I’ve had iTunes Match turned on for the better part of 24 hours now. There is some really awesome stuff in it, and there’s some not so awesome stuff that leaves me scratching my head a little. First, however, the awesome:

1. The matching is actually pretty quick
2. Playlists from the machine running iTunes match are visible everywhere
3. Playlists from the machine running iTunes match are editable everywhere
4. It appears that you can “stream” music to the other computers without saving a copy on disk

This is great. I can listen to the music I own on CD at work, without bringing the CD’s to the office (to explain to the copyright officers if something were to go badly), without saving tracks of unknown origin to my computer, etc. Even if I do download something to have offline, it has my Apple ID embedded in it, so there’s no real issue there. And it’s the dream of finally being able to edit and change playlists from multiple computers at once. iTunes Match is living up to all of it’s hype…

…other than a few, small issues. First, if you have more than 25,000 items in your library, you apparently can’t turn iTunes Match on, at all. It’s not an issue of “you can sync the first 25K”, you can’t use the service. Second, there’s a lot of hit-and-miss going on. Random tracks from the Beatles album Rubber Soul didn’t match – and have to be uploaded. (Actually, about ¹⁄₃ of all my Beatles tracks didn’t match) And finally, badly named tracks don’t get renamed. I’ve got a lot of music I ripped by hand, before the CDDB was really available. So the track names reflect my naming convention at the time. ‘01.name.of.song.mp3′ or ‘02_Name of the Song[Live].mp3′ or ‘Track 03.mp3’ are common. And none of these get cleaned up, even when they are matched by iCloud. It would be SO nice if I could get iTunes to rename them now, and give me clean ID3 tags. But, alas.

So I paid for TuneUp to do the same work for me.