The legacy of Steve Jobs continues as Apple announced on Monday, November 14th, 2011, iTunes Match. Jobs mentioned back in June that Apple was coming out with a service that would centralized users music library on its iCloud. iTunes Match was supposed to have come out in October but due to some licensing complications, the service was finally released on newest iTunes version 10.5.1.
This service is a yearly fee of $24.99, which scans the user’s library and uploads the songs that iTunes store has or ‘matches’ to iCloud, where it can be accessed anywhere, anytime as long as there is a Internet connection, Wi-fi, 3G, etc. This is a great service that offers a quick solution to the painstaking effort of cleaning up your music library, the process takes a matter of minutes rather than weeks if someone was to upload all their music manually. Another great feature of this service is its boost in music quality. The service is said to be able to play up to 10 devices and play back all music at 256 kbps AAC DRM, even if the original song is of lower quality.
iTunes Match did bring up a question of piracy concern since the service makes it easier than ever for illegal torrent users to automatically replace the lower quality music file via the iTunes store. For those who actually pay to download albums from iTunes for its musical quality, this service encourages those to seek the illegitimate means of pirating and replacing their songs with iTune store for a $24.99 yearly fee, you do the math.
This service would only be beneficial to those dedicated to all things Apple since the service would only be available for Apple products, iPad, iPhones, iPod Touch, etc. So if you have music on your Android, touch luck, perhaps you should have invested on an Apple.
