Technical information

Page 16
by Adam C. Engst
Apple has released iTunes 10.5.1, which finally unveils the
overdue iTunes Match (see “iCloud Rolls In, Extended Forecast
Calls for Disruption,” 6 June 2011). The iTunes Match service,
which costs $24.99 per year and is currently available only to U.S.
customers, enables you to store your entire music library in the
cloud and then play it from any of your computers or iOS devices.
What sets iTunes Match apart from services like Amazon
Cloud Player (see “Amazon Puts Your Music in the Cloud,” 2
April 2011) and the limited-access Music Beta by Google is that
iTunes Match doesn’t require you to upload all your music. Instead,
iTunes Match scans your iTunes library and uploads only those of
your songs that it cannot match with songs in the iTunes Store.
For tracks that do match, iTunes Match simply connects them with
Apple’s copies instead of uploading, saving you vast amounts of
time and bandwidth during setup, and saving Apple vast amounts
of storage space that would otherwise be wasted on millions of
duplicate copies of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The other big advantage of iTunes Match is that matched
tracks are provided to you at 256 Kbps AAC, in a DRM-free for-
mat. If you ripped much of your music from CD many years ago,
it may be in 128 Kbps MP3 format or worse, so the iTunes Match
versions of the songs may be of noticeably higher sound quality.
Assuming that you’ll be able to keep these higher quality versions
even if you allow your iTunes Match subscription to lapse in a
year, $25 isn’t a bad price to pay for not having to re-rip numer-
ous old CDs into modern encoding formats.
Once your library is either matched or uploaded, you can
stream your music to your iTunes-authorized Macs running iTunes
10.5.1 or to your iOS devices running iOS 5.0.1. (On an iOS device,
just turn on Settings > Music > iTunes Match.) iTunes 10.5.1 itself
requires only Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or later on a PowerPC- or
Intel-based Mac, making it significantly more backwards-compatible
than iCloud, which is available only for 10.7.2 Lion. iTunes 10.5.1
also runs on Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7,
which could be welcome for accessing your music library at work.
There are some caveats. First, if you have more than 25,000
songs in your iTunes library that were not purchased from the
iTunes Store, iTunes Match won’t let you sign up at all (presum-
ably you can fool it by creating a slimmed-down library). Second,
iTunes Match won’t upload songs that are over 200 MB in size or
that are encoded as AAC or MP3 with a bit rate lower than 96
Kbps. Third, songs in ALAC, WAV, or AIFF formats will be trans-
coded to temporary AAC 256 Kbps files before being uploaded,
but the originals will remain untouched. All other unmatched con-
tent will be uploaded as is. Fourth and finally, DRM-shackled songs
purchased outside the U.S. iTunes Store will not be matched or
uploaded.
iTunes 10.5.1 is a
102 MB download; it’s
not yet appearing in
Software Update for
me, and the Down-
load link on its Apple
Support Downloads
page is currently incor-
rect. However, you can
download it from the
iTunes Download page,
and it will undoubtedly
appear in Software Up-
date shortly.
[
TidBITS 14 Nov
2011]
iTunes 10.5.1 Unveils iTunes Match