I think it's time for Apple to release an iTunes for Android app. If they want to really compete with google, they're going to have to go after Android the same way they went after Windows users.
Because Android products are eating up more and more of the market. I know that I personally will not have another iPhone until I can get it contract-free for under 300 dollars on a pay-as-you-go plan (ie Sprint).
I have an android phone right now that cost me 100 dollars up front and is $25/month plus tax with unlimited text and plenty of voice and 3G data for my needs with no contract.
So using iTunes Match wouldn't cost me $25 a year. It would cost me $25 a year plus $30-50 dollars a month.
I would pay $25 for an iTunes App on Android plus $25/yr for iTunes Match to be able to easily sync/stream my library from my mac pro at home.
If they don't offer it, I'll just keep using google music. Less awesome, but certainly not worth hundreds of dollars a year and a contract lock-in just to avoid having to convert some Apple Lossless albums into MP3 and drag them over to my phone.
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I'm in the same exact position. OS X chewed up another hard drive, AND my big Drobo after a reboot. Now wondering if I'll be able to recover my music based upon the iTunes entries. If not, I guess I'll have to go with Piratebay.
It would be nice if, since OS X so easily ruins partition maps, they built in some kind of data recovery to the disc util.
It's almost certainly going to do audio fingerprinting of the files. This is what the Lala.com sync did, and that's the only reason that Apple bought Lala to begin with...they wanted that fingerprint sync tech and the associated patents.
So it's probably bad news for you.
When I had lala, I experimented with renaming files to see if it could tell if something was what it said it was, or what it sounded like, and it clearly wasn't fooled by metadata or file name changes...it does some kind of fuzzy hash on the audio files themselves. It could recognize ALAC and mp3 and AAC files all the same, and basically seems to have just "skimmed" them really quick and from that fingerprint was able to match them with the library.I had some files which were ALAC and got corrupt with a hard drive failure/recovery, and the last 5-10 seconds were scrambled. It recognized most of them as being valid for matching, but the two with the biggest audio errors did not sync. I had to re-import the CD into iTunes to get lala to like the files.