It seemed like Apple was poised to let iTunes in the cloud be an officially-purchased-music affair only, but the One More Thing this year was a bit of a curveball: iTunes Match. For $25 a year, Apple will scan your library against its catalog of tunes and give you DRM-free, 256 kbps copies of all the songs it finds. That means some of your obscure Soulja Boy mixtape cuts might not get matched, but anything in the Official iTunes Catalogue is eligible for the bump.
Steve said explicitly that the service will work with CDs you've ripped yourself. It's less clear, though, if it'll work with that Billy Joel discography you torrented last week (it also remains to be seen if the Music Police are going to come knocking at your door if iTunes Match detects such files—you'll want to get out your biggest magnifying glass for these Terms of Service). I'd imagine that it'll scan downloaded music just fine, but that has to be a prospect that makes big scary record company execs cry themselves softly to sleep at night. Either way, iTunes Match is an impressive nod towards full library matching—one that most of us weren't expecting Apple to deliver today. [Gizmodo]
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