" I hate being forced to use iTunes to update and sync."
In two years, I've never used iTunes to update and sync - I'm not sure what I'm missing, but apparently one can use an iPhone without iTunes.
In two years, I've never used iTunes to update and sync - I'm not sure what I'm missing, but apparently one can use an iPhone without iTunes.
I just realized the one thing that I am missing, that I've heard can be done with iTunes, is the ability to delete an album. iPhone only lets you delete one song at a time - which is painful if you have a lower capacity iPhone.
Good reason to buy a 128 GB iPhone and just never worry about it again.
This is just putting things in perspective, unless you have very specific needs of your phone I do not think 16GB is enough anymore, 64GB is definitely way to go.
I spend a lot of time traveling overseas, and have been hit by more than a few >$500 phone bills, even with the international data plan and lots of use of WiFi Dongles+Local SIMs. The more data, maps, podcasts, music I can store locally, the less use of data required.
I probably won't be happy until we get a 256 GB iPhone, which, on current trends, probably won't be for another 3-4 years unfortunately.
To put it another way - 128 GB isn't enough for me to stop worrying about saving space on my iPhone, but it is enough that there is little value in me shuffling music on/off it.
If you pay for iTunes Match, import all of your non-iTunes music into iTunes, Apple will store a DRM-free AAC file (256 kbit/s) in the "cloud" which you can play/import directly onto your mobile devices (without sync/tether).
You only have to pay for iTunes Match when you have new music to import. Once imported it is available "forever."
PS - I ironically used this to escape the Apple ecosystem. You can use it to strip DRM from old Apple DRM-ed music. You import it using match, and it converts it from an AAC-DRM track to an AAC DRM-free one and ups the quality from 128 to 256 Kbit/s.
Amazon does offer this too but I have no idea how well it works in comparison.
If it is not matches, it uploads your original file.
It was a good way to migrate from 128kbps MP3 to high quality 256 AAC
No, if you stop paying iTunes Match there is no cloud storage and no syncing
iCloud grants you 5 GB of "free" storage, including music. iTunes Match just grants you free additional storage for the matched music.
If you download the iTunes Match music then cancel, iCloud will sync the music on your devices using up some of your 5 GB pool.
So as long as you don't exceed 5 GB for your non-iTunes music collection (after they have been iTunes Match upgraded to 256 kbps) you're golden.
That's how it currently works for me. Half of my music collection is on the iTunes Store, the other half is in iCloud.
But if you delete the local copies, you lose them
[Funny, a right fact gets downvoted]
Photostream, after a rocky few initial months, has been awesome for the last year+ I hope it works as well with the new Photos apps as it has with Aperture.