Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
iTunes Match: All your music, all the time, on all your
devices
If you own more music than your iPad can hold or if you'd prefer to devote your gigabytes to
something other than music — such as photos or videos — you'll like the Apple iTunes Match service.
For a mere $24.99 a year, Apple stores your music library (up to 25,000 songs) in the cloud and lets
you stream or download any of them any time you like on up to ten devices (which must have a decent
Internet connection).
It all happens in iTunes, and it works beautifully. When you enable iTunes Match, the first thing it does
is compare your iTunes Library with the 20 million tracks sold in the iTunes Store. If it finds a match,
the song is already available from iCloud, and you can listen to it or download it to your device at any
time (as long as you have an Internet connection, of course).
After it matches all the songs it can, iTunes uploads all songs it couldn't match (up to a maximum of
25,000). In a few hours (or days), those songs are available from iCloud on all your devices on de-
mand as well.
Four more cool things you should know about iTunes Match:
Songs purchased from the iTunes Store don't count against your total of 25,000 songs.
Your iTunes Match content doesn't count against your free 5GB of iCloud storage.
All the songs iTunes matches (with its 20 million tracks) are 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free files,
even if your original was of lower quality. That means the songs you stream or download
from iCloud are likely to sound better than the originals in your iTunes Library.
iTunes Radio will play commercial free.
For just $25 a year, you can ignore the whole syncing thing between your Mac or PC and your iPad
(Chapter
3
covers syncing), at least for music. As long as Internet access is available, your entire mu-
sic library is available on your iPad (and up to nine other devices) and you'll be able to listen to radio
stations without commercials.
Browsing among the tabs
If you'd rather browse your music library, tap the appropriate tab at the bottom of the screen —
Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums, Genres, and More — and all items of that type appear. Or you can
tap the More button to browse Compilations or Composers, or to connect to a shared library, as de-
scribed later in this chapter.
After tapping one of these tabs, you can find a playlist, song, artist, album, or genre by
Flicking upward or downward
to scroll up and down the list until you find what you're
looking for.
