Itunes Match

[Easy Mac]

So all of the competitors have thrown their hat into the ring.

Apple - iCloud - All your music on all your devices.

If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.2

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 your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

So they purchased LaLa in 2009, which is literally what iTunes match is, it is no different.

I may pay $25 a year for this, depends on how much more useful it is on whatever device I have then. I have a Palm Pre now, so Google Music, Amazon music, and the forthcoming iTunes Match are of no use to me.

I use Google Music at work. Its pretty cool. I'm about halfway through my music uploading after probably letting it run for 50-75 hours (8k of 15k songs). The interface is getting a little bogged down if I go through albums, but searching is near instantaneous. But otherwise, it works nearly perfectly (my 24-bit flacs aren't uploading, so no go for my Stones, Beatles stereo versions, and Dylan mono versions). Plus, I really don't want to have to convert my flacs to aac/mp3s just to match them to Apple's servers. I guess I could save them in a different folder structure so they aren't scanned by mediamonkey, but that's more work on my end.

My only hope is that Apple actually opens their service up to devices outside iDevices. I'm near the end of my contract, so the interoperability of these services is key. If Apple bars google music from their phones (i.e. no app), then the iPhone is infinitely less useful for me. But I would like to try iTunes music service, but I'll likely have to get an iPhone for that (or convince the wife to let me get an iPad).

Either way, it's a good time to be a music fan.

Tale of the tape for services:

Amazon - 5gb of space for music. Free 20gb for a year if you buy an album. $1 per GB after that. Songs are uploaded, so the space depends on the size of your music files. But newly purchased Amazon songs don't take up space. Limited to Android only right now (plus web).

Itunes - Unlimited space. Costs $25 a year for unlimited music. Matches songs, uploads the ones it can't match. Seemingly no free version. iOS only when it comes out in the fall.

Google - 20,000 songs. No word on increased/decreased storage. Upload songs. Android only at the moment.

[ISiddiqui]

Google Music is pretty amazing - I can get my music from anywhere (it is Android only, but also any computer with an internet connection). Though there is mention on the site that it is free for now, so who knows, they may ask for payment later.

[k0ruptr]

you can access google music in safari on iOS slow but usable.

[ISiddiqui]

Interesting that it is slow on Safari. Its pretty quick on Firefox and (obviously) Chrome. I think even ok on IE9 (I believe I played a song at work the other day).

[MJ4H]

I thought this was why I bought my ipod.

[SirFozzie]

*grumbles* Not available yet for 64 bit machines