iTunes Match beta

Apple gave third-party developers early beta access to its upcoming iTunes Match service on Monday night. The service so far works as Apple has described—it will match iTunes Store tracks instantly and upload any others. In addition to allowing downloads of your entire iTunes library, however, it also includes iCloud-based streaming to iTunes or to an iOS device—a feature that was not previously revealed about the service.

Registered developers can download iTunes 10.5b6.1, which allows the iTunes Match service to be turned on by paying the $24.99 yearly fee. Apple told developers that they will get an additional three months of service for free in order to cover the beta period, though those who manage to access the 6.1 beta without a developer account are told that they’ll still have to wait to give iTunes Match a shot.

Once activated, iTunes scans a user’s library for music. Any songs that match up with tracks in the iTunes Store get linked to a 256kbps iTunes Plus track that is stored on Apple’s servers. Songs that don’t match are uploaded to a special part of the user’s iCloud storage, which doesn’t technically count against your storage quota. We say “technically” because Apple still limits iTunes Match to 25,000 tracks total—apparently larger libraries won’t sync at all with iTunes Match.

Previously, Apple indicated that iTunes Match would only allow users to download tracks to authorized computers or authorized iOS devices. The free “previous purchases” feature works this way as well—by download only. However, Insanely Great Mac discovered Monday night that iTunes Match tracks—at least those that are matched to tracks in the iTunes Store—can stream directly to iTunes or an iOS device without downloading first. (The ability to stream non-matched, uploaded tracks has not yet been verified.)

Streaming capabilities have been expected to be added to Apple’s iTunes ecosystem ever since the company purchased music streaming service Lala in late 2009. The company developed a protocol called HTTP Live Streaming specifically to make streaming audio and video content to computers and mobile devices a simpler process. While Apple did switch to streaming TV and movies to its Apple TV last autumn, the company made no mention of streaming songs from iCloud when the service was announced this past June.

The great thing about being able to stream tracks is that you won’t have to wait for songs to download fully to listen to them, nor will they be permanently added to your mobile device’s limited storage space. If you plan to be outside the range of a reliable network, however, you can always download the track for offline listening.

Apple said that iCloud and iTunes Match would launch this autumn along with iOS 5. We believe these services will launch in September, likely in conjunction with typical next-gen iPod announcements.

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