Apple finally launches iTunes Match

After missing its initial late October deadline, iTunes Match finally launched this week. It’s been a while since iTunes Match was first introduced back during Apple’s WWDC this past June so here’s a brief recap of what the service is all about.

After missing its initial late October deadline, iTunes Match finally launched this week. It’s been a while since iTunes Match was first introduced back during Apple’s WWDC this past June so here’s a brief recap of what the service is all about.

iTunes Match is a $25/yr subscription service that lets users download music from their iTunes Music Library onto other Macs and iOS devices. The service works by scanning a user’s iTunes library and “matching” the songs contained therein with high-quality 256 Kbps versions available for download from the cloud. Notably, the service will not only match songs purchased via iTunes, but will even match songs uploaded via CD and downloaded illegally via the web. It’s important to stress here that iTunes Match is in no way shape or form a streaming service. Rather, it provides a seamless way for users to transfer their entire music collections, in high quality, across multiple devices.

There is a limit to the number of devices that can sync up to an individuals iTunes Match account, however – 10 to be exact. But I can’t imagine anyone really needing much more than 5 or 6 so that’s really a moot point. This is useful not only if you manage a number of devices, but even more so if you have a number of different machines with varying music libraries. iTunes Match will allow you to merge the music from all these separate devices into one granddaddy of them all playlist in the cloud.

It’s interesting to note that Apple’s implementation here is markedly different from the one employed by Amazon and Google. Whereas Apple scans a user’s iTunes library and makes his/her’s music downloadable from the cloud, Amazon and Google actually transfer a user’s entire music collection into the cloud, an unquestionably more cumbersome and time consuming process.

So if free wheeling access to your music library is a necessity, the $25/year subscription may be well worth trying out. One caveat though, to all you music lovers out there, there is a 25,000 song limit on tracks purchased outisde of iTunes. In other words, if you purchased 4,000 songs on iTunes and ripped 30,000 songs from CDs, you’d only be able to match 25,000 of your tracks (4,000+25,000).

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