iTunes Match is immediately over-subscribed
By Philip Elmer-DeWitt November 14, 2011: 1:16 PM ET Apple advises would-be users to come back in an hour

Source: Apple Inc.
Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Match service, which missed its October deadline, went live Monday morning and promptly became over-subscribed. Visitors were advised to come back in an hour. I’d give it a day or two.

The $24.99 per year service scans the music in your iTunes library and matches it to the music available on the iTunes store. Songs that don’t match are automatically uploaded.

The idea is to let you play all of your music on any of your iOS devices. It has the added value of replacing low-quality songs ripped from a CD, borrowed from a friend or just ripped off from the Internet with pristine, unprotected (i.e. DRM-free) copies from Apple’s servers.

As we noted when Steve Jobs unveiled the service last June, we can see the value for a one-year subscription, but it’s not clear why the vast majority of users would ever want to re-up. See Apple offers pirates permanent amnesty for $24.99.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/category/apple-2-0/

What happens if you stop subscribing after a year? I have a feeling a lot of people will use this to clean up their libraries, but may not continue with it once that has been done. It’s certainly what I would consider doing. I’ve no interest in the whole streaming thing.

Am I correct in thinking that the tracks you get from Apple will be AAC? This could be a devious ploy to try and supplant MP3 as the most common format of digital music.

Also, are the files watermarked? That’s different from DRM.

Its already oversubscribed. 

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/11/14/itunes-match-is-immediately-over-subscribed/

wheeles - 14 November 2011 02:02 PM

What happens if you stop subscribing after a year? I have a feeling a lot of people will use this to clean up their libraries, but may not continue with it once that has been done. It’s certainly what I would consider doing. I’ve no interest in the whole streaming thing.

Am I correct in thinking that the tracks you get from Apple will be AAC? This could be a devious ploy to try and supplant MP3 as the most common format of digital music.

Also, are the files watermarked? That’s different from DRM.

According to Apple

iTunes Match
If you want the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It’s built right into the iTunes app on your Mac or PC and the Music app on your iOS devices. And it lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.2

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

The matched downloaded AACs are tagged with the user’s AppleID and e-mail.  Apps already exist to scrub this info if you’re concerned about privacy.

I am curious about one thing.  I managed to get a subscription after repeated attempts last night, but not until after 11pm—well past my bedtime. (I have kids.  Late nights are a thing of the past for me.)  I hit “stop” on the Big Match process so I could bird-dog it this evening instead of coming home to “what the heck happened?” and not knowing how the process had gone.  Before turning in for the night, I tucked in a few albums, fixing tags and the like in preparation for resuming the Big Match the next day.  I noticed that one of the options now appearing on the control-click menu was “Add to iCloud”.  Now, I didn’t say yes because I didn’t want to completely somehow bork the Big Match process, but I wonder: could it really be this simple?  Stop the Big Match and then just add your tracks album by album or track by track as you like?  I wonder if there is any functionality sacrifice from doing it “manually.”  Because I think a lot of OCD Apple fans would like to have that degree of fine-grained control.  I’d love to see something from Apple about this.

Ross Edwards - 15 November 2011 01:00 PM

The matched downloaded AACs are tagged with the user’s AppleID and e-mail.  Apps already exist to scrub this info if you’re concerned about privacy.

I am curious about one thing.  I managed to get a subscription after repeated attempts last night, but not until after 11pm—well past my bedtime. (I have kids.  Late nights are a thing of the past for me.)  I hit “stop” on the Big Match process so I could bird-dog it this evening instead of coming home to “what the heck happened?” and not knowing how the process had gone.  Before turning in for the night, I tucked in a few albums, fixing tags and the like in preparation for resuming the Big Match the next day.  I noticed that one of the options now appearing on the control-click menu was “Add to iCloud”.  Now, I didn’t say yes because I didn’t want to completely somehow bork the Big Match process, but I wonder: could it really be this simple?  Stop the Big Match and then just add your tracks album by album or track by track as you like?  I wonder if there is any functionality sacrifice from doing it “manually.”  Because I think a lot of OCD Apple fans would like to have that degree of fine-grained control.  I’d love to see something from Apple about this.

Ross,  Can you supply a bit more “color” on the process and what you are talking about.  As I take it you are saying if you stop the match process you can then manually select what songs are uploaded? 
And what about one’s private recordings that are not “songs” (though they could be singing recordings I guess)- could those be uploaded if they are at the right bit rate?  I was at an Apple store today and the Apple employee was perhaps not clear on the way the match worked on your iOS device.  I thought that your entire library in the cloud would be available to browse (heck if I know how) and played and when you play the song it is downloaded to the device and stays there.  But can it be deleted from the device (say iPhone) after playing/downloading?  I know that it is technically not streamed but close enough.

wheeles - 14 November 2011 02:02 PM

What happens if you stop subscribing after a year? I have a feeling a lot of people will use this to clean up their libraries, but may not continue with it once that has been done. It’s certainly what I would consider doing. I’ve no interest in the whole streaming thing.

Am I correct in thinking that the tracks you get from Apple will be AAC? This could be a devious ploy to try and supplant MP3 as the most common format of digital music.

Also, are the files watermarked? That’s different from DRM.

if you cancel your annual subscription, your iCloud music library reverts back to only iTunes-purchased tracks.

Bryanyc - 15 November 2011 09:40 PM

Ross Edwards - 15 November 2011 01:00 PM

I noticed that one of the options now appearing on the control-click menu was “Add to iCloud”.  Now, I didn’t say yes because I didn’t want to completely somehow bork the Big Match process, but I wonder: could it really be this simple?  Stop the Big Match and then just add your tracks album by album or track by track as you like?

Ross,  Can you supply a bit more “color” on the process and what you are talking about.  As I take it you are saying if you stop the match process you can then manually select what songs are uploaded? 
And what about one’s private recordings that are not “songs” (though they could be singing recordings I guess)- could those be uploaded if they are at the right bit rate?  I was at an Apple store today and the Apple employee was perhaps not clear on the way the match worked on your iOS device.  I thought that your entire library in the cloud would be available to browse (heck if I know how) and played and when you play the song it is downloaded to the device and stays there.  But can it be deleted from the device (say iPhone) after playing/downloading?  I know that it is technically not streamed but close enough.

Glad you asked!  (Because I worked on this last night and was hoping someone would be interested to learn what I discovered.)

First of all, the substantive content of the audio file is not important to Match.  If it’s at least 96kbps encoded, even if it’s just a lecture or even a surveillance tape or something, if it’s less than 200MB in size, it will upload.  A small number of files that don’t fail either of those criteria are being called “ineligible,” but nobody has any idea why yet.  Until Apple documents it, we can only speculate.  It may be that files of sufficiently poor fidelity don’t upload; it may even be that some artists or labels have obtained exclusions.

Second, what you asked about iOS devices all works just like you think.  A menu of what’s in your library is visible on your iOS device.  You can download track by track, playing immediately (so effectively a stream).  You can delete the tracks locally afterward and they revert to being menu entries again.  As it were.

Third, for the Big Match vs. Little Match.  I finally ran out of patience with waiting for a time window big enough to bird-dog the whole Big Match, since it’s been a busy week.  I decided I could always back up from Time Machine and start over, so I threw caution to the wind and I just started using Add to iCloud on my files, some on a track-by-track basis and some by the album.  Surprisingly, it works!  Not all files match, of course—some are uploaded.  But from what I am able to determine so far, I have lost no functionality by doing this.  It appears that the Big Match is just the “Add to iCloud” command executed on all the files in your library.  The same as if you used cmd-A to select all and then used the “Get Album Artwork” command, for example.

So yes, it appears that AS/OCD Mac users who want very fine-grained control over what is added to iCloud, should simply hit “Stop” on the Big Match and then use the “Add to iCloud” command on each file they are ready to submit for matching.  All the other files in the library will show the grayed out cloud and “Waiting” as the Match Status.  ONE CAVEAT: The Big Match got about 20 minutes in the first time before I stopped it.  It did not finish the “Gathering Information” stage… only about 20% of the bar.  Library now at about 10k songs, 90GB.  So if Match DOES perform some critical preparatory step in that period, that might have enabled the file-by-file management afterward.  So if you try this and it doesn’t let you Add to iCloud one by one, try letting your Big Match go a little further and then stop it again.