'iTunes Match' Allows Both Streaming and Downloading of Music

[bushido]

Glad to say I've successfully managed to register for the iTunes Match service even being out of the US (I'm in Singapore!) I can confirm that it asks for a US credit card but it will charge your account balance (as it did with mine) if you have sufficient to cover the costs of the service. I am neither a Mac or iOS developer and obtained the beta software through a alternative source. Also, it seems registration has been closed as I got the same message you did when I turned off and on the iTunes Match service (just exploring )

Can't say it's been very impressive though, it managed to 'match' a amazing *gasp* 280 songs out of 1188 songs from my VERY mainstream library. (Coldplay, Leona Lewis, U2, Lady Gaga etc.)

Attached is a screenshot

I do hope this is a 'beta' thing because the service needs alot of polishing before it can be released to the public.

damn yea thats what i'm getting. i guess they closed the loophole

 

[marksman]

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Assuming it is similar to Spotify a 2GB data plan would allow you to listen to about 18 hours a month.

Of course that is assuming you don't do anything else with your iPhone/iPad.

And you never use the ability to download music when on wifi to listen to it

 

[zstar]

So just so I read that correctly. You had your original Coldplay file (what was it originally, mp3?). You set up iTunes Match. You deleted the file from your computer (did it show up with the cloud icon in itunes then?). Then you downloaded the file and you found an AAC file in finder?

My Coldplay file was originally 196kbps mp3. I deleted it and the folder was empty. The cloud icon appeared. I clicked it and it started downloading. I obtained a 256kbps AAC and the purchase date was updated to the time where I downloaded it.

 

[scenemissing]

How does music 'look stolen'?

Believe me, it can. My boss had me review this help desk guy's computer he was writing up for having 40+ gigs of pirate movies on his work machine. Along with that were a bunch of mp3s. Now ask yourself if the following folder looks suspicious?

Jay-z.The_Black_Album.Mp3.R3LeaSeGroup.www.torrentsite.com

Or, if people normally embed torrent site info or "greets" in their ID3 tags.

Match will give you consistent artwork, tag structure, and bitrate as well. Totally laundered, and comes from a legitimate pay service.

 

[turbone]

Matched & converted tracks are coming back with the new type "Matched AAC audio file" and will contain your Name and Apple ID even if you bought (sort of ) them elsewhere.

Looking at my 11000+ Song library I'd say that about 80% is greyed out which probably means that there's no match available on iTunes for them and I'd have to upload them. Uploading seems to be disabled at the moment, so there's no way playing the greyed out tracks - not even on the Mac where the physical files remain. This seems a bit strange as there's no reason streaming the same file from a server if it's already on the disk. Not complaining here (yeah, I know it's beta), just wondering.

 

[marksman]

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I'm wondering if there are going to be nefarious programs out there that will try to "game" the system.

What I mean is, someone writes a program that makes an mp3 song file that "fools" the iTunes match system into thinking you have that song on your system...then it just automatically gives you that song from their iCloud servers.

Let's say I don't own "Oh Darlin" on Abbey Road by The Beatles. I fire up this hypothetical program, it makes a random mp3 file that's just noise, but it's the same size as "Oh Darlin" and has all the meta-data about the song attached to it and it puts it in my iTunes library. Then iTunes match comes along, see's "oh, he has "Oh Darlin" now, let's make available the 256-bit version to him on our servers". Wham...free song without having to go to Pirate Bay or wherever.

They have safe-guards against this? Just curious.

Yeah the safeguard is that it is not how they match songs.

 

[iCrizzo]

It only streams 1 song at a time right now. Beta of course and this could change once official.

Matching was fast.. but once it gets to step 3 it goes slow. This is where it uploads all the music that is not available on iTunes.

 

[JonHimself]

My Coldplay file was originally 196kbps mp3. I deleted it and the folder was empty. The cloud icon appeared. I clicked it and it started downloading. I obtained a 256kbps AAC and the purchase date was updated to the time where I downloaded it.

Awesome, thanks!

 

[Loge]

My Coldplay file was originally 196kbps mp3. I deleted it and the folder was empty. The cloud icon appeared. I clicked it and it started downloading. I obtained a 256kbps AAC and the purchase date was updated to the time where I downloaded it.

Good to know . It's consistent with the Apple press release which stated that you would get a replacement DRM-free 256kbps AAC.

Is the playcount preserved or do you start from scratch with the new file?

 

[OllyW]

I don't think I'll be bothering with the streaming. My monthly data allowance would be used up in 4 hours and 10 minutes if the streamed files are encoded at 256kbps.

 

[Jamie0003]

This is awesome, finally Apple is bringing iTunes completely in the Cloud.

I have a few questions though:

If you choose not to buy iTunes match, can you still stream the songs you have purchased from iTunes in the past?

Relating to that, if you bought iTunes match for a year, then stopped paying it, would you still be able to stream those songs? What about the songs that aren't in iTunes, would they be deleted off Apple's servers?

I really hope Apple brings this to the UK soon, as well as enables Match and streaming for TV Shows and Movies. I would love to be able to buy a DVD, rip it to my computer, and have it matched with the iTunes version. Will also make the Apple TV2 that much better.

I like iTunes but they charge way too much for movies, but i wouldn't mind paying a small fee like this to stream my ripped DVD's from apples servers.

 

[spazzcat]

I don't think I'll be bothering with the streaming. My monthly data allowance would be used up in 4 hours and 10 minutes if the streamed files are encoded at 256kbps.

I would be surprised if they streamed at that bit rate.

 

[UCF Sam]

I signed up last night and activated it on my home computer, but can't seem to activate iTunes match on my work computer, I just get "iTunes Match beta testing has begun with an initial set of developers. Over the next days, we will con tune to expand our testing. Please check back later to subscribe."

 

[GroundLoop]

Spotify = access to the full library of music that spottily hold on their servers - millions of songs.

iTunes Match = Access to ONLY the songs you have in your iTunes Library, NOT the full iTunes Store content.

Big difference.

Think of it this way....

You pay for a subscription to Spotify (or any other service) for one month ($5). Download/Stream Rip all of the songs you ever wanted that are available from that service. At the same time, have an iTunes Match account ($25) and have that service make all of the Spotify songs available to you in the cloud. Now you can redownload a permanent copy of your Spotify songs. Unlimited music for $30 that you can keep forever (if you only need a month to download everything etc)

Sounds like a good deal to me.

GL

 

[blybug]

My Coldplay file was originally 196kbps mp3. I deleted it and the folder was empty. The cloud icon appeared. I clicked it and it started downloading. I obtained a 256kbps AAC and the purchase date was updated to the time where I downloaded it.

That surprises the heck out of me. Wonder if that file will play in iTunes if you're no longer a Match member? Sounds like it would...but why should it? Quite amazing if this is the case, I'll potentially have thousands of 128 kbps songs both from CD rips as well as old iTunes DRM'd tracks replaced. Wow.

 

[riverfreak]

… and again US only is useless for many people.

So go complain to the record labels and the politicians in your country to change draconian copywrong laws.

 

[PeterSharp]

That surprises the heck out of me. Wonder if that file will play in iTunes if you're no longer a Match member? Sounds like it would...but why should it? Quite amazing if this is the case, I'll potentially have thousands of 128 kbps songs both from CD rips as well as old iTunes DRM'd tracks replaced. Wow.

The file will play because its drm-free. You didnt buy 128kb song from iTunes. You bought a license. You can get 256 because you already have the license for that song.

 

[riverfreak]

Sure hope that everybody testing out the beta are lgit developers who bothered to read the announcement email. Especially the part about maintaining a local copy and that Apple will reset iCloud synced music during testing...

 

[orfeas0]

Will the streaming work over 3G? If so I'm sure AT&T and Verizon will not like that.

Yeah I was wondering the same thing...
Even if it works, you're gonna end up paying 100$/month for the megabytes of downloaded music...

 

[jaw04005]

I only have 3,000 tracks in my library. Of which, 99.9 percent are available on the iTunes Store. However, iTunes Match only matched the ones I purchased from iTunes (sort of defeating the purpose). It then wanted to upload 1100 tracks. I stopped it there.

Seems like they have some bugs to work out.

 

[sam250]

Do you really have more than 25000 tracks or are you just curious if Apple really have a plan for music freaks?

I've got 59,000 tracks and iTunes match immediately gave me the over 25K error and quit. Is there a way to match just part of your library?

 

[spasm321]

Huh? Where'd this come from???? What are you referring to?

Looked at my network monitor while iTunes match is running and it says iTunes is connecting to this s3-external-1.amazonaws.com consistently.

 

[riverfreak]

I've spent a lot of time making sure my music library has the exact album art, proper tags and everything else in line, even changing genres for some songs. That being said, I'd hate to sign up for this service and then once all is said and done, the iCloud version of my library isn't as perfectly arranged and categorized as my hard copy of the music library I put together.

Exactly.

The meta information problem is very important.

First, I'd assume that Apple is using a hashing algorithm of the waveform for matching and not meta information. Thus, only songs that are identical in content will be considered matches. Matching simply using meta information would make it easy to poison the system. Matching with meta and song content would defeat the purpose given how easy it is to change tags.

Given that, the real question is: is meta information retained for songs that are matched such that many people can have access to a single copy, but each with their own tags. I hope so, because some of the meta information submitted by record labels to iTunes is just horrible.

 

[marksman]

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I still would like to have a question answered that several people posted already:

Say you have 20,000 songs of varying quality. You get iTunes Match. You delete your hardcopies, maybe download some, but mostly stream. Then your iTunes Match subscription runs out. Does anything happen to the files you saved to your hard drive? Do you still have access to the ones from the store you did not download again?

If you delete your originals you would have no music library. That would not be smart

 

[wovel]

What the little demo didn't show is what exactly happens with that file he downloaded. Is it accessible in the Finder to be "kept forever" or has the computer truly become just another iOS-style "device" where the underlying file system is not really accessible, and the downloaded track is only visible or able to manipulated from within iTunes? Is the iTunes Library now like the iPhoto Library?

Personally I don't care, but there were some heated arguments a while back about whether iTunes Match would be purely streaming or would actually let customers "keep" all the 256kbps files they could possibly download/hoard, essentially making it an all-you-can-eat buffet for a one-time $25 fee. Looks like the streaming is clearly in place, but whether or not downloading means "for keeps" remains to be seen. My prediction: no.

Also curious if the latest iTunes will close the CD-burning loophole. Apple's deal with the record companies on this is suddenly believable if all the tracks are "trapped" inside of iTunes on the various devices, including computers.

iPhoto files are stored in well known directories and are very, very, very easy for even novice users (with the inclination) to find and copy. I don't think that was a particularly good example....