So how did people get on? I ignored my own advice of waiting for it to settle down for a week before diving in on Saturday morning.

Once it took the money, it kicked itself into action. Eight hours later it was still on stage 2 of 3. I began to wonder if it was working or not.

I use apple TV at home and so I logged onto that to see if anything had happened. Sure enough, the iCloud tab gave me a link to my music collection. Some of the tracks were greyed out, which were tracks it either couldn't find, tracks that it thought were duplicates or tracks that it simply hadn’t got around to yet.

My Mac was still chugging away in the front room and I left it on overnight to continue to do whatever it was doing. Next morning, it was still chugging away on step 2 of 3 so I decided to interrupt with a reboot just in case. I think it had actually completed the process but the Mac was enjoying it so much it forgot to move on.

So I now have something like 13,000 tracks available to me in the cloud. So, what is the point?

Well since then, I’ve spent a bit of time getting to grips with it and enabling it on my iPhone. This is a plus point, especially if you have an iPhone or iTouch with limited disk space. I can now see my entire music library via my iPhone and can call up any tracks, playlists or albums that I want by touching the screen in an appropriate manor. This will then sync or download these tracks to the iPhone for immediate listening. I can then either leave them on the phone or a simple swipe will remove them.

I was reluctant to work in this way at first, but I’ve played with it and it seems to work fine. It would be useful for households who have multiple apple devices (with limited disk space) who can share the central resource. A note of caution would be to ensure that any syncing / downloading is done whilst in WiFi range. Downloading a playlist for example could wipe out a 3G data plan allowance during a commute. I think I’m noticing a slight delay in switching between tracks, but it’s nothing too troubling.

As for my library, the reality of matching my music has thrown up a few initial observations. Even though I have hardly any un legitimate content in my library I was expecting more benefit from the amnesty. I was expecting for example that any Vinyl that I have transferred to mp3 would somehow be magically transformed into high quality copies from the iTunes library. I don’t believe this has happened as it seems to match tracks using meta data information hidden within the tracks to identify potential matches. As self-created mp3’s don’t have the same standards, all that happened is that the files got uploaded to ICloud as they were.

Also, I was expecting any iTunes purchases that I made some years ago in the 128 bit formats to be replaced with the near CD quality of iTunes Plus. This hasn’t happened. It’s simply recognised that they were iTunes purchases and then left them as they were.

So all in all, for £21 per year I now have an offsite backup of my music library, the ability to access that library wirelessly via multiple devices and the ability to stream that library via apple TV into my main music system in the lounge. Not a bad result for the money.

How did you get on?