iTunes Match or Amazon Cloud?

[ghsDUDE]

So I love how Amazon now allows you to stream your music with their App. iTunes Match would be awesome (if they actually allow you to stream on iOS 6) but that's unknown right now. iTunes Match cost $25 a year and right now Amazon cost $20 for a year (20GB) and right now have a special for unlimited music.

Which deal do you think is better? I'd like to keep everything Apple...but right now Amazon seems to have a better deal.

Are there any negatives I'm not thinking about/missing right now?

 

[Online]

I have been very happy with Amazon. And they just put out the Cloud Player app for iOS. The app works great. I tried Apples and it gave me trouble. But that may be just bad luck for me.

 

[DodgeV83]

So I love how Amazon now allows you to stream your music with their App. iTunes Match would be awesome (if they actually allow you to stream on iOS 6) but that's unknown right now. iTunes Match cost $25 a year and right now Amazon cost $20 for a year (20GB) and right now have a special for unlimited music.

Which deal do you think is better? I'd like to keep everything Apple...but right now Amazon seems to have a better deal.

Are there any negatives I'm not thinking about/missing right now?

iTunes Match works in the iOS native music player, meaning it works with Siri, and the music is accessible to other apps. iTunes match is streaming, when I click on a song that's not downloaded yet, it streams and plays immediately, while caching the song locally.

Also, iTunes match upgrades the song quality, if you have any lower quality songs, and can "match" most of the music for you, meaning less upload time.

When you consider the 25,000 song limit, along with the 256k AAC quality, you're getting the equivalent of 200 gigs of storage.

 

[adam044]

google play/google music manager, its free, does the same thing as amazon

 

[nuckinfutz]

As DodgeV83 eloquently points out

iTunes Match is heavily integrated into the iOS ecosystem Playlists,
sync, Genius syncs and metadata.

Amazon's cloud app is limited to just it's own app and that's not going to help me if I want to play my music in Onque or mix some stuff up in Djay or the handful of other apps I use.

 

[DodgeV83]

It seems iOS 6 gives the option to not locally cache the songs as you play them, don't think I'll be using it, but it'll be an option

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/1...orts-both-streaming-and-downloading-of-music/

 

[Roessnakhan]

Use iTunes Match, then upload that music to Google Music and use that.

 

[ghsDUDE]

iTunes Match works in the iOS native music player, meaning it works with Siri, and the music is accessible to other apps. iTunes match is streaming, when I click on a song that's not downloaded yet, it streams and plays immediately, while caching the song locally.

Also, iTunes match upgrades the song quality, if you have any lower quality songs, and can "match" most of the music for you, meaning less upload time.

When you consider the 25,000 song limit, along with the 256k AAC quality, you're getting the equivalent of 200 gigs of storage.

Wait...so you can stream on iTunes match? Right now?

 

[DodgeV83]

Wait...so you can stream on iTunes match? Right now?

Due to licensing restrictions, Apple does not officiall call it "streaming", but in all practicality it is. You click on a song, and it plays, you don't have to wait for it to download. They officially say, "You click a song to download it, and it will play as its downloading"

Really it's just streaming with a local cache so the next time you play the song it won't have to use data.

 

[ghsDUDE]

Due to licensing restrictions, Apple does not officiall call it "streaming", but in all practicality it is. You click on a song, and it plays, you don't have to wait for it to download. They officially say, "You click a song to download it, and it will play as its downloading"

Really it's just streaming with a local cache so the next time you play the song it won't have to use data.

So say I have 50GB of music and I click on EVERY SONG...will my phone add the 50GB of music or not? Yeah it's definitely confusing after reading this.

Does iTunes Match stream or download songs?
On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs.

 

[lordofthereef]

iTunes Match works in the iOS native music player, meaning it works with Siri, and the music is accessible to other apps. iTunes match is streaming, when I click on a song that's not downloaded yet, it streams and plays immediately, while caching the song locally.

Also, iTunes match upgrades the song quality, if you have any lower quality songs, and can "match" most of the music for you, meaning less upload time.

When you consider the 25,000 song limit, along with the 256k AAC quality, you're getting the equivalent of 200 gigs of storage.

With iOS6 it seams like we will have "true" streaming through iTunes match. It also sounds like we will have Siri incorporation with non-native apps. In other words we will be able to pick our poison. If you really want integration through the default music app iTunes match is and wil continue to be the way to go. I use that and have used others as comparison (iOS5 only) and the interfaces are similar enough to the point that I don't notice too much of a difference. The quality thing is nice, but only if you store lower quality tracks of your files. I would say match is a clear winner for those who have thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of songs (the majority of which are sold on iTunes) as you eventually get no limit on the amount you can store this way.

----------

So say I have 50GB of music and I click on EVERY SONG...will my phone add the 50GB of music or not? Yeah it's definitely confusing after reading this.

Does iTunes Match stream or download songs?
On a computer, any songs stored in iCloud will stream over the air when played, though you can download them at any time by clicking the iCloud download button. iOS devices will start playing tracks from iCloud as they download and will store them so that you can listen to them later even if you don’t have a network connection. Apple TV only streams songs.

I believe it keeps the songs cached on your phone until it needs the space. iTunes match does actually download songs. If you look at your most recent tracks they will be playable without a data connection. I personally think this is a lot of the reason why match is so data heavy (assuming you are cycling through many songs and not just playing the ones you have cached over and over). I can easily burn a couple hundred megs and hour whereas with something like pandora it will only be a couple dozen at most. My hope is that when we get "true" streaming we will have some sort of compression algorithm in place such that I can listen to my 10mb track in quality perceived to be just as good as the original file I uploaded but that will only eat 1-2mb of my data.

 

[Defender2010]

Due to licensing restrictions, Apple does not officiall call it "streaming", but in all practicality it is. You click on a song, and it plays, you don't have to wait for it to download. They officially say, "You click a song to download it, and it will play as its downloading"

Really it's just streaming with a local cache so the next time you play the song it won't have to use data.

It's not streaming, it's downloading....this has been discussed in many other threads...
Streaming does not download a copy of the song and cache it...

 

[DodgeV83]

It's not streaming, it's downloading....this has been discussed in many other threads...
Streaming does not download a copy of the song and cache it...

That depends on your definition of the word. Is it using a streaming server over the rtsp protocol? No, but many streaming servers don't. When I stream from my Subsonic server, it caches the file locally, will you say that isn't streaming as well?

In the end, it doesn't really matter. People want to know if the song will immediately play when they click the button to play it, the answer to that is yes.

 

[AnionicStrength]

Are there any negatives I'm not thinking about/missing right now?

One negative that hasn't been mentioned yet is that iTunes Match is really buggy. There are many songs in my library that play just fine on my Mac, but when they are downloaded by my iPhone, half of the song is missing or worse yet, has a completely different song appended to the end.

It doesn't appear to matter if the songs are matched or uploaded.

Anyway, this has all been discussed before, just something to consider...

 

[bp1000]

They said the other day with ios 6 songs can be streamed... so you hit play and it streams and doesn't store it on your device.

Not sure where contract issues come into this as this has been the default behaviour on the mac.

I think apple made it stream and store locally on iOS because the a huge bandwidth a pure streaming service would consume and how over 3G this might be perceived as a poor or unreliable service of songs stream only.

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/1...orts-both-streaming-and-downloading-of-music/


As for the question, i would go with apple, i think purely for simplicity. I have everything uncompressed in iTunes on my mac apart from the odd iTunes purchased album.

 

[ChazUK]

I use Google Music simply because it works cross platform Android/Windows/Mac/WP7 (Gooroovster)/iOS (gbxMusic)

You can also re-download your whole library if you lose your local copies.

 

[malnar]

I guess I'm the voice of opposition: Amazon Cloud Player! I've been using iTunes Match since it started last fall and I think it stinks. I have a large library and so have pruned back my collection to keep it under 25,000 songs. I've used Amazon's Cloud Player to function as a storage place for my entire collection until now (over 35,000 songs), using it by deleting out of iTunes what I don't want, then adding in from Amazon what I do want. It has worked, but it's clunky.

In the meantime, I've had to deal with the snail-like pace of Match on the iPhone. It is all too often painfully slow in all areas, from loading the database to downloading music. And then, in almost every case, music will be absent artwork. And another fun thing is random errors that prevent me from downloading music all together. I'm talking about songs and albums that I've downloaded many times previously that all of a sudden cannot be downloaded. It's ridiculous.

So I welcomed Cloud Player onto my iPhone the other day and I've had almost nothing but positive experiences with it so far. It's almost as slick as the iOS Music app and the "Cloud" portion of it BLOWS AWAY iTunes Match - it is fast in every way imaginable (and I don't stream - I download to use on my daily commute, etc.) I guess some people use some apps that access music from the Music app, but I don't have any need for this so Cloud Player has replaced Music entirely on my iPhone.

 

[TG1]

Well, currently have all three! I got the temporary unlimited cap on Amazon last year when I bought a full album. I got iTunes Match to upgrade all of my low bit rate songs (hundreds). And I just recently uploaded my collection to Google Play Music just to see what it was like and because it's free (for up to 25,000 songs?). Have multiple devices on both platforms. Will probably end up with iTunes and Google in the end.

 

[nunes013]

right now i have amazon when i bought there "one album and get 20 GB" deal last year but that ends in a month. if streaming does actually stay with iOS 6 i think ill stick with just that as i only have about 1000 songs and i like the way apples is incorporated in the OS.