Hi, I’m not sure this is exactly the correct forum for this question, but I’ll give it a go.
Years ago, Leo recommended iTunes Match as a good way to manage and keep an iTunes library up to date. As the years pass I continue to pay annually for Match, but I’m not sure it’s of any use anymore. I do have a decent sized music library, but in all honesty I don’t use it that much anymore. I think the majority of my library is NOT downloaded but is in the Match system library. Should I continue to renew the Match service? Should I download all of my library and store it on an external drive?
I would like to be sure that my library is safe and accessible. I guess that’s why I keep renewing the Match subscription.
@Jeffo for me the questions are: Are you Apple only? If yes, Is the music you have in Apple Match in Apple Music also? If Yes, then how many people/devices do you share with, and is the larger selection in Apple Music worth added cost? If you originally ripped the music at a higher quality, it was downscaled as you uploaded to Match. Then back up the originals. If you don’t have the originals, 256k on Apple devices is good enough. Downloading 50K songs from Match at 256k, is ~400G. An external SSD. 500G Drive ~$60-85. Buy 3. Remember to refresh between them periodically, no drive is permanent storage.
Match is aging. The value of Match is low-cost way to share across apple devices. Especially music not licensed by apple to be on Apple music.
There are other ways to share the music you have that isn’t on a cloud service.
This is great info thanks. Yes, I’m mostly Apple but don’t sub to Apple Music. Sharing across devices and to other people is not really a big issue. I think the answer for me is as suggested-download the library and store it on SSD. I can’t recall the size of my library at the moment, but it’s not huge.
You definitely want to have at least 1 local copy of the library download.
iTunes Match is still useful if you need to access your library on the go. I’ve been a long time subscriber. What is frustrating for me is, even though you can share an Apple Music subscription with your family, you can’t share the iTunes Match library. You have to have the Match iTunes account be logged in on every device. The library can be shared locally, if the iTunes computer is left on.
This was the year I stopped subscribing to iTunes Match. I’ve long ago matched all my Napster downloads and I no longer buy music anywhere but iTunes. It’s really only useful if you buy or download lower quality music from other sources.
same for me last year, and I find I don’t use my downloaded music library much any longer since I just use Apple Music and call it a day (getting lazy as I get older!!)
I’ll chime in here late. I subscribed to Match years ago and loved it, but eventually subscribed to Apple Music. After a year or so of both, I found (or Apple changed) Apple Music includes iTunes Match. As evidence, I only pay for Apple Music, but my long-ago Matched music is still available to me. And I can continue to Match the few new songs I get (although matching isn’t always reliable, so some tracks just get uploaded). No one else seems to have made this point.
Whatever you do, I would definitely download your whole Match library (and make a backup) first.
Thanks to everyone for the replies. I don’t subscribe to Apple Music (or any other streaming music service) so I’m primarily interesting in preserving my current Apple library. I will download and back it up, then figure out how best to share it among devices.
