I’ve just started using the iTunes Match service, that is to say that I subscribed and it is currently churning through all of my albums and uploading all of the ones which aren’t on the iTunes library…which seems to be about 6,000.
There seem to have been a plethora of teething troubles with getting the service working, many forum posts talk about iTunes just ‘hanging’ and becoming unresponsive but it may just be that if there are a lot of tracks to process it takes quite a while.
The basic idea is that if you have bought loads of CDs youshould be able to access that music from anywhere and not have to reload it on to loads of machines…all you need is a network connection. So, to save having to load all of your music (nearly 20,000 tracks in my case) in to the cloud, your tracks are checked agains Apple’s own library and if a match is found, their track (digitised at the highest quality) is the one which is used.
Brilliant in theory, but it relies on a very robust network connection to be seamless and (like in my case) the Apple library isn’t 100% complete…we shall see how things develop.