iTunes Match:
On our previous post “Cloudy with a Chance of Free Storage?,” you learned about the hardrive in the sky that stores 5MB of all your iTunes music and Photostream to be accessed anytime, on any device. But to add more, iCloud has something fantastic coming this fall: iTunes Match.
iTunes in the Cloud will place all of your music whether its downloaded from another source other than iTunes or ripped from CDs and will match it and upgrade it to the songs that 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. With 18 million songs in the iTunes store, iTunes will match your songs into the iCloud. If iTunes aren’t able to match songs, those are the only songs that you will need to upload to the Cloud yourself. All the music iTunes matches will play at plus quality, even if you original copy of the music was of lower quality. This feature is only $24.99 a year!
Home Sharing in iTunes:
What is iTunes Home Sharing? It’s an application from iTunes that allows you to share music and videos through your Apple account with Wi-Fi. Home Sharing enables you to stream or transfer music, movies, TV shows, apps, and more among up to five authorized computers in your household (interchangable at anytime). You can share it from one Apple device to another or even with a PC, and the steps are easy!
1. Open up your iTunes, on the top dashboard click Advanced and then from the drop-down menu click on Turn On Home Sharing
2. This step will bring you to a page when you enter in an Apple ID and password. With whoever you’re sharing your music and video files with, enter their Apple ID and password.
3. Once you’ve entered in your sharer’s information, you’re ready to go! On the left sidebar of your iTunes you will see a Shared tab with the name of your sharer’s music library. Once you click on their library, you will see all their music. You can scroll through their music or videos and just click and drag to the top left corner to the iTunestab that says your Library. You can load as much as one song or their whole library.
Home Sharing can only work if users are using the latest, newest iTunes application, if their using the same wireless network, and if the users your sharing your media files with have their iTunes application open.
You can also choose to have iTunes automatically import purchases you make on any of your Home Sharing computers to your own library. To do so, select the library and use the Settings button at the lower right of the iTunes window to check what you’d like copied.
Both of these features, iTunes Match and Home Sharing, are great ways to share music and import media platforms through wi-fi networks instead of sending media files through emails, usb cards, cd’s and etc.
