Apple has just pushed iTunes 10.5 beta 6.1 with support for iTunes Match, an upcoming subscription based on “iTunes in the Cloud” that allows you to store your entire music collection purchased from iTunes or any other source including the one you’ve ripped from CDs for $24.99 per year. With iTunes match, you can upload each and every mp3 in your library into the cloud which can be accessed from virtually anywhere and on can be played on any device.
According to Apple, here’s how it works:
iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.
The technology was first announced back in June at WWDC 2011 and today the beta version of iTunes Match has just gone live, exclusively to the developers. Apple officially sent an email to all developers to subscribe to there service and start beta testing the new iTunes Match technology. Meanwhile, Apple also gave a heads up to anyone uploading content to iCloud not to delete anything yet from their computers since the iCloud accounts may be reset at the end of free beta service.
Download iTunes 10.5 Beta 6.1 for Mac OS X [Direct Link]
Download iTunes 10.5 Beta 6.1 for Windows [N/A yet]
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