Is that where it matches tunes you have to tunes on their database? Google do something similar. My friend recently uploaded quite a few thousand tracks. They matched precisely none! It's very cool though - he could play his library on my media centre just by logging in. I think it's free too. I must look into it.

'iTunes Match' is simply the service that builds your cloud library. The bit that allows you to play the songs once they're in the cloud is called, unsurprisingly, 'iTunes in the Cloud'.

When you set up iTunes Match it searches your library and matches up as many as it can with songs in Apple's library. Any that it can't find a match for, it uploads those songs from your hard disk to your 'iTunes cloud space'. The songs available in iTunes in the Cloud is always the same list as what's in your copy of iTunes, within certain constraints ( like it won't upload songs with certain values of metadata or file sizes above a certain limit and up to I think a total of 25Gb of uploads). iTunes Match essentially uses your library to fill in the holes in Apple's library. That merged library is then available to be played via 'ITunes in the Cloud'.

There are plenty of valid reason not to bother with iTunes Match (I never did) but 'they don't have the songs I have that I want to listen to' isn't really one of them. The system will have all the songs you already have, one way or another. If you want to listen to songs you don't actually already own, you're better off with Spotify premium, obviously.

Jon

Yep, sounds like "Google Play Music Manager". They seem to use the Gracenote database to do their matching. I wonder what iTunes use?

I'm just about to find out how well it works for me:



You only get 20,000 songs for free, but to my surprise I only have 12,000 so it should be fine for quite a while! It's a shame it doesn't do videos, but I guess that's what Youtube is for.

The same, IIRC.


I'm pretty sure various legal shenanigens stop it being used for videos, the same way both Apple and Google still put DRM on the videos they sell - it's the film & TV companies still being stuck in the early to mid 20th century, basically.

Well their matching failed 100%. It's about 25% the way through uploading my collection. I can't believe that not a single person has anything I have - especially the free downloads which must be byte identical!

Maybe the DRM on the free tracks means that it is not identical to what others have?

The free tracks are all DRM free. I don't do DRM on downloads.

IIRC I think that if it is from iTunes the free tracks have user ID embedded in them, even if they have no DRM.

Interesting Article on iCloud syncing

Goesovcer the background of what 'iCloud' actually is and what bits of it do or do not work. Basically, 'iCloud syncing' is in fact three different things. The two simple ones - value/key syncing (settings syncing) and file syncing, basically - seem to work pretty well. The complicated one - cloud data syncing - doesn't bloody work at all.

Most damningly, none of Apple's own apps use cloud data syncing.