By David Ponce
While the company overshot their late October target launch date, the important thing is that iTunes Match is now up and running. If you’ve not been keeping track, this service gives you access to your music library in the cloud. Now if your entire library consists of songs you’ve bought on iTunes, then you have no use for iTunes Match, you can simply use iTunes in the Cloud for free. If that’s not the case… if, say, you got your collection by ripping dozens of physical CDs, then for a $25 yearly fee, iTunes will scan your hard drive, identify everything you own and simply enable your access to matching songs on iCloud. So you don’t have to actually upload a truckload of songs, the software simply identifies the ones you have and lets you listen to a 256kbps version on demand, streamed to or stored in up to 10 devices. If no match is made, only then is the song uploaded to iCloud.
There’s a limit of up to 25,000 non-iTunes purchased songs, and while the songs you decide to download from the cloud will be DRM-free, they’ll be in AAC format.
[ Apple iCloud ]
