This is such horrible logic here. The point of iTunes Match SHOULD be to allow you to maintain a library of music on your iOS device, files stored on that device, AND additionally have access to many more songs through iCloud/match.
I have 80,000 songs in my iTunes library. Not all of them are going on Match. My live shows certainly won't be matched, or music I've made, isn't going onto Match. So I'd like to free up space on my iPhone and/or iPad for that music, or for more Books, Apps (and all the data that comes with any magazine's half assed bandwidth hog), Movies, whatever!
Let's be real about this: Beta 6 wasn't a streaming service. You can call it streaming plus, or whatever you want, but it still downloaded each song. It's quite preferable over streaming when you are using 3G and at the mercy of shaky internet conditions. 10 minutes down the road you may have no service at all, and that downloaded song will save you the pains of streaming services right now when the track cuts out on you because it's buffering a very small portion of the song and streaming as you go.
The BIG issue with this Beta 7 implementation is that it's confusing to the user and puts the burden on the user to manage their device in a VERY haphazard way. Let's review here:
1. I start off with no iTunes Match songs downloaded to my iDevice. Thus, I fill up my iDevice, probably close to the max (save a GB or two). Maybe it's with more music, or apps, movies, books, whatever. Doesn't matter.
2. Now I start playing songs through Match. They start eating up that space. In an afternoon at work, that could run through my 1-2 GB of free space in a matter of hours, or if I skip some songs, maybe even an hour or less. What happens when my iDevice is now full, out of space? Does the service stop working? Does it start deleting the earliest played Match songs? Does it tell me, the user, that I need to free up space to listen to more music from Match? Whatever the outcome, this burden shouldn't be put on the user. That's poor implementation however you cut it.
3. Let's say I have 10 GB of free space, and I start eating away at that. How is going album by album (remembering what I have listened to), and swiping over each song a reasonable solution to free up more space on my device? Once I start impeding on my ability to use the device in other ways, i.e. downloading the latest issue of Wired magazine that I have a subscription for (or maybe it's 2 months? Or maybe I just want an older issue?) I now have to go into my device settings to see how much space I have to work with. I have to ACTIVELY MANAGE space on my device because the iTunes Match service, with 25,000 songs available to "download", eats up my free space.
There's an inherent conflict between how your iDevice works and how you currently manage the amount of data on it vs how iTunes Match works because it is in the cloud and is essentially 15-20 GB of data sitting up there for you to pull down onto your iDevice.
The previous implementation dealt with this pretty well. It downloads one song, and when you go to the next one, it replaces the previous song in the cache. Thus, it never eats up more than 30-40 MB at MOST. It solves all the issues with managing space on the user. It frees the user from all of the burdens I've just mentioned.
Even if the cache becomes 1-2 GB (which would probably be more reasonable on the server side than a song-by-song caching mechanism), the user would have a pre-defined amount of space to manage for. "Okay, iTunes Match takes up 1GB of space. I can plan around that." The user is still not trying to balance free space with the physical motions of deleting song after song.
I haven't even touched upon the syncing issues, though I would hope Apple is smart enough to place these iTunes Match songs outside the same folder as your synced iPod/music tracks on the iDevice, in the way it adds purchased items from the iTunes store when you purchase them from your iPhone or iPad.
From a usability perspective, it just makes simple sense to have a cache of a fixed, not variable/expanding size for iTunes Match. The size, as I mentioned, doesn't matter as the implementation is still the Beta 6 version (streaming+ if you will). Once you hit that cache threshold, it should just begin to push out the oldest cached items, and yes, you will have to download them again. But as we know, that's not a real issue unless you have no Internet access at all.
I'm sure the ignorant, lowest common denominator response will be something regarding your data plan and how the more songs it stores on your device the better. But anyone who brings this up is a.) an AT&T/Verizon loyalist who has their head up their butt or b.) too ignorant to realize that even AT&T offers wi-fi hotspots in many areas. Many of us will use wi-fi at work, wi-fi in public places, wi-fi even at home to download songs from Match (and I say at home because if you've tried connecting to an 80,000 song library at home on the iPod/music device, you know it will time out before it ever loads up to listen to music from).
Apple's implementation of these features shouldn't be at the expense of the user's ability to manage the music and at a larger level, the rest of the device. Certainly not to offset bandwidth consumption from a mobile provider. Bending over backwards in UI design and implementation so that AT&T isn't burdened at actually providing you with service you're paying out the wazoo for is simply unfeasible and as someone who shelled out the money for the device, should make you disgusted.
I have hope that because this is a beta it will not release like this, and I have backup hope that a jailbreak plugin can easily address the caching issues so that users don't have to manage their devices in such a fundamentally different way if they decide to shell out the $25 for iTunes Match. But if you think this method is GOOD, you just aren't thinking properly.
