For anyone not familiar with the iTunes Match service, the idea is that for $25 a year you can have iTunes scan through your music library on up to 10 devices.  Using technology that has not been publicly discussed in any detail by Apple but presumably involves using Fourier transforms, iTunes looks through your music library to identify any songs that are already available from the iTunes Music Store.  For all of those tracks, iTunes will make a note that you have the song and are entitled to access it.  For any tracks that don’t match against the iTunes Music Store it uploads your local copy of the song to iCloud.

The magic is that once this process has completed, all the songs in the library (up to 25,000 tracks) are available on up to 10 PCs or Macs running iTunes or iOS devices (iPhones, iPads, iPod touches) where you have signed in with your iCloud account.  When a new song is imported it will automatically be added to the iTunes Match library either by being matched against the iTunes Music Store or uploaded if the song is not matched.

All of the iTunes playlists are also synced across devices and changes made to a playlist on one device are instantly propagated to all your other devices that have iTunes Match turned on.

The service is not all things for all people and depending on your mix of devices this may be more or less useful.  For me it’s great.  My primary iTunes library is on a Windows PC and it contains somewhere around 10,000 songs.

I currently have an iPhone 4 and have been an iPhone user since the 3G came out, but I have never been very good about syncing music to it.  Even with the highest capacity iPhone there’s no way I can have all my tracks synced to the phone so I have to make choices about which songs or playlists I want to sync.  And invariably I’ll be somewhere away from my computer and want to listen to something I haven’t thought to sync.  Plus I tend not to plug my phone into my computer all that often and actually I don’t even bother turning that Windows PC on much.  So mostly I don’t listen to my iTunes library at all any more.  Pretty sad.

I also have a 17″ MacBook Pro but I’ve never bothered to copy my library to this laptop because, while it could hold the entire library, I don’t necessarily want to commit that much disk space to music since I already have it on my home PC.  So I don’t listen to music in iTunes on my laptop either.

That’s been a lot of music just sitting there not getting enjoyed.  Too bad.

Since Spotify launched in the US over the summer I’ve been subscribing to Spotify Premium and doing most of my music listening through Spotify.  I love Spotify and they have an incredible selection of music, but they don’t have everything that I have in my iTunes library.  I don’t really buy music much any more since I can listen to most of what I want on Spotify or YouTube, but when I was in my teens and early 20′s I bought a LOT of CDs, including a fair amount of obscure stuff that just isn’t going to be in Spotify and may or may not be in the iTunes Music Store.

With iTunes Match I now have access to my entire library on my iPhone 4 as well as my MacBook Pro and I can choose to download only what I want to listen to.  But I can make that choice spontaneously as I think of something I’d like to hear.  I’ve read some critiques of the service that state that you can’t sync everything at once, but that’s actually not true.  If I open my iTunes library on my MacBook Pro and select everything I can indeed right click and download everything.  That would probably take a while.  However I have used that technique to download everything by certain artists to my MacBook Pro.

The one feature that would be nice is if there were a web based player on iCloud.com that would let me listen to music streaming through a browser if I happen to be on a computer that doesn’t have iTunes or that I can’t link to my iCloud account for some reason.  But that’s a “nice to have” feature request and not a use case whose lack of availability I’ve actually wanted to use in any real life scenario as yet.

I’ll confess that I’m still mostly listening to music through Spotify but I suspect that I will find myself listening to more music in iTunes now that I have my library accessible wherever and whenever I want it.  Definitely worth $25 a year.

I used to be a huge Toad fan – it’s not that I’m not now, but they broke up a long time ago. Apparently they reunited just for the tour, and whether any further studio output is forthcoming remains to be seen.

I was clicking around on their site and saw they have an online store. I used to have a collection of their videos on VHS called Seven Songs Seldom Seen (I told you I was a fan). Alas I have no idea what happened to that video, so I thought I’d see if it were available for purchase.

It’s not.

But they do have the videos (I think they’re the same videos) available for free on their web site. Check ‘em out! Gotta love the Internet.

Tags: Toad the Wet Sprocket

I suppose I could pay another $9/mo for a dedicated music cable box, but yeah…that’s not gonna happen. Would be nice if I could get like a “music-only” cable box for $1/mo or something. I’ll go ahead and hold my breath on that.

Apparently you can stream Music Choice to a PC if you have Comcast cable Internet service. Alas, I have Speakeasy DSL service so that won’t work for me. Of course I don’t have Comcast cable either, even if I were inclined to change my ISP, which I am not in any event.

Tags: Music Choice

Tags: Juliet, Jacques lu Cont

I’ve put up a little sidebar javascript thing on here to broadcast my recent plays for all to enjoy and laugh at. Alas the last played chart looks like crap as I haven’t done anything to integrate it well into the CSS layout for this site, in part becuase I think I might hate this layout and want to change it soon. Who knows.

In any case, it’s not pretty but it’s there. Now prepare to be schooled on some music.

EDIT – I’ve moved the recent playlist to its own page as it was way too ugly and busy crammed into the sidebar. Plus it takes a few seconds for the image to be generated and load from last.fm and I’d rather not have every page rendering hang on that. So now you can find the “recent playlist” link under the “static” section of the side navbar. Enjoy.

I can’t be 100% sure since the music was not very loud and there were people talking. But I’m pretty sure there was some Lilith Fair girlie band playing Marian on the Starbucks speakers. How odd. I couldn’t tell if they sang the German verse or not. I’m curious who the band was (or if I’m even right)…so if you know about this cover, let me know who did it!

Tags: Starbucks, Sisters of Mercy

OK, this might be slightly incriminating, but I downloaded a ton of nomeansno albums the other day. Now, IN MY DEFENSE, I owned every single one of them on CD and they all got stolen out of my storage space in California. And I think ALL of them are out of print. So I do not feel bad at all, considering that over the years I have bought every one of their albums (or at least almost all of them) and t-shirts and I’ve seen them live, etc. So they have made their money off me.

So anyways, I have been listening to a ton of stuff off of 0+2=1 and Small Parts Isolated and Destroyed and Mama that I haven’t heard in YEARS. And it just reminded me again of what an incredibly awesome band they are. If you’re not familiar with nomeansno I highly highly highly suggest you check them out.

And if you think Coheed and Cambria are punk (no seriously, some little emo girl told me that once) then you really need to learn about nomeansno. Now I’m not exactly sure how to tell you to do that since a ton of their stuff is out of print. But if you can find copies of the albums I mentioned above, or Wrong (which I think was reissued somewhat recently) then you should. Go on gemm.com or something. I dunno what to tell you. Just check them out. I don’t know if they tour any more since they’ve been around since like 1979, but if you ever get the chance to see them live you really should. They rock my socks.