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With iOS 5 Beta 7, Apple is Right: iTunes Match is Not Streaming in iOS

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Apr 12, 2001
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With the release of the iTunes Match Beta to developers earlier week, there has been a lot of confusion about whether or not the service was "streaming" or not.

Early hands on videos seemed to show that iTunes Match was a streaming service for both the Mac and iOS devices. Music would play over the internet, but not appear to be permanently downloaded to your device.

Apple, however, later denied that the service was actually streaming. Instead they described it as "a simultaneous listen and download". We labeled the distinction one of semantics and still considered it streaming based on what had been observed in the early build.

With the release of iOS Beta 7, however, Apple is right and iTunes Match (for iOS) is a listen and download service, and not a streaming one. InsanelyGreatMac put together a new video of how things have changed with this latest release.

Songs that are played are now permanently downloaded to your iPhone, iPod or iPad library. Even if you skip past a song, the entire song is saved directly to your device. That means as you listen to music, songs are pulled from the iCloud and stored. The main distinction is that users may have to manually free up space over time. Once a song is deleted, it will again be available for download once again in the same manner.

As a result, the original impression of streaming may have just been an iOS user interface bug or simply an oversight by Apple. What makes us think it was not just an interface bug is the fact that songs are still streamed in iTunes Beta for Mac. Even with the newest iTunes beta release from tonight, users can reportedly stream songs from iTunes Match and those songs are not saved permanently to their Mac. Mac users must explicitly press the iCloud button to download and save songs locally -- of course, this could change.

Apple's clearly continuing to tweak and make changes to iTunes Match, and we hear there remain a lot of bugs in the interface itself. We should know more for certain when the software seeds stabilize as we approach the expected launch this fall.

Article Link: With iOS 5 Beta 7, Apple's is Right: iTunes Match is Not Streaming in iOS
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/09/01/with-ios-5-beta-7-apples-is-right-itunes-match-is-not-streaming-in-ios/
What we are really getting at here is can I get a smaller GB iPhone to save som e money, and Apple is basically saying, no.
 
Is there a reason they'd implement (only) one or the other? If space is an issue and Internet connectivity (or data caps) is not, streaming seems preferable for most people, although I personally usually prefer actual downloads.

Back to my original question, I'm guessing they might have licensing issues preventing them from doing one but not the other, as trivial as the difference may be? Just guessing...

EDIT: Or, like dagamer mentioned, perhaps they want you to buy the larger capacity... ;)
 
"..has been sorta mixed. First off it only matched 30 of my 700 songs and then uploaded the rest. I'm not exactly sure how you are supposed to download your music to your device without going through each artist individually. I don't want all my past purchases downloaded either, just the music that's on my Mac. I've noticed that on my iPhone, if I try to "stream" a song and avoid hitting the cloud button, it works just fine. However every song that I have played has been put into my "songs" list, so when I flip the switch that says "show all music", the songs I went and played earlier were actually now on my device storage. Could this be what apple means? I'm still rather confused on how iTunes Match is gonna work out, still seems rather cumbersome to use."

Hah, looks like I was right when I posted that yesterday.
 
I'm simply dumbfounded on why Apple just doesn't give the option to automatically delete the song after it's played, which would mimic streaming. What's the friggin' difference to Apple? It makes no sense unless it's a licensing issue, and even then it makes no sense.

Tony
 
Doesn't surprise me. With how firm they were about it not being streaming despite it clearly streaming I did not expect it to stay.
 
A whole thread...wasted. An internet controversey...over nothing. Who'd have thunk?


dagamer34 said:
What we are really getting at here is can I get a smaller GB iPhone to save som e money, and Apple is basically saying, no.
Click to expand...

Sure you could...you would have access to all your music, all the time, without having it all on your phone. Unless you want to listen to more than 8gb worth of different songs in one day, everyday, you would only have to clear songs once in a while
 
Data cap is a reality either at home or 3g or 4g or whatever. We may enjoy streaming, but eventually it costs quite a bit. Streaming does eat away the battery faster, too. Guess, it is tedious, but you can delete a song after you listened to it. Or you can delete a playlist after you are done with them. This does conserve battery better and cost of streaming. ;)
 
dagamer34 said:
What we are really getting at here is can I get a smaller GB iPhone to save som e money, and Apple is basically saying, no.
Click to expand...


What ever money you save on the device, you'll end up paying in the data fees (assuming you don't have a grandfathered plan from Verizon/ATT)
 
I'm sure a jailbreak tweak can make it stream. ;)


MultiMediaWill said:
It cost $25 a year to play music I already bought and own. GTFO
Click to expand...

It's not for everybody. To me, the $2 a month is worth it for the convenience of having all my music synced up and ready to play on whatever, whenever.
 
Sorry..

Sorry if this has already been answered.

If I have ~200 songs that match identifies and I download the high quality versions of them do I still have to pay the monthly fees in perpetuity to keep access to those songs.
 
lostngone said:
Sorry if this has already been answered.

If I have ~200 songs that match identifies and I download the high quality versions of them do I still have to pay the monthly fees in perpetuity to keep access to those songs.
Click to expand...

That's a question that hasn't been answered yet.

I would imagine that since it's not a streaming service, the file would be stored locally so you would be able to keep the songs.
 
OT:

Am i the only one seeing news from may on the front page? Already happened few times. All caches were cleared and still i get that randomly. Any clues?
 
Newbie post (but longtime lurker/facebook commentor):

Too many rumors are started to quickly. Had these "developers" actually worked with the feature, then they would have seen it work properly. the problem here is that these "developers" only became devs to be the first to talk about a new feature that becomes available; they don't actually take time to learn anything before their mouths open and spread internet sewage. Shame on them for wasting valuable cyberspace with their garbage talk.
 
Bartboy919 said:
There will be a jailbreak tweak that allows streaming, I'm sure of it.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm thinking too. It should be fairly easy. All the tweak needs to do is automatically delete the locally stored file after it's done playing and you'll be left with a streaming music app.
 
Bartboy919 said:
There will be a jailbreak tweak that allows streaming, I'm sure of it.
Click to expand...

I agree. It's a matter of just deleting the song from your device once you're finished listening to it. Not exactly streaming, but at least you'll be able to save space.

What I hope is that this lack of streaming is only limited to iOS, and that it's still possible to stream without locally storing the file on Macs. Since the recent Match news came out, I decided that I'd fork over the 25 bucks and as a result be able to delete my duplicate library on my MBP and re-claim as much space as possible on my SSD. That way, I'd have my entire library stored locally on my desktop and in the cloud, and whenever I wanted to get music, I'd be able to stream it to my MBP and keep no hard copy of it on my disk. If they disable streaming for iTunes as well, I may have to reconsider. The $25 doesn't seem justified if you're not actually saving space by having your music in the cloud. Yeah, you can delete it after the fact, but the point is to be able to access your media at any time without having to store it locally at any point during the process (except for a temporary cache, of course).
 
Progressive Download

It sounds like what Apple is doing is "progressive downloads" which they've done in QuickTime for 15+ years. The only question is whether there is one mode (permanent download) or a second, less formal, "cached download" that keeps a song until the space is needed then removes it automatically.

The huge advantage of progressive download is that the song (or movie) is downloaded as fast as available bandwidth allows, but playback is realtime. If the connection gets too low for awhile, the user may never know as long as the buffered portion got far enough ahead.

In "true streaming", anytime the available bandwidth drops below 256 kbps, the song would stop or stutter.

Jim
 
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