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Apple Reopens iTunes Match Beta for U.S. Developers

Saturday September 10, 2011 3:22 pm PDT by Eric Slivka
Apple has sent out an email to registered developers today notifying them that the company has opened the iTunes Match beta to additional developers in the United States. The iTunes Match beta was initially opened late last month, but closed to new registrations within a few hours after the initial quota of developers was reached.
iTunes Match beta testing has now been expanded to additional developers in the United States.

iTunes Match stores your music library in iCloud and allows you to enjoy your collection from anywhere, any time, on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or computer. Any of your songs, including music you've imported from CDs, that matches with the 18 million songs in the iTunes Store will become available in iCloud and will play back at iTunes Plus quality (256 Kbps DRM-free AAC) — even if your original was of a lower quality.
Apple goes on to note that developers must upgrade to the new iTunes 10.5 beta 8 in order to use iTunes Match, and continues to warn that all iCloud libraries will be deleted at the end of the beta testing period, so users should be sure to retain copies of their music libraries.


iTunes Match is priced at $24.99 per year, and Apple is providing developers who sign up for the service with additional time on their subscription to carry them through the beta testing period and the first full year of public availability.

[ 157 comments ]


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alectheking
104 months ago

What happens if iTunes Match scans your pr0n stash?


if porno musicals are your type of thing..
Rating: 5 Votes
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spasm321
104 months ago

Can somebody confirm if I can subscribe using iTunes Gift Cards credit?


It worked for me.
Rating: 3 Votes
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alectheking
104 months ago

I'm sorry, but what?? You can't polish a turd, so why even waste the resources up-converting the lower bitrate songs? And what about higher bitrate songs? They get down-converted? No thank you, Apple. I will stick with Amazon for my cloud music storage.

Besides...who the bloody hell wants to use iTunes if they don't have to?


It doesn't up convert, it replaces entirely.
Rating: 3 Votes
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gnasher729
104 months ago

I don't mind spending the $ during the dev program, but does anyone actually have this working full force? All I see is problems with it, and no sense spending more cash for a beta non working service.


I'll explain it: The idea is that you, as a developer, who wants to make money from Apple's services, use the beta service to help Apple find problems in the service so that they get fixed before general consumers use the service.
Rating: 3 Votes
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peterdevries
104 months ago

It's a US service, so we can't really complain though ;-)


Well the thing we could complain about is that Apple is not really fast with adding other countries to their licensed countries list. Take for example iTunes movie content. This has been around for what, five years? It's still missing in a large part of the world.
The Dutch iTunes movie content is still MIA. I know we represent a tiny market compared to the US, UK and german speaking region, but it shouldn't be that hard to focus part of the effort on including smaller regions in negotiations with providers.

I do not have any confidence that I will be using iTunes match anytime soon. :mad:
Rating: 3 Votes
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alectheking
104 months ago

Someone who does have iTunes Match, could you tell me what you're renew date is? My renew date is a year from when I signed up. Does that mean after it goes live, my renew date will be updated? Or are others renew date set to 15 months later as opposed to 12?


mines Aug 30, 2012. Guessing it will update upon public launch.
Rating: 2 Votes
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Peace
104 months ago

still getting a "full" error message :(


Yeah me too! Lame sauce


ditto


This happened with the first batch of Dev accounts. Give it some time but don't give up.

And remember you need a U.S. credit card and Dev account.
Rating: 2 Votes
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wlh99
104 months ago

So, I am a huge DMB fan and I have several of their Live Trax albums ripped into iTunes. In a couple of cases, different live versions of the same songs are on multiple albums. So how does the matching work? Can the program differentiate between different versions of live songs from different albums? Does it just do it's scan and say "oh that's #41, we have a match for that" and play a different live version than what I have, or worst still a studio cut?

Thanks for any help info testers of this system can provide.


I guess that might be one of the reasons the match rate is so low for some people, it actually looks at the waveform to make sure it is an exact match. So you will either get the right version, or it won't match and you will have to upload.

I got an 89% match rate on over 6000 songs, so it isn't as broken as people here would lead you to believe, but probably depends on how you got your music, and differences in recordings of the same song.

I had a number of cases where an album I bought on iTunes matched all but one song. That really surprises me. If a song is in my purchased history, it should match.
Rating: 2 Votes
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besweeeet
104 months ago

...but talking about iTunes Match in a public forum such as this violates your developer NDA.


Didn't Apple violate their own NDA by posting information such as what's found on http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/? :rolleyes:
Rating: 2 Votes
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Los
104 months ago
I got in! :D

I'm really curious how this works, I'm thinking that I can have all my lossless tracks on my Mac, and then have the 256 kbs versions on my iPhone through iCloud without me having to make two versions of each song and what not. I think this is great. $25 a year doesn't sound too bad either. Let's see if that's how it works though.
Rating: 2 Votes

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