One of iCloud’s most anticipated and innovative features is finally live. Apple had announced that the iTunes match service would be functional by the end of October 2011, but missed the deadline by just under a half a month. Was it worth the wait? Is it worth the annual charge of $24.99 for a maximum of 25,000 songs? We put it through its paces to find out for you.
The iTunes Match is a piece of Apple’s iCloud online storage service that backs up all music in your iTunes library, whether you bought it from the iTunes Store (before or after DRM), ripped it from a disc, or acquired it from another online source. Match checks your music against Apple’s own huge stored library of over 20 million tunes, and if there’s a match, there’s no need to upload from your computer to the cloud. In fact, if Apple’s copy is of a higher fidelity than yours, you’ll get that better version in the bargain. Apple stores music as 256-Kbps AAC files (“iTunes Plus”).
Read more in the full article here.
