The new CEO of Apple is responding to customer emails left and right from his tcook@apple.com address. Thanks to an email sent to that address, Apple’s VP of Internet Services has now shed a little more light on the availability of iTunes Match to customers outside of the US.
Apple released iTunes Match to registered developers last night, and many have been playing with the cloud service since then to figure out how it really works. We then showed you a video that demoed how Apple lets you “stream” music.
As it turns out, iTunes Match doesn’t actually ‘stream’ music in the purest sense of the word. Instead, Apple lets you download music on the fly, which basically means that you’re still locally storing songs on your device.
Apple has temporarily closed down the iTunes Match beta to developers trying to access it for the first time after Apple launched their match-and-stream music service yesterday afternoon.
When Apple announced iTunes Match at WWDC back in June, it was a little unclear whether the service would allow you to stream your music library to your iOS devices as opposed to storing it locally — allowing you to access your tracks without actually taking up any of your precious storage space.
Following the launch of the iTunes Match developer beta yesterday, it has been confirmed that streaming is possible with Apple’s upcoming $25/year service.
It’s finally here — for U.S.-based developers, anyway. iTunes Match, Apple’s upcoming new service that takes your iTunes library and mirrors it in Apple’s cloud so it can be streamed has just dropped in Beta form.
TuneUp is the #1 add-on for iTunes. It cleans up song metadata like missing album info or misspelled names. It also delivers related music videos, and alerts you when favorite artists are playing in town.
It’s easy to use and can do a quick job of cleaning up the messiest library. But it’s not perfect: songs can be mislabeled and there’s been complaints of bugs and crashes. TuneUp costs $39.95/yr or $49.95 one time fee for a bundle. TuneUp also offers a la carte pricing for individual products. A free demo cleans up to 50 songs and removes 25 duplicates.
Yesterday I got a chance to talk to Gabe Adiv, founder and CEO of TuneUp Media,company behind the plug-in.
He gave me some interesting statistics about iTunes and listening habits, as well as thoughts about Apple moving music into the cloud.
Much beloved Spotify has been trying to launch in America for years now. During that time, they’ve faced considerable challenges in convincing a music industry worried about alienating Apple to give the greenlight to their excellent all-you-can-stream subscription service.
But it’s finally come together, and now there’s even a firm date being thrown around: the freemium music service will launch in the States between July 5th and july 15th.
UPDATE: I totally screwed this one up. When my contact, TuneUp founder Raza Zaidi, told me iTunes in the cloud has only 20% of the all the music listed in Gracenote’s big database of music, I interpreted it to mean that the upcoming iTunes Match service would mirror only a fraction of most music libraries. What I failed to realize was that 20% of music in iTunes represents the most popular 20%. The remaining 80% is all the music in the long tail. So when Apple rolls out iTunes Match in the fall, it will indeed likely mirror most music libraries, just as Apple claims. In a clarifying note, Zaidi says matches will likely be 95% or higher. In addition, the Get Album Artwork feature in iTunes isn’t powered by Gracenote, as the post implies. Sorry for the mistakes. Teach me to post before my morning coffee.
When iTunes Match goes live in September, Apple promises to instantaneously match any of the tracks in your iTunes library to the iCloud… as long as it already has your music in its mega music library. What Apple hasn’t said is that as much of 80% of your music might not be recognized by iTunes Match… and the only way to get that music into the iCloud will be to spend days manually uploading gigabytes at a time.
One of the big questions about Apple’s upcoming iTunes Match is how the online music service will handle songs acquired from non-standard sources, like analog LPs, or yes, file-sharing networks.
Coming this fall, iTunes Match will scan your iTunes library and make available in the cloud all the songs you’ve purchased online or ripped from CDs.
But Apple hasn’t explained what will happen with songs encoded from sources like tapes or LPs; or those couple of tracks you accidentally downloaded from a file-sharing network and forgot to delete. Will iTunes Match reject these songs or make them available?
In theory, the system should recognize most digitzed music. Apple has explicitly said it will not discriminate based on source, and someone likely ripped the songs from CD before sharing them with the world.
We’ve found a way for you to check how iTunes Match will treat your music library before Apple makes it public.
Oh, man, finally. Years after showing Europe how a streaming music service ought to be done, and just a couple of weeks after Apple made it clear that their own iTunes-In-The-Cloud service wouldn’t do streaming at all, Spotify has officially confirmed that it will be coming to the United States within a matter of weeks.
Apple’s new iTunes Match functionality is an incredible boon to music lovers, effortlessly matching your local music to Apple’s cloud servers, but it doesn’t happen by magic. Instead, iTunes Match is the product of numerous inked deals between Cupertino and music publishers: no deal, and iTunes Match can’t mirror tracks from that label.
So bad news, soul and R&B fans. Numero Group has just vocally drawn a line in the sand: iTunes Match legitimizes piracy, and they won’t be part of it.
While the iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match features unveiled at WWDC this week have since been the center of attention for user in the U.S., users across the pond in the U.K. are still wondering when these features may be available to them. According to record label executives and music analysts, us Brits won’t get our hands on them until at least 2012.
As much as I love my Apple TV, I’m still rather irked that Apple is yet to offer a Netflix substitute for its U.K. users. It now seems that Apple has snubbed those of us across the pond once again with its iTunes cloud services, which apparently won’t be making their way to the U.K. anytime soon.
No matter how many months of rumors and insider reports precede an anticipated Apple announcement, it’s probable that, when Steve Jobs actually reveals the product on stage, it’s going to be radically different than what people are expecting… but iCloud could be the most radical deviation yet between the fancy of pre-announcement hype and the reality of Apple’s finished product.
What people expected from iCloud was a streaming cloud locker for your media collection: iCloud would scan your iTunes library and automatically mirror them on a central server, allowing you to stream any song you owned to any device you owned without being bothered with local storage.
What people got? iTunes Match. It scans and matches your iTunes library in the cloud, sure, but there is no streaming: any time you want to listen to an album that’s not on your iPhone or iPad, you’ve got to download it from the cloud onto your device.
No streaming? What was Apple thinking?
As a follow-up to last week’s super guide of everything we expected at WWDC 2011, here’s everything Steve Jobs and Apple actually did announce at this year’s WWDC, from Lion’s exciting new features to the revolution of iOS 5 and iCloud.
