iTunes Match Arrives For Australians

With iOS 5 came iCloud and the next exciting instalment of iCloud is iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match. iTunes Match is a subscription service where all of your music is available in the cloud, you can store up to 25,000 songs in iCloud.

iTunes Match lets you store all your iTunes purchases, ripped CDs or any other MP3 downloaded outside of iTunes in iCloud for $34.99 a year in Australia or $24.99 in the US. iTunes Match launched in the US in November 2011 and in Australia in December 2011.

How it works: iTunes determines which songs in your music collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your iOS5 devices (Up to 10 devices signed into your iTunes account, with a maximum of 5 devices being computers - Mac or PC). 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.

I decided to buy a subscription to iTunes Match for a few reasons (see below) and I have been pleasantly surprised!

1.    My music collection is larger than my available storage on my iPad and it isn’t my primary music player so previously I didn’t have any music on my iPad but with iCloud only the music you want to play is stored on your device, so you have access to your whole music library without taking up storage space. I can just stream music from my entire music library without using all the storage space as long as I have internet access and I can even choose to download selected songs or playlists if I want them available offline.

2.    Some of my music collection is very old and the quality is very low, iTunes Match lets you download a 256 Kbps AAC DRM-free version of your music if it is matched. The great thing is even after you cancel your subscription you get to keep the local higher quality file forever but will no longer be able to stream them.

90% of my music collection was matched and the other 10% had to be uploaded to iCloud. The whole process only took just over an hour. Some albums were matched but a few songs weren't so I'm not sure why that is but I am continuing to look at the metadata to see if I change some details and scan again if this fixes this. Stay tuned and I will post an update when I learn more.


Update: Apple Support Forum where other uses are having the same issue.

For instructions on how to upgrade your iTunes music files to the better quality 256k AAC music files click here with thanks to Grown Up Geek.