All About iTunes in the Cloud
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This afternoon at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple finally announced its long awaited, much anticipated cloud-based music service, which they’ve named iTunes in the Cloud.
It turns out that iTunes in the Cloud is not a music streaming service like many speculated. Instead, it allows you to download any music you’ve purchased via iTunes to any and all of your devices with no additional charge.
New music you purchase will be automatically downloaded on your devices (up to ten of them). Older music purchased from iTunes can be downloaded on any of your iDevices using a new “Purchased” tab in iTunes. Your music is stored in the Cloud, allowing it to be instantaneously accessed from any device.
Attendees at the WWDC watched as a song was download on an iPhone and instantly showed up to be played on an iPad. With iTunes in the Cloud, music from one device is pushed to all of your other devices. All of your music will be at your fingertips on every iDevice, plus your PC or Mac. Manual syncing is a thing of the past, as the Cloud will automatically update everything for you.
If you have music that was purchased from other sources or ripped from CDs, Apple has you covered with its new iTunes Match service. iTunes Match allows you to put your existing music collection in the Cloud, which is done by scanning your library and matching songs to Apple’s versions. This saves you from uploading everything, and the entire process takes only minutes to complete. If there is no match, songs will be uploaded, and all songs that are matched are automatically upgraded to Apple’s existing DRM-free 256kbps AAC file. iTunes Match provides all of the perks of iTunes in the Cloud for music that was not purchased through Apple, including storing your entire music collection.
iTunes Match will cost $24.99 per year, for your entire music collection, and will give you the same benefits as music purchased from iTunes. So, in essence, for just $25 a year, iTunes will upgrade the quality of all of your existing non-iTunes purchased music and allow you to keep it in the Cloud for use on all of your devices. This is, as Steve Jobs put it, “an industry leading offer.” 20,000 songs on Amazon’s Cloud Drive will cost you upwards of $100 per year.
To finish up the iTunes in the Cloud announcement, Apple gave a tour of their new massive data center in North Carolina (one of three), which houses Cloud servers. This, Steve Jobs says, proves that Apple is serious about the Cloud and eager to bring the iCloud services to its consumers.
iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match will both launch sometime this fall with iOS 5, but an iTunes in the Cloud beta version is available today for U.S. users using iOS 4.3.
