iTunes Match Launched with Release of iTunes 10.5.1 [Download Links]

Nov 14, 2011 - 14 Comments

iTunes Match

iTunes Match has been launched in the USA by Apple with the release of iTunes 10.5.1. The Match service costs $24.99 a year to store your entire music library within iCloud allowing you to stream it to any iOS 5+ iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, or Windows PC, regardless of where your music has come from. This means music that you have ripped from your own CD’s, gathered over the course of time, downloaded from the web, or bought from iTunes, are all accessible to be streamed through the iTunes Match service.

To use iTunes Match, you’ll need to sign up for and set up iCloud if you haven’t already, then install the latest version of iTunes. After launching iTunes, you’ll see a new “iTunes Match” option under left sidebar where you can sign up for the service.

Download iTunes 10.5.1

You can get the latest version of iTunes through Software Update, iTunes Update, or by downloading it directly from Apple:

  • Download from Apple.com/iTunes (no email address required just click big blue ‘Download’ button)
  • (Direct download links for Mac OS X and Windows coming soon)

Apple describes how iTunes Match works as so:

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are, your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes has to upload only what it can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

The last point of upping the quality of songs is rather substantial, since anyone carrying a music library around for quite some time undoubtedly has many 128kbps songs in their library.

There is a limit of 10 devices and 25,000 songs to the service, although songs purchased from iTunes Store do not count against that limit.

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Posted by: Matt Chan in iPad, iPhone, iTunes, News

14 Comments

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  1. B says:

    or…just use Plex, or Subsonic and stream it from your own computer for FREE. Yeah, you could pay for the upgrade in bit rate….

  2. Andrew says:

    If I was using the Itunes Beta 3, should I now install today’s public version? Thanks!

  3. brent says:

    It’s not working on my iPhone… is it because I have a korean iPhone? I have a US iTunes/apple account, but I’m stationed over here.

    • Justin says:

      I’m in Korea with a Korean iPhone as well. I signed up this morning and have it running through my iPhone no problem.
      My account/setup appears to be identical to yours. However, i noticed that my phone didn’t respond right away when i turned on music match this morning.

      About 2 hours ago however, I noticed my library was responding to the music match service.

  4. Ken says:

    1. http://www.tonidoplug.com/ Serve your own “cloud” for about $130 shipped.

    2. Thankfully the iTunes Match link goes away when you click it and choose “No thanks”.

  5. roo says:

    What I find most useful about iTunes Match is that I have a large music collection, and I use 2 desktops/1 Laptop and an iPod on occasion.

    I buy almost nothing from the store, and rip all my own CDs into iTunes.

    My music is too large to fit onto any iPod (except for the hard-drive based classics), but if I want to listen to something I don’t have, it is easy to download that specific thing and listen to it right now rather than going back to sync to the desktop. If that desktop didn’t have it, since you can’t sync music from multiple desktops, meant you had to move the audio files over manually from desktop to desktop, and then finally sync.

    This lets me at my content any time I wish.

    If you only buy from the store, it probably isn’t very useful, especially with them now letting you re-download any content you’ve bought again easily.

    I’m not sure if it is my weird tastes, or the fact that I ripped it my self, but I see less than 10% of my music being “matched”, and instead more of it is my content uploaded. Thankfully I have fast big upload pipes. :)

  6. Amit says:

    So… basically they stream down to me, chewing up my bandwidth and battery, but it’s ok because I get more storage space for 30 bucks a year?

  7. Brian says:

    Would like to see the number of how many people in the US subscribe to it, since I don’t really see a need for it other than pad Apples bottom line.

  8. RMIA says:

    Tells me it’s in beta and that it will be deleted? LOL

  9. […] iTunes Match is now available along with iTunes 10.5.1, download it now to sign up for the music streaming and cloud storage […]

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