December 5, 2011

Access your music anywhere with iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match.

iTunes in the Cloud now gives you Internet access to all the music, apps, and books you've acquired from the iTunes Store, plus the ability to automatically download new store purchases to your devices without syncing, no matter which one you use to make the purchase. To download your purchases to devices they're not on yet, use the Purchased link on iTunes' main page on your computer, or at the bottom of the iTunes Store on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. To turn on automatic downloads on your iOS device, go to Settings and select Store.

A subscription to iTunes Match ($24.99 a year) adds everywhere access to the music you've imported from CDs and bought elsewhere. Match first determines which of those songs are for sale in the store and automatically adds them to your iCloud library, no uploading required. It then uploads any music it didn't find a match for. The result is your complete library in the cloud, playlists and all, with a minimum amount of upload time required to get it there. You can keep up to 25,000 songs in your library--songs purchased from iTunes don't count against that number. To activate the service use Turn on iTunes Match in the iTunes Store menu on your computer.