Apple release ‘iTunes Match’ in the US. Rest of World left waiting for release date.
Apple today have released the long-awaited iTunes Match service for U.S. iTunes fans only. iTunes Match has been bundled and released with the recent iTunes 10.5.1 update. Unfortunately, there is no release date for Australia (including Rest of World), however I am confident that before the end of year, we will see this service pushed out to UK, Canada, Australia and Beyond.
What is iTunes Match?
For US$24.99/Per year, iTunes Match is an iCloud based service, and with over 20 Million songs for matching, iTunes Match will analyse your iTunes library, matching songs, and uploading non-matched content to your iCloud service. If a song is matched, it becomes available to you to download to any of your devices linked to your iCloud account via iTunes. If a song is not matched, it is uploaded in its current format, ensuring that your existing music is not compromised in quality. In addition iTunes match will replace any lower quality version of an existing songs with higher quality 256k version.
“iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are, your music is already in iCloud. And for the few songs that aren’t, iTunes has to upload only what it can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”
