I know the topic can potentially require several hundres words to address, but obviously I’m not looking for that. Here is my question: Does this service physically move my iTunes Library to iCloud? Therefore, when I want to hear a particular track the music is streamed from the cloud?
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Ray Craft
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Well, “move” is the wrong term. Saying “copy” would be correct. And it doesn’t really copy it to iCloud, which would refer to your iCloud space where you store contacts, events, email and documents. It is separate from that. Think of it as iTunes Match servers, not iCloud servers.
It will first see what you have that already exists in iTunes. It doesn’t copy those, but just creates links to the one place they exist in iTunes. If you have a lousy 128kbps version of the song, you now have access to the 320kbps version in iTunes.
For the rest of your music, it copies it to Apple servers. For me, it matched about 5/6 of my songs with iTunes songs, and then uploaded 1/6 of them.
I now have access to all of these songs on all of my devices (iPad, iPhone, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro).
It doesn’t really “stream” the music. It basically downloads it when you want to play it. A subtile technical (and legal) difference. So I choose a song to play on my iPhone and it starts downloading it to my iPhone. I don’t have to do anything special, it takes care of the details. While downloading it starts playing. I can pretend it is streaming, but I can return later and play that song again and it will probably not need to download it again as it is there in a kind of temporary storage.
I can also tap on the little cloud icon to force my iPhone to download a song, even if I don’t want to listen to it at the moment.
It remains to be seen how well this will work when we have limited Internet access.
Gary,
So I have about 1,400 songs in my iTunes library, which is about 6.5GB. Will that be used from my iCloud storage? I’m just wondering because as you know iCloud only gives you 5GB of memory for free. Will I have to buy extra storage?
Love the show!
Thanks,
Joe
No. This is unrelated to iCloud storage. I have 6,000+ songs and 1,200 of them were not matched so they were uploaded. I’m still using less than 1% of my iCloud 5GB.
Up to 25,000 tracks/songs
Great!
Your always my go-to-guy when I need an answer about Apple.
Keep up the great work with the show.
Thanks Gary!!!
my iPhone only have 16GB of capacity, I am a little afraid to fill the whole capacity of mi phone… what stored on the cloud mean?? it occupies space on my iPhone?? or my iPhone space remain the same???
iTunes Match is made for your situation. All of your music is on the iTunes Match servers. You can download and listen to songs when you want, but the music doesn’t have to stay on your iPhone after you listen to it. It just makes it easier to get music on to your iPhone from anywhere, temporarily.
Thanks Gary, macmost is one of my favorite sites, full of valuable information..
does this affect my data package?
What do you mean? Your data package usually refers to your wireless carrier. iTunes Match is a service that uses data, but it doesn’t change you agreement with your carrier.
If you mean will it use data over your 3G connection — the answer is that it is up to you. There is a setting where you can prohibit iTunes from using this service unless you are connected to wifi. Or, you can just not use iTunes when you are using 3G.
I am wondering about backup of my pc iTunes liberty – do I stile have to have backup of the iTunes liberty when I have iCloud and Match?
Or is it possible to download the complete iTunes liberty to my pc after a HD failure ?
iTunes Match means that all of your songs are on Apple’s servers. So consider them backed up. But that is just music. It doesn’t take into account other things like videos, apps, etc.
Of course you might want to still back up your library locally.
Ok so how do I download my library from I cloud? I had a HD failure and need to do so but I can’t get any information more than what services I cloud offers.
Did you sign up for iTunes Match? If so, then you should still see all of your songs listed. Just double-click to play it and it will download and play.
I want to download my entire library due to getting a new computer, I can see all my songs that are in iCloud on my itunes now no problem but I want the physical files on my computer, do i have to click the button to download from icloud for every single song, or is there a quicker way to select download all?
Just select multiple songs (or all) and control+click on one of them and select “Download.” It will download all of the songs selected.
Hi
this is a really good post! I’ve iTunes Match set up as well and have 2.5k songs there. Problem is my laptop is about to die as it is an old Dell. Can I just trade it in and then with my new laptop sync it with the new machine or do I need to physically transfer everything to new laptop??? any help appreciated…..
If everything has been uploaded to iTunes Match, then theoretically you can just run iTunes on the new computer, log in to iTunes Match, and everything will be there — download songs as needed.
But if you have any songs that have not been matched and/or uploaded, then you would lose those. So check. I would do a complete backup of an old computer anyway, as a safety net (for other things as well).
Hey,
For some reason iCloud has made it so that my entire itunes library is on my phone. How can i make it so only my playlist are on my phone? I dont want to have 3,000 songs or whatever take up that much storage space on my phone…please help on how I can fix this..
Are you using iTunes Match? If so, that’s what it does. But the songs aren’t on your phone ,they are “in the cloud.”
I have two different iTune locations. One on my PC and the other on my laptop. I am using my PC location to convert my vinyl to MP3′s. Will iTunes Match allow me to access both libraries from a single location (iCloud)?
The way iTunes Match works is that you have ONE library that you can access from any device (with your ID). It is unusual that you have two libraries. But it should just upload one, then the other. I’d back them up first, or consolidate them into one first before starting with iTunes Match.
I purchased the 16gb 4s. My itunes library is approximately 8gb, and is comprised of songs that I purchased from Itunes AND songs that I downloaded from CDs. Will the icloud store the music that I downloaded from CDs in addition to the music I purchased from Itunes? I am trying to understand the Icloud and am considering exchanging the 16gb for the 32 gb, but I want to make sure that’s the right move before I spend the additional $100.
Thank you!
Yes. That’s what iTunes Match does. With iTunes Match you might not need all of that space as you don’t need to store all of your music on the iPhone. You can just access it through iTunes Match when you want.
Just uploaded my library to the iCloud, but need to create space on my hard drive. Can I now delete the songs from the hard drive?
As long as you are sure they uploaded OK, you can. But I would archive them first to an external drive or media.
sorry, another question. I’m not that clued up with iTunes and the iCloud… Does this not work on the iPod Classic?
No, it does not work with the classic. It only works on devices with the Mac OS X operating system or the iOS operating system. The old iPod Classic is more of an “appliance” than a computer, so it doesn’t have the ability to do this sort of thing — not to mention that it isn’t a network device either, so it can’t connect to any networks.
HOW DO i UPLOAD MY ITUNES LIBRARY TO THE CLOUD WITH OUT DOING IT 1 BY 1
You don’t do it one by one. You sign up for iTunes Match. Then iTunes does all of them.