaming (especially if I'm at home), it would be nice if it could be adjusted - especially for those with poor coverage/data caps.
You're gonna have to explain this to everyone.
Very simple. Checksums, both of the whole file, and also parts of it to make sure that adding/editing characters doesn't invalidate the checksum. There's also the tags added by the person/group who ripped the cd, and very simply, the filename.
Would this find every illegal copy? No. Would it find a lot of them, and most likely a huge majority? Yes.
Because most people who want to match their illegally downloaded songs won't spend the time to make sure that their illegal files can't be identified.
That's not a butt-load of money. Do you know how much money the music industry is getting from proper sales on iTunes? That's a butt-load of money.
I highly doubt that Apple made the argument that they would get 70% of $25 for 25,000 illegally downloaded songs. (And that's what the record company would get from Apple, what the artist would get....) BTW, that might be as little as $0.0007 per song and year... Compare that with the $0.69 or so for a song sold on iTunes. That's 985 times as much.
But if anyone actually can prove that Apple actually made the argument, I'd love to see it.
If you stream while on WiFi and store songs for off-line listening, just like you can do with Spotify, then this wouldn't be a problem for your data plan.
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I'd love to know why people would allow Apple to be able identify their files for matching but not to identify any illegal files. If their files are all legal, then what's the problem?
(This isn't the security camera in your home argument, it's the security camera in your home that doesn't report anything illegal you're doing argument...)
I imagine the better argument would be that all those files that are pirated get re-encoded with the user's Apple ID; thus, it would deter people from sharing / easier to find those who do share in the future.
I'm waiting on those
"But it has no blue ray" posts,
I kid, that's pretty cool. I have no real use to it for my personal use.
However they mentioned something about home sharing. If that means I can also listen to/get the songs from the people I am connected to on 'home sharing' then I will be really happy, because I will have access to a very large library
"But it has no blue ray" posts,
I kid, that's pretty cool. I have no real use to it for my personal use.
However they mentioned something about home sharing. If that means I can also listen to/get the songs from the people I am connected to on 'home sharing' then I will be really happy, because I will have access to a very large library
It's really not stealing if you're allowed to download it by the owner. RIAA (and also the MPAA for example) most likely has a large database of scene releases.