Out of all the cloud storage music services, Apple’s iCloud is by far our favorite and this is mainly because of iTunes Match. Uploading and syncing even a moderately sized music library is generally a hassle, and I gave up on uploading mine to Google Music half-way, I only keep around 500 songs there.
Instead, with iTunes Match all your music becomes immediately available in iCloud as long as it has been matched to music on Apple’s servers. In addition your cloud copies are available in higher definition 256kbps AAC format irrespective of the quality of your local files and we’ve even showed you how you can easily upgrade all your local music using iTunes Match here.
Our single biggest annoyance with iCloud and iTunes Match has been that in order to listen to your cloud-stored music on an iOS device, i.e. iPad, iPhone etc., the song would first have to fully download to your device and then played. This meant a delay between selecting a track and actually listening to it, and it also filled up your device’s storage with the downloaded files.
Well one of the new features in iOS 6, and one that had generally slipped by, is the ability to now actually stream music directly from iCloud.
The new feature is already present in iOS 6 beta and selecting a track means that it starts streaming and immediately playing. You can also select to download tracks individually as a separate option for offline listening.
