Phil's blog

Have just been experimenting with iTunes Match on my iPhone 4. I’ve already subscribed to, and set up iTunes Match on my iMac and I am very happy with it. It matched the majority of my music into the Cloud and only around 1000/3945 tracks had to be uploaded.

Since then I’ve used it as an opportunity to clean up the library by removing duplicates (the Match process exposes them for you) as well as downloading the 256kbps versions of lower quality tracks. I like the feeling that it is all backed up for me, while letting me keep all of the files for myself if I want to move away from iTunes in the future.

I had reservations about enabling Match on my iPhone as I had heard from a few blogs that once enabled, it would remove all tracks. This ended up being the part that I really just didn’t agree with! But I went ahead with it anyway for curiosity’s sake.

Once Match is enabled on iOS, it starts downloading the names/artists/albums of all of your songs from Match and makes them available to you. If you want to listen to any of it, you tap it to play as usual, but now it downloads (over Wi-Fi or 3G) from Match. This isn’t such a problem if you’re at home or the office on a good Wi-Fi connection, but over 3G while out and about, it will be slow and costly if you run over your data bundle!

The worst situation is if you’re out of any network connectivity, which means you don’t have any music! Well apart from all of the music you’ve streamed previously as it is downloaded and saved locally in the background. Just not very good if you’re looking for a particular song on a plane that you haven’t listened to in a while…

After I enabled Match, I was looking for a way of downloading all of the songs at once, instead of one-by-one. I found that if you create a playlist of all your songs on the device, once you’ve swiped all the way to the bottom of that playlist, you can tap Download all songs. I did this and then realised after one song that my 32GB iPhone 4 doesn’t have enough storage for everything (I normally use the “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC” to fit it all on). So I scrambled to cancel the process by turning iTunes Match off, and off it has stayed.

The nice thing about the iPhone is that all of my music is there with me, instantaneously, no matter what connectivity situation I find myself to be in. So as nice as iTunes Match is on my iMac, it just doesn’t cut it for my mobile device.

Phil (currently syncing all of my music the old fashioned way)