Following last month’s iOS 9 release, Apple’s failed to raise the song-matching limit to 100,000 tracks.
Eddy Cue, Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, said back in the summer that Apple was “working to” quadruple the scan-and-match song limit by iOS 9’s release.
In an effort to clarify the situation, MacRumors reached out to Cue and got the definitive confirmation that the limit for matched Apple Music and iTunes Match libraries will raise from the current 25,000 tracks to 100,000 songs “before the end of the year.”
Since its debut in 2011, the $25 per year iTunes Match service has remained stuck with 25,000 song matches per account, forcing users with tons of music to either look elsewhere or split their iTunes libraries.
One viable alternative would be Google’s Play Music service, which back in February 2015 bumped up free storage limit from 20,000 to 50,000 songs.
iTunes Match scans all tracks in a user’s library. Each song’s metadata is compared to Apple’s vast catalog of music on the iTunes Store. Every matched song is then made instantly available on all devices that use iTunes Match in high-quality 256Kbps AAC format, even if the user’s local copy is encoded at lower bitrates.
Non-matched songs are uploaded to iCloud so users can stream and download them to other devices that use iTunes Match. Songs purchased from the iTunes Store do not count toward the iTunes Match’s 25,000-track limit.
Non-matched songs uploaded to iCloud do not count against the user’s iCloud storage. Similar scan-and-match features are also part of iCloud Music Library, a new feature supported by both iTunes Match and Apple Music.
Source: MacRumors