iTunes Match only recently became available to me here in Canada. Unfortunately one of the downsides to being Canadian, is that we’re always behind when it comes to receiving the latest services and content that always seem to launch first in the US.
I decided to try iTunes Match yesterday, but that wasn’t without the slightest concern for what the process would be like. I’ve heard of numerous problems with people experiencing anywhere from several days ranging to several weeks for the scan and match process to complete. I subscribed to the service and hoped that would not be my experience.
With 2,959 songs in my library, I expected I would have to wait at least 24 hours for the first two steps in the process to complete. I was pleasantly surprised that it only took about 40 minutes for the first two steps to complete. As for step 3: “Uploading artwork and remaining songs,” that has been running since last night and hasn’t completed yet.
Since the initial scan and match steps were done so quickly, I was able to open the Music app on my iPhone, which loaded my entire library for me. I can very easily grab any song and have it downloaded to my iPhone without the need to ever sync my library with iTunes. Of course, with iOS 5 Apple introduced WiFi syncing, but this is a far superior solution since syncing takes quite a while. I’d rather simply just download a few albums to my iPhone when I want.
I don’t know if perhaps I was just lucky with iTunes Match or that I don’t have a large enough library for it to have been a problem. I don’t have a small MP3 library by any means, but maybe the advantage of not getting iTunes Match right away is that Apple was able to iron out some bugs during the initial rollout.