I have a question about the service. Say you have a bunch of albums that you own and ripped to put them on iTunes. The Cloud comes along and in the first year, you buy the service to get all your songs backed up. Will you have to keep renewing to keep all the songs there? Will they be "un-synced" if you don't continue the service?
I would imagine you would have to keep subscribing to the cloud to keep them on the cloud. Once you have them downloaded though, they should be yours to keep wherever you have them.
I'm not sure I agree with your description of this as a "backup" since it's really not. The original files would remain on your computer(s) as they were before you ever went to the cloud regardless of what the cloud does. This is more of a method of sharing your music (and other things) between devices rather than backing up your data. Apple uses the phrase "store" but with the exception of content you have to upload yourself, none of the music "stored" comes from your actual files themselves.
Nighthawk said:
Whatever the copy protection issues with stuff bought from iTunes and whatever the legality of burning from my own CDs, the songs I burned onto my iDevices from my CDs are mine.
I am not paying iTunes for those in any way whatsoever
You maybe need to calm down a bit and read what Apple has released about how this works:
Apple said:
If you want all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve ripped from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.
Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. (NOTE-IT's NOT UPLOADED!) Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.
If you read that it's pretty simple. You are not paying for anything other than the ability to
legally share your music (no matter the source) on any iDevice or computer (including Windows PCs) you authorize to access your account (up to 10 I believe). You are not paying Apple to use them, you are paying Apple to use their service so you can share them among devices more easily than having to load them individually on each device or taking up the time/bandwidth to upload to a server to share. $25/year is pretty darn cheap and since songs that are a match in the library don't eat up any part of that 5Gb it's not as big of a deal as you think it may be.
Seems to me that no one here is noticing that Apple has just provided you with a way to share pretty much your whole music library with anyone you authorize
legally. While this may not seem like a big deal, since many have been doing this illegally for years, it's a HUGE step foreword for the labels and their acceptance of DRM free music sharing on multiple devices. Heck, the fact that Apple got all 4 labels to sign on and now allow you to re-download music
for free that you've already purchased
legally purchased (regardless of the source) is in itself a huge deal. These are the same folks, along with the MPAA, who have been suing the pants off folks for sharing as few as 10 songs on P2P networks in just the last few years. This is a pretty big deal, yet people are complaining about it.