Well, that was quicker than we expected. Less than a monthafter its US launch, iTunes Match has gone live in Australia, costing $34.99 a year.
For that money, you get anything in your local iTunes library accessible via the cloud; songs already in iTunes are available automatically (and potentially at a higher bitrate than your own copies), while more obscure items will be uploaded. It’s a tempting possibility, though bear in mind that you could chew through a lot of data on the initial upload if you have a large collection (though there’s a 25,000 song limit).
iTunes Match [iTunes Store]
Joel Carpenter
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:23 PMHmmm… .doesn’t seem to be working. Subscribed, went to account settings and messed about with authorising ‘this computer’ but each time it ‘encounters an error’ and asks you to log out and back in again. Creating a loop which I haven’t managed to get out from yet! Hopefully us gung-ho early adopters won’t lose too much from signing up based on this :D
Drew
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 2:34 PMSomething wrong with you… Apple things just work.
stephen
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 10:13 PMI had the same issue until I activated genius and let it scan my collection. now it is apparently working
Paul F.
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:26 PMMay have jumped the gun a little there… You can *subscribe* and Apple are happy to take your money, but it doesn’t actually work… yet.
Maybe tonight.
Paul
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:31 PMOr for free, I could stream all my music I have in my Windows Media Player library
Corey
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:39 PMand leave your PC on 24/7. Pass.
john
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:55 PMnot sure what the problem with leaving your PC on 24/7 is? Care to elaborate?
Corey
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:05 PMPower consumption, fire risk, security risk. But each to their own.
light487
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:52 PMIndeed.. power consumption is a big one.. depending on your computer of course. Since I’ve turned off my computer every night when I go to bed and leave it off all day when I am at work, I’ve cut my power bill by at least $50 a quarter.. I was astounded at the amount I have been saving.
Toliman
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:42 AMi don’t have to worry about the fire risk, on the PC, i have watercooling installed with about 2L of water that will dampen the computer in case of a fire.
in 4 years, apple might convert people to Watercooling, then co-opt it as a Macbook Air+Water exclusive, with iTunes Water bottles and a DRM activated lid that opens via syncing with the iCloud. See ? that’s S M R T there.
anyway, still “gathering” in iTunes, which is not at all ominous.
Joel Carpenter
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:07 PMSurely streaming from your WMP library means that every time you listen to a song on a remote device you pay for the upload on your home broadband, and then the download to your remote device? With iTunes Match we don’t have to physically upload anything, once the library is synced it’s just the streaming download we’re paying for. I think……
Drew
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 2:35 PMYou’re right about one thing, you dont do it physically. Although I do suspect it is done electronically
joshua
Saturday, March 17, 2012 at 7:11 AMBa-ba-ba-ba is a song about how we are like sheep easily led tsaray by the lies of this world. 77s alternative rock band in the 80s-early 90s. I remember listening to them all day on a cassette tape on my walkman. :-p
Tim
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:15 PMI’ve yet to hear a good reason for it, i have 2500 songs on my iPhone 4000+ in iTunes, why would i want to have it in the cloud as well, what benefit do i get.
Paul F.
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:54 PM$35/yr to have all that data backed up and available at will on any device running iTunes isn’t a good reason?
Each to their own!
Paul F.
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 1:53 PMLooks like this might have been a mistake: http://twitpic.com/7te7ye/full
FYEAH
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 3:26 PMGOOGLE MUSIC ALL THE WAY
Topdown
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 4:11 PMAm I missing something about the music being DRM free? isn’t this a rental model in any-case… meaning it might be DRM free, though it’ll be in a protected (potentially time-limited) vault that you can’t get into?
Anthony
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 5:46 PMIf the music already exists in the cloud it doesn’t upload your copy – so the copy in the cloud might be a higher bit-rate, but it might also be a lower bit-rate, or a different version. The versions of a lot of songs on many compilations are slightly different to the original album release. The single is sometimes different again.
My music collection is in my Dropbox account. Available from any device – not just iTunes device.
Andy
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 9:30 AMDropbox? Ermmm yea, that’s great if you’ve got like 10 albums in your collection. I’ve got 145Gb of music in my collection (I’m a club DJ) and not even Dropbox’s $200 a year pro account would cover that. Also I don’t think you fully understand the concept behind Match because it is not simply about streaming music.
Aeds
Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 7:55 PMAnd how much does it cost for US?