find a woman who likes Supertramp?

I don't think it makes iTunes more annoying. How do you figure?

Don't get me wrong, I think the server outage is crap, but the service itself is a great principle.

Have you tried it?

"iTunes Match stores your entire music library in iCloud...", that is factually incorrect for those with more than 25k songs. How do these companies get away with this?

that I genuinely can't see the point of services like iTunes Match.

My entire music library still fits on a 1TB disk on my server. This is Time Machined onto a second 1TB drive and, if I need to take it with me anywhere, I sync it with a portable 'Passport' disk which fits in my pocket.

If any of these disks fails, they cost less than a tank of petrol to replace.

What would I gain from going 'cloud'?

...at the idea that 25,000 songs is "small".

to make sure that they can size the storage and system requirements. I would expect the restriction to disappear over time but it makes sense to have one at the start. It's typical Apple - put in a control that is actually fairly sensible and then move on from there.

This might help:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/11/14/how-to-use-itunes-match-with-very-la...

I only notionally heeded my own advice and kicked the process off on Saturday. Once it took the money it kicked itself into action. Eight hours later it was still on stage 2 of 3. I wondered how one could tell 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 or tracks that it thought were duplicates.

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.

Bottom line is that I think it’s completed the process. It's not very good at explaining what has happened, or indeed what you need to do with those icons that appear alongside rogue tracks that it has identified.

It’s difficult to tell what benefit it has actually created for me. Aside from being able to stream my music via Apple TV (without having to have my mac running) I've yet to see what benefit it has given (other than a back up). I didn’t have too many tracks that needed "legitimising" and I haven't studied it enough to see if the tracks I had encoded under the low bit rates back when ITunes first began have been upscaled as promised.

I enabled my iPhone to work with iMatch but I'm not sure that anything has happened as a result!

More investigations are needed clearly.

Anyone else found any benefits or worked out what happened next?

OK first things first, we are an Apple house so no idea how the dark side works. I started the process when the option first appeared in my iTunes menu.

I'm at 21000 or thereabouts, the iMatch found around 18000 in iTunes but then slogged for what seemed like days to get the rest up, probably a mix of early adopter crowd at the server, random crashes and my slow upload speed.

What is sexy is the way stuff magically appears everywhere - phone/pad/appletv/macbook etc. My free 12 days of Christmas presents from iTunes just pop up for download automatically. No need to carry old iPod everywhere, if the desperate need for a particular song occurs just download onto whatever device (probably the phone) is to hand.

My friends insist that I can't possibly need 21K of songs to carry but like others on this thread my 50 years of music collection makes the 21K a sample.

The query, what does Apple have against Dave Mason? iMatch won't accept Only You Know and I Know off Alone Together, I can understand the lack of match but why won't it upload - it isn't a duplicate.