Stefan Mileschin

Apple has finally released iTunes Match to the public. The release comes a couple of weeks later than its originally schedule October.

For those of you unfamiliar with the service, iTunes Match is iTunes in the cloud - it lets you store all your music (up to 25,000 songs) on Apple's servers. Once uploaded, you can access your music from anywhere so long as you've got a semi decent Internet connection. What makes Match special is that you only need to upload the songs from your library that are not in Apple's iTunes Store. Songs that are available in iTunes Store are already on Apple's servers, hence the upload isn't necessary. This is a definite advantage compared to Amazon's Cloud Player, which requires you to upload all of your music. Upload speeds are still generally slow; a 1Mbps upload would take over four days to upload 50GB of music.

iTunes Match is priced at $24.99 per year and is currently US only. Along with the release of iTunes Match, Apple has also updated iTunes to 10.5.1, which is required for iTunes Match. iOS devices need the recently released iOS 5.0.1.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5099/i...atch-goes-live