Thought of as the general amnesty for folks who have songs in their music collections that may have been acquired from dubious means and a good way to get better quality audio, iTunes Match is finally available to Canadian users.
Starting today, iTunes Match is available in Canada. iTunes Match allows you stream and store ALL of your songs to any of your devices, not just your purchased iTunes music. TV purchase re-downloads and TV purchasing via Apple TV is also now available.
iTunes in the Cloud lets you automatically download new music purchases to all your devices, so you can buy a song on your iPad and find it waiting for you on your iPhone―no syncing required. iTunes in the Cloud also lets you download your previously purchased iTunes content, including music and TV shows to your devices at no additional cost.* Since iCloud stores your previously purchased iTunes history, you can see what you’ve bought no matter which device you bought it on, and since you already own the content, you can play it on your devices or simply tap the iCloud icon to download it to store and play later.
iTunes Match scans the songs in your music library, including music not purchased on iTunes, and matches them to the more than 20 million songs available on the iTunes Store, offering them in high-quality, DRM-free 256 kbps AAC encoding. Any unmatched songs are uploaded to iCloud so you can play songs, albums or playlists from your music library on your devices.
A couple of things to note:
- iTunes Match is available in Canada for a localized annual fee of $27.99 CAN
- There is a limit of 25,000 songs for tracks not purchased on iTunes, including CD rips (iTunes songs do not count against the limit)
- Upload times can vary wildly based on how many unmatched songs a user has.
- All songs uploaded to iTunes Match will download/stream in iTunes Plus (DRM-free 256 kbps AAC), even if their original file type was of lower quality.
- Uploading to iTunes Match doesn't change anything in your music library, unless you choose to download from the cloud and replace the original tracks.