Be Excellent To Each Other

I've now got this set up on the iPad and it's brilliant. I set it off yesterday morning before work and it still hadn't finished analysing my library when I got home. However, it found over 8,000 of my 11,000 songs and is now busy uploading the rest, very slowly.

I've come into work this morning and decided to try it out on the wifi at work - I can browse my whole library and download whichever albums/songs I want to. I'm so pleased with it - no more syncing trying to decide which music I'll feel like listening to next week.

This may be the thing that brings me back to the iPhone next year.

What does it do, and can I use it on my iPod Touch 2nd generation?

Cheers. Googling is a pain on iPod. So, that's cloud storage for £2 a month and no, it won't work.

You have to pay for it?

It is indeed good, and it brings into question (for me) the purpose of owning a higher-than-lowest-capacity iDevice, if you fill it with music, and have virtual constant access to wifi.

However, it has (once again) screwed up Album artwork on conversion and redownload (I matched my library and have then downloaded from the cloud to my phone what I want/need, and it has come back with some very odd album covers). Also, on the first pass, some Albums came through with missing tracks.

Also Also - Be very fuckign careful with your 3G settings. I understand that if you start downloading over Wi-fi and walk out of reception, it will switch to 3G unless you turn iTunes match 3G off, which at 70Mb per album is going to hurt, quickly. Also, I saw a report somewhere that this overrides your roaming settings if you do it overseas, which is really, really going to hurt.

It's like a cross between Spotify and Dropbox, only cheaper or more expensive, depending on how you look at it.

Oh. Does it enforce some horrible bitrate?

I can't wait for a competing, non-apple, compatible with my android and not iTunes player version of this! Maybe Google Music in 12 months or something can do something similar?

It defaults to 256kbps AAC.

Spotify for your own music effectively, right?

No, because it's not a streaming service. It's like the iTunes store, but everything you own. So you want to listen to Nirvana's 'Nevermind'? You download it to your iPhone from the Music app over wifi or mobile data. Takes as long as it would to buy an album and download it through iTunes. You can see all your albums in the app and choose from there.

Heh

Spotify already does your own music, it just doesn't sync it over the air (well, it does, but only on a wifi network, so let's pretend it doesn't for simplicity). That's where Dropbox comes in.

[edit]@Myp: Oh. That's less exciting.


If you don't mind leaving your PC turned on there are a fair few.

I'm actually quite stunned that such a service exists, and even more so that it's by Apple. And I say that purely because they're in the business of selling music themselves so it's surprising that they'll make available stuff you didn't buy from them. Also this:

"And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes uploads what it can’t match."

So if it finds a song that isn't available in iTunes it'll upload your version of it and make it available to you? Bloody hell, that's some pretty comprehensive stuff right there, and for a fraction of the price that Spotify, for instance, would charge you for a much worse service.

If you were to torrent every album ever released, then itunes match it, you've got spotify, effectively. You can stream (in effect) but at high bitrate.

It's a different service, though.

And, as ever, kudos to Apple for making people think that this sort of thing was impossible in the past.

Yes.

Grim...: it's better for me, and one of the reasons why I'll never subscribe to Spotify. I don't want to constantly use bandwidth all the time, plus it's useless if you're in a bad signal area. I'm happy with downloading a few albums while at home/work, and then listening to them on the go or when I get to my destination.

So.. what is it?

Yes, it is. Or, at least, it can be. You can stream any music in your library without downloading it so in that sense it's exactly like 'Spotify for your own music' except better.

ETA: Hmm, actually maybe that's not the case, the Apple page about this is confusing to read as it used the word 'stream' but then starts talking about storage space. If it won't stream then I'm suddenly much less impressed by this.

For £2 a month, you can listen to music you already own if you really can't wait to plug your iPod into a laptop and alter what music is in there.

Spotify lets you download stuff to play offline.

iTunes Match seems like a way for iOS devices owners to pay to get around something that would be a non-issue for most if only iOS devices had memory card slots.

edit: or if Apple weren't such blatantly piss-taking cunts when it comes to pricing for storage on their devices.

Oh. That's a bit crap then.



Oh. Which is it?!

See my edit, I imagine myp is correct and I've just been taken in by Apples badly worded marketing prose. A more paranoid person might image they'd purposely misued the word stream in there but I'm sure it's just a mistake...

If it stores it, it doesn't stream it in the conventional sense - I guess stores it as it streams, if you see what I mean.

At its simplest level, it seems to be a glorified backup system just for music, with a pretty front end. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

To add one note to this, for £21 I have upgraded significantly the sound qualify of music which I obviously legally own but have misplaced the CDs for, and had copied at awful bitrates year ago. Also, approximately 20 albums which had dirty/scratched disks are now magically repaired.

Don't forget it's also a backup solution. So if my HDD dies I can redownload all my music again (including all my iTunes purchases) for the included price. Currently if you lose the HDD with your purchases you have to go through a ballache to get them back again without paying again.

Bamba: I'm not sure why you were more excited by streaming. I think streaming is overrated, personally. Admittedly it would be good if it had both options, but it does exactly what I want it to do.

Like cover bands.

I didn't know that it would sync your local files over wifi - that's handy to know.

But that's because

a) Apple are complete arseholes about letting you redownload things
b) You don't already backup your music.

iOS5 essentially does away with the need for having to plug in your device to a computer ever again. This is quite a big development, I think.

Maybe, but the biggest MicroSD card (which seems to be the standard for mobile phones, if you ignore Sony) is 64GB, and some people have a lot more music than that.

Is there a limit on iTunes Match (which is a funny name, by the way)? I couldn't see anything on the Apple page.

[edit]Oh, 25,000 songs.

If my iOS devices had memory card slots then all my music would effectively be backed up anyway, so unless I somehow lost my iPad, iPod and PC at the same time I'd be ok.

This is a good point. I like this.

iOS5 essentially does away with the need for having to plug in your device to a computer ever again. This is quite a big development, I think.[/quote]


[edit]Do you have to plug WP7 phones in?

Only for software updates. And that's because the carriers won't let them deliver them OTA.

Yeah, that doesn't include anything you've purchased on iTunes though, you can have unlimited number of iTunes songs stored.

Grim...: when I said 'plug in' I essentially meant 'sync'. You don't need to sync with a computer again.

Yeah, I find I really can't be arsed syncing mine with the USB cable, so it never gets done. I like the idea of magic syncing and stuff, might even be prepared to pay for it

Most devices don't need to "sync", though. I'm not saying this isn't a fucking good thing - at the least it cuts down on iTunes time - or that they haven't done a good job, because they have, but it's seriously about bloody time.

I might be missing some things (especially with the confuse-opoly that Apple are making this) but i thought the idea was :

You have music on your pc which is a mixture of stuff you bought from apple , stuff you ripped from CD's (or torrented) which is in the apple store and stuff you have which is not on the apple store.

By getting this apple will scrape all your music and anything it finds that it already has it will mark on the store that you 'own it' have access to it DRM free and at a reasonable bit rate (so can download it again in the future via itunes with album art and whatever else).

For the stuff which it doesnt have it uploads to a service which you can then access via other devices.

The 2nd part of that is where things are not clear but I would have thought for a lot of people the advantage is getting rid of all the stuff in their music library which itunes does not understand and getting all the album art / other stuff for your music.

As an example I have an external drive with around 30 gigs worth of ripped CD's - and if anything happens to this i would either need to make sure i have a backup or re-rip the CD (if i can go and dig it out of whatever cupboard its at the bottom of) , if instead I use this and these are recognised then i just go to itunes and say 'download' and since it recognises that i legitimatly had the thing I can get it at zero cost.

Yeah, that seems to be it. "Cheap" rather than "zero cost", though. If all you are interested in is the backup aspect, you'd be better off using a backup service (or SkyDrive, which seems to offer a rather barmy 25GB for free).

[edit]Wait - why would you want to "get rid of all the stuff in your music library that iTunes doesn't understand"?

Apart from the fact that to sync, your phone needs to be wired in to something. And if you need your computer on to do it, and your phone to be plugged in, it may as well be USB tethered. It then, brilliantly (as far as I can see) refuses to use the cable, and still does it wirelessly anyway. Dicks.

Re Apple being an arse about redownloading, they scrapped that quite some time ago (although this year, admittedly), and gave you access to your entire history of previous purchases for redownload, not just new stuff.

So if your computer was powered down, how would you get new music to your phone?

Stop it you lot.. I’ve only just convinced myself that I want a Windows Phone.

I've decided if I do get an iPhone next year that I'm keeping my WP for my work phone.

If my computer was powered down, you wouldn't be posting here

[edit]But for a serious answer, I'd use Spotify. In fact, I do.

Not any more. You can redownload any iTunes purchase now. This was a record industry licensing thing, not an Apple-being-willfully-difficult thing.

iTunes Match is the only cloud music locker service with music industry buy-in, so it's the only one that'll take 128k mp3 files from the dawn of Napster and give you back 256k AAC. I'd say that's a hefty USP, unless you have tin ears or actually bought all your music and ripped it at decent bitrates.

How did you just put it on your powered off computer?

Can't go to "Things I've bought" -> "Download all" though, can you?

Yep. I believe you can also go "things I bought" > "download everything that isn't here"