Is ITunes Match worth purchasing?

My new computer died with tons of music inside. I have 100 albums stored on my iphone. Should I go ahead and purchase iTunes Match?

 

Did you have your music backed up?

iTunes Match won't recover the lost music and I find it frustratingly bug ridden. Also I have found no way to delete evErything stored in the cloud to start again. Hugely frustrating and I won't be renewing the subscription.

 

I have 100 albums stored on my iphone. These were all ripped from cds.

 

There is third party software to get the music from your iPhone back into a new computer.

 

Not sure if you are on a mac or a PC, but on a PC you can use the free version of MediaMonkey to transfer the songs off your device and onto your hard drive...(all the file names will be messed up) but once you move everything into the 'automatically add to iTunes' folder you should see the stuff normally.

 

As soon as you hook it up to a new itunes library they will be wiped. As Mazzy says there is third party software to get the music off you phone but it's a good idea to have your music backed up on an external drive as well as the iTunes library file.

I have 3 back ups of 20,000 plus songs.

 

I have a hard drive with about 80,000 lossless songs and three of my friends are keeping backed of versions for me.

 

Can I go purchase a hard drive and get someone to transfer the songs? Wonder how much that will run .

 

There are ways to retrieve information off of hard drives, even if they've died. You might want to investigate a SATA-USB adapter (about $20).

I'm pretty down on iTunes Match these days. I can't get it to work on two separate Windows 7 computers. On the other hand, I can access it from my iOS devices and Apple TV, which is nice.

 

No, no, no!

iTunes Match will screw up your music library like you wouldn't believe, substituting one thing for another. It'll give your library an abortion. For good, too.

 

iTunes Match works fine for me.

 

Gort is correct. If the hard drive is not dead, then you should try to use an external enclosure to hook your computer hard drive into and copy all the data to a new drive. I've done this many times for other people who thought they lost everything on their labtop.

 

If you have Apple TV then iTunes Match is a major benefit streaming from the cloud through the apple tv through your stereo. I use it on long trips in the car too on the iphone, random shuffling the library.

 

I didn't think that this was the case, unless you asked it to. I haven't signed up yet and, with my Spotify subscription, have a protected (if more expensive) means of accessing my collection from the road.

 

I have never had an issue with it. I turned it on to let them scan my files and turned it off when it was done. It didn't make any changes to my collection. I love the way it integrates with Siri. I also like the Appletv integration.

 

iTunes Match is DEFINITELY worth purchasing. I now do not have any music stored on my iPhone or in my car. Instead, I stream my entire library from the cloud, whenever I want it, to my iPhone. When my iPhone is connected either via USB or Bluetooth to my car, my entire music library is there, ready to be streamed instantly. Same thing with my AppleTV--it acts as a music server, streaming my entire library from the cloud (the iCloud, actually) into my system. True, it's 256kbs AAC audio, but for convenience, it can't be beat. I'm pretty much done with local storage--except for hi-res files--and done with physical media--except for vinyl.

 

I've had a hard time playing tracks from the cloud on my iPhone using iTunes Match. If I try to download a complete album, I might get 5 of 12 tracks to play back, and the rest fail. But they're visible as a kind of dummy file when I connect my phone to iTunes. What's up with that?

 

Don't. Really, don't. Ever.

 

They shouldn't show up as a dummy file at all. What you are *probably* doing is downloading the tracks from iCloud onto your phone, rather than streaming them. I've made that mistake before.

If you are clicking on the cloud with an arrow on it to the right of the track name or album name. and then are getting a circle which fills up like a status indicator, you are doing it wrong. That downloads the track to your phone and then plays it while downloading.

What you need to do instead is click the album artwork to the left if the track name or album name. That streams the track only and it is not saved on your device.

In other words, you don't download the track or album to your phone at all.

 

I hate the music app on the iPhone so I can't imagine ever signing up for match.

 

OK, then the download function is buggy. But I thought that iTunes Match doesn't do streaming. I thought it only downloads, and plays back while downloading.

 

No. It does streaming. I use it that way every day.

Don't click on the cloud icon. That downloads. Instead, click on the album artwork. That streams.

 

I agree that ergonomically, the app is pretty cr@ppy. Witness the confusion above re how to stream music vs. how to download it. Apple sure didn't make it easy to figure out. However, the convenience of iTunes Match outweighs the interface shortcomings. I have my whole music library to listen to in my car and can control it hands free either via my car's native system (uConnect) or via Siri. Pretty cool.

I also use the Amazon Cloud Player app which automatically has "autorip" copies of many of the discs I have bought from them over the last 10 or more years. Pretty cool! The interface sucks as badly as Apple Music does, unfortunately. Also, it's not voice controllable over Bluetooth. Hopefully Amazon will add that functionality.

 

The majority of my digital collection was upgraded when I signed up for match. I no longer have to preload albums onto my iPhone when I go out. There are no ad breaks when using iTunes Radio. No nag screens to sign up for the paid version, or other ads that get in the way of what's playing (I'm looking at YOU, Pandora!)

I'm a satisfied customer.