iTunes Match: One year in

iTunes Match: One year in:

On November 14, 2011 (a few weeks later than promised), Apple released iTunes Match, a $25-a-year, cloud-based service designed to provide access to your iTunes music library from a computer, iOS device, or Apple TV.

The idea is simple: iTunes scans your music library, sends the information about your songs to Apple’s servers, and then either “matches” music that’s in both your library and the iTunes Store, or uploads the music that isn’t in the iTunes Store. Then, you can either download or stream (depending on the hardware) all of your music from a Mac or PC running iTunes 10; an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5 or later; or a second- or third-generation Apple TV.

(See Macworld’s extensive coverage of iTunes Match for more about using the service.)

When iTunes matches your music, it scans your entire library so it can recognize its contents and send that information to Apple's servers.
In theory, iTunes Match is a great idea. The point of matching your music is to leverage the more than 26 million songs in the iTunes Store so you don’t have to upload all your music, saving you time, and saving Apple the hassle of having to store millions of copies of songs. When your music is matched, Apple keeps your specific tags and album art, but the actual music files aren’t duplicated. And if the matched file is of better quality than your original—iTunes offers 256-kbps AAC files, but will recognize the 128-kbps MP3 you ripped from a CD a decade ago—you can replace your aging copies with pristine iTunes Store music.

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