Apple has finally released iTunes Match to the public. The release comes a couple of weeks later than its originally schedule October.

For those of you unfamiliar with the service, iTunes Match is iTunes in the cloud - it lets you store all your music (up to 25,000 songs) on Apple's servers. Once uploaded, you can access your music from anywhere so long as you've got a semi decent Internet connection. What makes Match special is that you only need to upload the songs from your library that are not in Apple's iTunes Store. Songs that are available in iTunes Store are already on Apple's servers, hence the upload isn't necessary. This is a definite advantage compared to Amazon's Cloud Player, which requires you to upload all of your music. Upload speeds are still generally slow; a 1Mbps upload would take over four days to upload 50GB of music. 

iTunes Match is priced at $24.99 per year and is currently US only. Along with the release of iTunes Match, Apple has also updated iTunes to 10.5.1, which is required for iTunes Match. iOS devices need the recently released iOS 5.0.1

Source: Apple

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  • GotThumbs - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 - link

    Winamp even provides you with the ability to play YOUR music on your phone...Itunes library import and you can play on your IProduct.

    Its free or go PRO for one time purchase of 20.00.

    Really people...its a NO-Brainer. I know Anandtech readers here are savvy enough to know their are alternatives, but the real problem is the general public are CLUELESS and that's what Apple preys on. Dumb/Fashion focused consumers who would pay someone $60 just to install a memory stick.

    I just hate the idea of people being duped out of their hard earned money before knowing what other options are available.

    Best Wishes.
  • melgross - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link

    is that Apple did deals with the record companies to allow this, while neither Amazon nor Google did.

    The advantage isn't just that you don't have to upload all of your music, which is required with the others, whether they have the music in their stores or not, but that you are legalizing the music you otherwise obtained, and are upgrading it to a higher level of quality, assuming it was created on some kids $400 Dell with shareware software.
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