iTunes Match is out. For $25 a year, you get to “match” your music library against Apple’s servers, upgrade to Apple’s high-fidelity, 256 kbps copies, upload anything you have and they don’t, and see your whole music library on any Apple device. It’s super convenient. It’s a great value.
It’s kind of wonky.
Which is fine - it’s the early days. But, you may scratch your head at some of the crazy little cloud icons iTunes will show you once you’ve matched your whole music library (Ishtar soundtrack and the Spanky Dingos/The Trappings of Sir Francis Drake split-EP included). Here’s how I see it:
(If you don’t see any of these anywhere in iTunes, right-click the column header and turn on “iCloud Download”.)
I did my best to divine the meaning behind each of these icons. So, starting at the top:
- This should be shown while iTunes is actively matching the song. If it sticks around for a long time, update Match (in the Store menu).
- A few dozen of my songs had this generic “!” icon; who knows why. Updating solved it.
- This is interesting: if Apple thinks you have duplicate copies of the same song, it will only upload one, and flag the rest this way. In my case, they were genuinely the same exact song, so I confidently deleted them.
- Voice memos, podcasts, and some funky formats won’t qualify as “songs”, and won’t upload or match.
- The “waiting” status makes no sense to me. I can’t resolve it, and it affects another few dozen tracks, with no apparent pattern to them.
- Click the happy cloud to happily download!
I’ll update this post with further info as it becomes available. It’s a brave new world!
P.S. I should’ve known smarter people would have gotten there first: here’s Apple’s official support page on iCloud status, and Macworld’s article on the same.
