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4. iCloud Downloads > Use iTunes Match
Use iTunes Match
Automatic downloads and re-downloads work great for media you’ve purchased from Apple, but what about music you obtained from other sources—CDs you’ve owned for years that you imported into iTunes, MP3 files you bought from Amazon.com because they were cheaper than iTunes’s offerings, or even recordings you made yourself in GarageBand? Wouldn’t it be great if all your music, no matter where it came from, could automatically be made available on all your devices?
Thanks to iTunes Match, it can—for the small fee of $24.99 per year.
iTunes Match is an optional add-on. It was initially available only in the United States, but availability has now spread to most countries around the world. If you don’t need it, you can skip the rest of this chapter. But if you think it might be useful, read on.
Once you’ve paid your first year’s fee for iTunes Match and activated the service on your devices, here’s what happens:
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iTunes scans the music library on your Mac or PC and compares what you have to Apple’s vast iTunes Store selection—more than 20 million tracks. This process should take just a few minutes.
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Whenever iTunes finds a track in your library that wasn’t purchased from the iTunes Store but matches a track in Apple’s library, it makes Apple’s version available for download or streaming on all your devices (including your Apple TV). The music in Apple’s library is stored as 256-Kbps AAC files, without DRM (digital rights management). So, if the song already on your computer was stored at a lower quality or with DRM, the version now available to all your devices will be superior.
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When iTunes encounters a track it can’t match—for example, a rare version of a song, or a track you recorded yourself—it uploads that track to iCloud, after which it’s available to all your other devices. (This may take a while, depending on the quantity of music and the speed of your Internet connection.) Unmatched tracks are uploaded at their existing quality, even if that’s less than 256-Kbps AAC.
Note
iTunes Match even makes your playlists available across all your devices, including your Apple TV—and when you download a higher-quality track from Apple, it maintains your existing metadata (such as play count).
iTunes Match is easy to set up on all your devices. If you have a large collection of music that didn’t come from the iTunes Store, you may find it well worth the price. (And if not, you can always cancel your subscription before the end of the first year—you keep all the upgraded music you downloaded.)
Activate iTunes Match on a Mac or PC
To activate iTunes Match on a Mac or PC, follow these steps:
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Open iTunes.
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Choose Store > Turn On iTunes Match. The main part of the iTunes window explains what you get if you subscribe.
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Click Subscribe for $24.99 Per Year.
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Enter your Apple ID and password, and click Subscribe.
iTunes verifies your purchase, gathers information about your iTunes library, and then begins matching your tracks. You can continue using iTunes normally—but if you quit iTunes, it will interrupt the process until you open it again. A small cloud icon appears next to the word Music in the iTunes sidebar to indicate that iTunes Match is active.
If you have another Mac or PC, you can follow a process similar to Steps 1–4, except that in Step 3, the button says Add This Computer. (You pay only once for up to ten devices that share an Apple ID.)
Note
If you sign out of your account in iTunes (Store > Sign Out)—for example, to temporarily sign in with a different Apple ID—iTunes turns off iTunes Match. When you sign back in with your previous account, however, iTunes Match is not reenabled automatically. You must choose Store > Turn On iTunes Match to reactivate it, just as if you were adding a new computer from scratch.
Activate iTunes Match on an iOS Device
After you’ve turned on iTunes Match on your Mac or PC, you can activate it on all your iOS devices too. Follow these steps:
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Tap Settings > Music.
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Set the iTunes Match switch to On. You’ll see an alert that iTunes Match will replace all your music, but that’s misleading—any music already on the device that was previously synced to an iTunes library you’ve connected to iTunes Match stays in place. Tap Enable.
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After a few moments, a Show All Music switch appears beneath the iTunes Match switch. If you turn this on (as most people will prefer), every track in your iTunes library appears on your iOS device in the Music app; those that haven’t been downloaded appear with a download
button. If you turn it off, only the music that is stored on your device will appear.
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If you want to ensure that iTunes Match downloads music only when your iOS device is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi (and not when it’s using a cellular connection), tap Settings > Store and turn Use Cellular Data off. (If you don’t see this switch, your device doesn’t have a cellular modem.)
You can now stream or download any of your tracks on this device. Repeat Steps 1–4 for any other iOS devices you use.
Tip
You can listen to all your iTunes Match tracks on an Apple TV; see Set Up iCloud on an Apple TV.
Interact with iTunes Match
Once your songs have been matched (and, if necessary, uploaded) and iTunes Match is activated on all your devices, what then? I give you a quick overview here; in the next topic, I tell you where to go for more detailed information.
Use iTunes Match in iTunes on a Mac or PC
In iTunes on your Mac or PC, everything should work as it did before. After all, all your iTunes music was already there to start with.
You should notice a new Cloud column in iTunes list views, however, which displays a status icon next to a track when iTunes Match needs to call your attention to something. If the icons alone don’t mean much to you, you can add another column, iCloud Status, that spells out in words what each track’s status is—for example, whether it’s been Matched (it was already in Apple’s online collection) or Uploaded (because it was uploaded from your computer), among others. To turn on this column, choose View > View Options and select the iCloud Status checkbox. (You can then click the iCloud Status column to sort by status, which can be helpful for a variety of reasons.)
You now have a fantastic new capability: you can delete any track from iTunes that has been matched or uploaded with impunity, and re-download it at your convenience! This is ideal for people who have, say, a MacBook Air with a tiny SSD, or for anyone running low on disk space. Simply delete the tracks you don’t need at the moment, and then download them later—assuming, of course, that you’ve continued to pay for iTunes Match.
To delete a track, first verify that the iCloud Status column says either Matched or Uploaded. Then select the track and press Delete. But wait a minute…
Warning
In the alert that appears, stop before you select the Also Hide This Song (or These Songs) in iCloud checkbox. For tracks you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store, selecting this option truly does hide them—on all devices on which you’ve turned on iTunes Match. (You can unhide them later by choosing Store > View My Apple ID, clicking the View Hidden Purchases link in the iTunes in the Cloud section, navigating to the tracks you want, and clicking Unhide.) However, for tracks that were merely matched or uploaded, checking this box deletes them from iCloud entirely. Once such a track is gone from iCloud, the only ways to get it back are to restore it from a backup or to copy it to iTunes from another source.
So, with Also Delete from iCloud not selected, click Delete Song (or Delete Item); then click Move to Trash. To recover the space on your disk on a Mac, empty your trash (Finder > Empty Trash); in Windows, right-click your Recycle Bin and choose Empty Recycle Bin.
Any track that’s part of iTunes Match but not currently on your disk displays a download button in the Cloud
column. To download the song again, click this button. Or, to stream the song (that is, to play it while it’s downloading), double-click the track name.
Use iTunes Match on an iOS Device
In the Music app on your iOS device, any tracks that were already on the device (that is, those you previously synced with iTunes) should stay in place, even though you may have seen a warning message suggesting they’ll be deleted. In any case, tracks that are part of iTunes Match—those that were purchased from the iTunes Store, or matched or uploaded from your Mac or PC—but not present locally on your iOS device, have a download button next to them.
You can interact with tracks in the cloud just as you would with purchased tracks that you haven’t downloaded (read Re-download on an iOS Device). To reiterate the basics, you can do the following:
Learn More about iTunes Match
Although the idea behind iTunes Match is simple and straightforward, its implementation has led to a great many “Yeah, but what about this situation?” questions. I can’t answer them all here, but Apple has posted some helpful information on its Web site, and my colleagues at Macworld have also written a tremendous volume of text about iTunes Match that should help you over any remaining rough spots. Here are links to the articles I’ve found most useful:
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For a huge and extremely interesting FAQ-style overview of iTunes Match, read “iTunes Match: What you need to know,” by Serenity Caldwell at Macworld (http://www.macworld.com/article/163658).
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For more information about the status icons that can optionally appear next to each track in iTunes, start with Apple’s “iTunes Store: Understanding the iCloud Status Icons” (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4124) and then, for much more detail, move on to Jason Snell’s Macworld article “Check your music’s iCloud Status” (https://www.macworld.com/article/163606).
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Jason Snell of Macworld describes a very nifty way to replace all the lower-quality tracks in the iTunes library on your Mac or PC with their higher-quality iTunes Match versions in “How to upgrade tracks to iTunes Match, fast” (https://www.macworld.com/article/163620). I’ve tried this myself, and it worked great!
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To see Apple’s tips for solving iTunes Match problems, read “iTunes Store: Troubleshooting iTunes Match” (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4054).
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Kirk McElhearn’s ebook Take Control of iTunes 11: The FAQ (http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/itunes-11) covers iTunes Match among many other iTunes features.
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