Game, Set, and (iTunes) Match?
On Monday morning I heard the news, iTunes Match was ready for public consumption. Having just made a full back-up of my computer, I decided to jump right in. This had been something I had been looking forward to. Not so much for my music-consumption needs today, but more for what I envisage those needs will be next year. More of this in a moment, first some background...
I have quite a lot of music. In addition to hundreds of CDs – all ripped into iTunes at varying bit rates (128 Kbps upwards) – I've also purchased hundreds of songs on iTunes, and since 2005 I've been downloading the annual free torrent of music from the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. If you haven't heard about this, every artist who plays at SXSW donates a free song which you can download as part of a torrent (the 2011 torrent contained over 1,100 songs!). Factor in some other free downloads and a bunch of songs that I've recorded myself, and I have amassed over 13,000 songs in my iTunes library.
This was the situation at about 10:30 am Monday morning when I started the ball rolling:
The initial stage of matching my music to what is already in iTunes was quite quick. About 2,250 of my songs (~17%) are not present in the iTunes Store and so they have to be uploaded. This process took quite a while, but if I was using the cloud music players from either Amazon or Google, I'd have to upload all 13,000 songs. I went to bed with these songs still uploading and by the time I woke up the next day, the whole process had been completed…
This is apart from 26 songs which have an iCloud status which says 'Error', and 4 songs which are 'Ineligible' (due to having too low a bitrate). Essentially, all my music is now available to my iOS devices and any other Macs I want to use. I'm curious as to whether Apple will ever allow you to access your iCloud music via a web browser (probably not, as this removes the obligation to buy/use a hardware product made by Apple), but for now I'm happy just to centralize all of my music in one place (the cloud).
Importantly, for me anyway, iTunes Match keeps all of your track metadata in place. Even if you ugprade a 128 Kbps song to a 256 Kbps song from the iTunes Store, you'll keep all of your important metadata (play count, ID3 tags etc). If this didn't happen, a lot of my smart playlists would become broken, so thank you Apple for thinking this one through!
One of the other bonuses for using iTunes Match is that if any of your songs are encoded at less than 256 Kbps, you can delete your local copy and then download a 256 Kbps version from iTunes. Several years ago I was ripping CDs at 128 Kbps, before increasing this to 192 and then to 256, so I have a lot of my music encoded at a lower quality. Although I could go back and re-rip these CDs to obtain higher quality versions, I'm happier to let iTunes do it (more so, when it is low quality SXSW downloads that I can now upgrade). However, this would currently require about 33 GB of extra disk space! Another benefit of iTunes Match is that – if you trust Apple to look after your data – it gives you an additional backup of all your music (though I'm not suggesting you ever make this your only backup).
So am I stumping up $24.99 a year for this service just to get higher quality versions and have an online backup? Not quite. My iTunes library currently contains over 60 GB of music; this will be close to 100 GB if I upgrade the quality of all songs to 256 Kbps. Next year, I plan to purchase a MacBook Air and this means that I almost certainly won't be able to store all of my music on that device (assuming I want to keep other files on the computer). I could keep music on a network drive at home and access it that way, but I like the simplicity of accessing the data via iCloud and just downloading the songs that I'm going to be listening to on any particular day, week, or month.
The one grumble I have since moving to iTunes Match is that playlists will no longer sync to iOS devices if they contain podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have a playlist that I frequently sync to my iPhones and iPods that contains a selection of podcasts. The podcasts themselves will still sync to my iOS devices – they remain available in the 'Podcasts' section of the Music app – but you can no longer play those as part of a playlist. Turning on iTunes Match on an iOS device effectively wipes the local music content and replaces it with what's in iCloud. It's a bit more subtle that this. Existing synced playlists remain on the iOS device (except if they contain podcasts) but all other playlists become available to browse. The music in those non-synced playlists has to be downloaded on demand via iCloud. Another advantage of using iCloud, is that any changes that you make to your playlists (on your Mac or iOS device) are immediately synced between devices (this includes playcount information).
The lack of playlist support for Podcasts meant that I quickly turned my attention to the iOS app store. I'm now using the excellent Downcast app that fulfills all my podcasting needs (and greatly exceeds the previous capabilities of what I was able to do with the default Music app).
So overall, I'm happy with iTunes Match and with accessing my music via iCloud. The real test will be in a year or so when I may need to do more music management on my desired Macbook Air.
If you're looking for some iTunes Match tips and tricks, try out these great resources:
