“Apple’s cloud services are confusing to say the least, and things have only gotten more convoluted as these services have proliferated,” Dennis Sellers writes for Apple World Today. “iTunes Match, Apple Music, or both?”
“If you want to use Apple Music, using it along with iTunes Match is your best choice if you already have a large music library,” Sellers writes. “Your Apple Music membership includes an iCloud Music Library, which allows you to listen your entire music library from all of your devices as long as you subscribe to the service. When you sign up, it checks your music collection to see which of your songs are also in the Apple Music catalog. It does this by matching against your song’s details (such as name, artist, album). If Apple has your songs in its catalog, it makes ‘em available to access on all of your devices.”
“Your iTunes Match subscription also includes an iCloud Music Library,” Sellers writes. “Songs added are made available to your other computers or devices in 256 Kbps DRM-free AAC. Since they’re DRM (digital rights management) free, any of the songs that you save offline can continue to play, even after your iTunes Match subscription ends. That’s the big difference from Apple Music.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We let our iTunes Match subscription lapse as we plan to continue with Apple Music and we have backups of our original non-DRM’ed ripped CDs and purchased music. Is anybody in the same boat or the opposite: You subscribe to iTunes Match, but not Apple Music?
And, lastly, can you imagine trying to sell these things to your average consumer? (gack!) Why is this so confusing, Apple?