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Is iTunes Match what I want?

CarboysDesire

CarboysDesire

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 9, 2008
818
276
Las Vegas
I have about 10,000 songs in my iTunes library, located on a 27" iMac at home. I listen to my music all day long at work, on shuffle. It barely fits on my 64 gig first gen iPad but I've noticed apps are crashing a lot--I'm guessing because I have hardly any space left??? Maybe it's just time to replace it, but that's another issue.

To the 27" iMac I sync 2 iPhones, the 1 iPad mentioned above, and 2 iPods. It has worked this way for a few years.

I bought a 13" MacBook Air (2013) that I've had for 2 weeks. I'd like to play music on it sometimes. I've been Googling and browsing forums about how to copy the music on my iMac to the Air. I would like to copy everything, but am wary of how to keep them both in sync if I buy something new, which happens all the time!

So I came across a posting about iTunes Match. Supposedly for just $24.99/year my entire library will be available to me via the cloud, and I can access it from my Air (and my other devices) without actually having to store the music on those devices??? Is that right? Seems too good to be true.

If it is true, is this what I want? Seems like it is..or is there another (free) way?

I think it writing all that out I know the answer, but I'd be open to any other suggestions or feedback, thank you!!! :p
 
I use iTunes match. It works well for me. Almost all of my songs were matched. They are available to any device using my iTunes account. I usually stream music to my iPhone over 3g/4g while at the gym and in my car.
 
Svend said:
I use iTunes match. It works well for me. Almost all of my songs were matched. They are available to any device using my iTunes account. I usually stream music to my iPhone over 3g/4g while at the gym and in my car.
Click to expand...


Thank you. I have an 80 gig iPod that lives in my car, so I won't need streaming there. At work I have access to the Wi-Fi, so streaming will be ideal there.

The gym though...I'm there 6 days/week. I think I would still keep music on my iPhone for use at the gym. I can do that right?
 
CarboysDesire said:
Thank you. I have an 80 gig iPod that lives in my car, so I won't need streaming there. At work I have access to the Wi-Fi, so streaming will be ideal there.

The gym though...I'm there 6 days/week. I think I would still keep music on my iPhone for use at the gym. I can do that right?
Click to expand...

Yes you can, once you have iTunes match turned on (on the phone) you can chose to download as many of your songs as it will hold to playback when you are not connected. i do tihs at work, no wi-fi and no cell service so i keep a playlist of all of the locally stored music and just shuffle play that playlist while at work.

The only issue i have had with iTues match have been album art issues.
 
Thank you. I think I will just not turn on the iTunes match on my iPhone and just keep syncing it to put the music I want on there. I prefer it that way.
 
So far I have turned on iTunes match on my main iMac, and all of my music has been transferred to the Cloud, save for a few rarities that I don't care about anyway, so I'm happy.

I then turned on iTunes match on my Air and it found every song in the Cloud. Success.

Then I sync'd my iPad, removing ALL the existing music. Then I turned on iTunes match and just like the Air it found all my stuff via the Cloud. Success.

Since I prefer to keep the music that's on my iPhone as it is I will simply not go to settings and turn on iTunes match. I think that should work. I guess the next test is to sync the phone swapping out some of the songs and seeing what happens.
 
CarboysDesire said:
Since I prefer to keep the music that's on my iPhone as it is I will simply not go to settings and turn on iTunes match. I think that should work. I guess the next test is to sync the phone swapping out some of the songs and seeing what happens.
Click to expand...
You can keep syncing the phone as always. If you turn on Match on the phone, music previously synced from iTunes will stay on the device (that is how I fill my devices initially before turning on Match, since it is much faster than downloading tons of songs from the cloud). Just make sure you have a current iOS version, since Match sometimes behaved in strange ways in earlier versions.
 
I just signed up for match yesterday and I've been looking for a lot of this information. This thread seems a good place to start. I was surprised to not see a match master thread in my search.

Match is still doing it's thing on my Mac Mini at home. I have just over 13000 songs. Last night it said 8000 some were available in match and less than 100 out of 4700 had been uploaded. This morning when I got up, I now had 11000 available in match and around 1700 out of 3300 had been uploaded. So I guess it had found 1400 more matches that it no longer needed to upload.

I'm glad to see that turning Match on does not remove music from the phone. I am still going to wait until the setup completes and I sync my phone before I try it.

Later I will begin the "upgrade" process. The main draw of match for me was the upgrade my 128 purchases as well as some 192 rips I did years ago. It's simply too tedious to pull out all the CD's again to re-rip them. Anything I buy now I'm ripping lossless.

I'm still apprehensive about the play counts thing. I did play around on my old iPad last night and turned on match and after a few moments could see all my playlists and such. I definitely like the idea of having the ability to see my real library from anywhere.

One question; once I finish setup and turn on Match on my work laptop, can I make playlists and such from work without downloading my whole library to it? Will those playlists appear across my other devices? My understanding to both is yes, though I'm less sure about the first part.

I think overall I am going to like this service and will keep it beyond just the upgrade perks.
 
randy98mtu said:
One question; once I finish setup and turn on Match on my work laptop, can I make playlists and such from work without downloading my whole library to it? Will those playlists appear across my other devices? My understanding to both is yes, though I'm less sure about the first part.
Click to expand...

Yes you can create a playlist without downloading the whole library (I just did that on my iPad), and yes it will sync across all your devices.
 
kh3khalid said:
Yes you can create a playlist without downloading the whole library (I just did that on my iPad), and yes it will sync across all your devices.
Click to expand...

Thanks. It just finished setting up for me last night. I've not played with it on 3 computers and I enabled it on my phone. The only thing I haven't seen working yet is playcount updates. That will be important to me and I have read that it is buggy. I did make changes from my work machine to a playlist and within a minute they were reflected on my phone. I was hoping playcounts would go the other way as quickly, but so far they have not. Do they only transfer when you sync to your main library?

Nevermind. I just loaded up my work library and songs played as recently as 15 minutes ago now show as played. This is the ultimate setup I've been dreaming of for years.
 
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