Apple released iTunes Match Today

As expected, the launch of iTunes Match is now upon us, with today’s release of iTunes 10.5.1, available from the iTunes website here. Apple has turned on its iTunes Match service -- although it's two weeks late. For those living under the proverbial rock, iTunes Match is the new service from Apple that gives you legal access to store all your music in iCloud – even those songs you didn’t originally purchase from iTunes. For $25 per year, iTunes Match will match tracks in your music collection to those in the iTunes catalog – a catalog that now includes over 20 million songs.

The $25-a-year subscription promises to match every song on a person's computer and store the tunes in an online account on distant servers known as the "cloud." And if you have an extensive collection of indie artists, local bands or DJs that live outside the i-Universe, iTunes Match will upload those MP3′s to iCloud, too. Once in iCloud, music can be streamed to any device and stored at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality – even if the original song was purchased at lower quality. The songs can then be downloaded or streamed to other Apple devices without needing to physically connect them to the computer.

The new service is just one of the features in iTunes 10.5.1, which also includes baked-in iCloud support, enabling you to access your songs, apps and books across all your Apple devices, without having to manually re-download the purchases on each additional device you own. Songs that are not recognized can be uploaded automatically. The service promises to function with multiple computers used by the same person by eliminating duplicates.

The update to iTunes is out now, but iTunes Match is available only for U.S. users (sorry, world). To enable the service, you’ll need to switch it on after iTunes is installed. Apple declined to comment on the delay. Earlier it had said iTunes Match would be available by the end of October.

An earlier message on iTunes saying new accounts were not being accepted was posted in error and has since been removed. P.S. For those of you who remember the debate about whether or not what iTunes Match is doing can be called “streaming,” you may be interested to see that Apple now uses the word “streaming” on its website to describe the service: “Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it to any of your devices…”


Source : www. techcrunch.com