Thousands Of Songs, With A Couple Of Hitches

When I leave my house, I carry a lot of music around with me. And yet, it's always been such a challenge to curate my 32gB iPhone. I sync a number of playlists: my top rated songs and songs ripped today, this week or in the last three months. I keep some "genius" playlists, one based on Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" for my British folk mood, another based on Pink Floyd's song "If" and my Ramones playlist.

The program

The program, which the company released last week, scans your iTunes library and at the time automatically gives you access to anything that Apple offers in the iTunes store, on your computer iPad or iPhone. The sound quality of these files - 256 kB AAC, about the same as 320 kB mp3s - is pretty good. And everything that you listen to streams if this continues, even if the version on your computer is a lower-quality mp3 that you downloaded eight years ago. The "match" feature is what separates this service from similar cloud storage services on Amazon and Google. If the songs in your library are as well in the iTunes store, you won't have to spend hours - or in my case, weeks - uploading your tunes to the cloud. iTunes simply scans your library and your songs are ready in pretty short order. The only time it needs to upload a song is if you have something that isn't carried in the iTunes Store.

The good news is that the service is pretty amazing. Hit play on a song in the cloud, and it plays pretty quickly. It's not instant, nevertheless in most cases you've got music in in accordance with five seconds, even though there were times during on the road that it took around 15 seconds. The delay only seems to happen when you play the first song on an album or playlist - there's no hesitation from song to song. Another nice trick: the songs don't stream, yet download to a cache on your device, so if they're playing and you go into a tunnel or down into your apartment's garage, the song won't stop. You always have the option to download anything from your iCloud library to your iPhone or iPod.

What doesn't work?

What doesn't work? So then, for starters, the service doesn't work on mobile devices not made by Apple. As well there's a limit on the number of songs you can have in the cloud. That number is 25,000, not including anything purchased in the iTunes store. This may not be a problem for most people, nevertheless this was where I ran into trouble. Because I had over 30,000 songs, I in fact had to remove thousands of songs from my library earlier iTunes Match would work.

I was as well surprised that enabling iTunes Match erased all the music that I had loaded onto my iPhone and iPad. You are warned about this, nevertheless if you want to use iTunes Match there's no choice: all your music on mobile devices will come from the cloud. So if you hop on an airplane or you're if not offline, you can't hear your music, unless you remember to download entire playlists or albums to your device. Once those songs are downloaded, they stay put, yet that's a conscious decision you have to make ahead of time. I'm not sure why this makes sense from Apple's point of view. Why would they want me to hit their server every time I want to hear one of my songs? It seems odd and inefficient, however that's how it works.