I have a foot in two worlds, one centered around the PC, a second centered around my Apple iOS gadgets. Notice the plural on the Apple side of the equation. What can I say, many moons ago I tried a Mac Mini and was hooked. From then, I’ve pulled the trigger on any number of nifty Apple gadgets but they appear to have taken over entirely — or perhaps I should say mostly.
My iOS universe includes a 27″ iMac, an entirely solid-state MacBook Pro, my beloved iPhone 4S (holding out for the second gen iPhone 5), and my constant companion which provides unconditional love and media saturation, the 64GB Retina display fourth-gen iPad in black. Yeah, I feel pretty good about that ensemble cast of gadgetry and but something recently synched together my stroll in the Apple universe — they call it iTunes Match.
I have zero issue with keeping my music collection within the Apple ecosystem. Everything works, it works well, and the music is not loaded with any DRM. Good for me. But I’ve always desired a way to sync my music collection between iOS devices — iTunes Match has solved that issue with grace and elegance.
With a paltry $25.00 annual subscription fee one can save up to 25,000 sounds in an associated AppleID iCloud account. That means my entire library is online available to be downloaded or streamed (if the Internet connection is robust enough) at any time and I recently discovered yet another benefit of iTunes Match.
Back in the day, the standard bit rate for all music was 128. A plethora a tests confirm the higher the bit rate, the better the musical quality (so many studies and test, in fact, low vs high bit rate quality is beyond dispute). However, I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem so long, I have plenty of 128 bit music in my local library — but not for too much longer. I’ve discovered all I need to do is delete any offending music from my local library which is ripped at an undesirable bit rate (ensuring I do not delete the same mirrored music from iCloud). Now, I can just re-download the music I just deleted but this time from the iCloud version which is automatically set at 256 bit quality.
Did I mention how much I enjoy my iPad?