At long, long last...Apple has started rolling out its iTunes-in-the-cloud services. There's iTunes in the Cloud, which stores all your iTunes-bought music and TV shows, making them available for download on any computer or iOS device.
And there's the subscription-based iTunes Match, which also includes music you've stored in iTunes, but not bought from Apple. Say you've ripped a CD into iTunes, that will also appear in your music cloud.
But, if you're not in the United States, don't get too excited just yet.
While iTunes in the Cloud is worldwide, iTunes Match is US-only at the moment.
You'll need to update iTunes to version 10.5.1, which you can do here.
Then all your iTunes music purchases will appear on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch - under your device's iTunes "Purchased" tab - and you can download them for free.
If you're in the US, you can also hand over your $25 a year iTunes Match subscription to Apple and your entire iTunes music collection - whether bought from iTunes or not - will be replicated and stored in the cloud...well, on Apple servers...and you'll be able to access it on any computer, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
And your cloud copy of your iTunes music library will be stored in pretty high quality, no matter what the quality is of your PC-based tracks.
Somewhat surprisingly, iTunes Match even copies pirated tracks and torrented music, which makes you wonder just how huge the bags of money are that Apple is handing over to record companies. For $25 a year, you can, in effect, make your illegally-pirated music legal.
And that's the problem for us would-be Matchers outside the US. It would seem Apple hasn't yet done deals with record companies for the Match rights outside the US. Let's hope we don't have to wait too long.
Update: Apple has now added an iTunes Match section to its website explaining how to subscribe to and use the new feature. Here's the link.
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