Apple seems to be deploying iTunes Match into international music stores this evening, though there seem to be some ongoing glitches that suggests they could be an early mistake or a partial roll out.
Several readers in the UK and Australia have noticed that iTunes Match is now a sign up option in their iTunes Account information page. Apple has not yet started promoting iTunes Match in the iTunes Store, but the links to iTunes Match are live with localized pricing (see above).
In the UK, iTunes Match costs £21.99 for a year and €24.99 in other parts of Europe. Users are allowed to sign up for it and receive a confirmation email of their purchase but one Twitter report claims it "does nothing" at this stage. For Australian customers, the service is priced at A$ 34.99.
To see if it appears available in your country, log into your iTunes account on your Mac or PC and then tap on your account name to see your account information. From there, you may be able to sign up, though we'd advise some caution as it seems the service isn't fully operational at the time of this writing. Alternatively, you can also try this direct link that opens the page directly in iTunes.
iTunes Match is Apple's music service offers users the ability to match their existing iTunes library with high quality versions in Apple's iCloud. The service originally launched in the U.S. and recently expanded to Brazil.
Thanks Colin
Update: It appears the launch may have been premature. Apple is refunding early buyers and claims it is not available outside of Brazil and the U.S. at the moment.
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I went thru the matching process about a week ago. First stuff I did -
-Created a playlist of all music with a bit rate less than 256 VBR (variable bit rate)
-Updated all "songs" that were actually audiobooks to the correct media type and genre so they wouldn't all get uploaded as unmatched songs and to get below the 25,000 song limit (I had about 32,000 items when audiobook tracks were included.)
-Re-imported a few cds where I had bit rates less than 100 VBR (too low and it won't match)
-Back up the music collection
The actual scanning and matching ran very quickly, was done in about 2 hours for 9000 songs. About 3,000 were in a low quality that could be redownloaded at the higher iTunes Plus quality. I deleted the matched and upgradable songs, then used the playlist to help track progress for redownloading. I did that part over 2 days on and off when i was not doing other stuff.
I turned on iTunes match on my phone after a few days, and it warns you it will replace your music. I have a metered 3G plan, so I didn't want to stream all the time. I selected a bunch of songs to redownload via wifi, but turned off the iCloud-only music. So basically using iTunes match to upgrade all my music, and provide an off-site, always available backup of my music collection. Well worth the $25! Less to put in my regular backups, and less room to take up on my laptop if you want to delete local copies and store the upgraded music on an external harddrive. Used to be that your entire music collection had to be in the iTunes music directories, now very easy to have partials. Would have loved this a few years ago, as I had been purposely burning lower fidelity songs to save space on my laptop. Now you can listen to the hi-fidelity music all the time, with less hassle.
