iTunes Match First Impressions
I’ve been playing around with iTunes Match over the past couple of days. Here’s some early thoughts.
Wouldn’t ‘iTunes in the Cloud’ be the more appropriate name for this? That’s essentially what it is. It takes your iTunes library and playlists and puts then in iCloud.
This is biggest and most important thing Apple has done with iTunes since opening the music store back in 2003. Having access to every song in your library on every device without having to physically store it all is awesome. I now have access to my 53GBs of music on my 16GB iPhone and iPad. This is a dream come true.
But it’s buggy as hell. I’m a bit surprised Apple released it in this state.
For example, many of my more complex smart playlists are way way off on my iOS devices. Some contain thousands of songs which don’t meet the criteria. Also, when playing an iCloud cloud song, if it runs out of buffer the app will consider the song over, increment the play count and move on to the next song. At least that’s the case in my smart playlists where songs are removed for a period of time once it’s been played.
It’s makes it difficult to say to friends, “Yea, you should totally pay $25 for this!”, but I’m sure the bugs will get worked out over the coming weeks and months.
All those ‘Free Single of the Week’ songs I downloaded years ago and then decided I didn’t like and deleted are back! Same with all those singles I bought before the full album came out. I usually delete the single afterwards since the full album download duplicates the single instead of skipping it or replacing it. But those are all back now too!
It appears the desktop version of iTunes can stream iCloud songs without storing them permanently on your computer. But with iOS devices it appears once songs are streamed->downloaded they’re there to stay. I’m not sure if there’s a way to manage on-device music storage or not.
The functionality to upgrade your ripped MP3s to 256Kbps AACs is non-destructive. Which is nice. But you do have to remember to get rid of the one you don’t want to keep.
