Why is itunes match an all or nothing feature?! Can I have more control over the songs I want on the harddrive of my iphone?

iTunes Match does not delete the songs from your iPhone's drive. It simply allows you to download songs on demand from the cloud. After they are downloaded, they stay on your iPhone until you delete them (by swiping the song / album or artist). Therefore, you do not need a wifi or 3G connection to listen to music, only to download new songs from the cloud to your iPhone.

You can tell if a song is stored locally on your iPhone by looking to see if it has the cloud icon next to the song name. After you download the song, the cloud icon will dissapear.

Just flick through your collection on your phone and download the albums you want by touching the cloud (I'd suggest wifi for that rather than cellular!)

Selected songs/albums will be with you wherever you go, remove ones you no longer want, add some more. It actually completely solves the space issue you mentioned above

Paul Wieland wrote:

iTunes Match does not delete the songs from your iPhone's drive.

iTunes Match deleted all my songs from my iPhone... 😮

qwert qwe wrote:

Paul Wieland wrote:

iTunes Match does not delete the songs from your iPhone's drive.

iTunes Match deleted all my songs from my iPhone... 😮

The only way you could lose songs is if you had non purchased music on your phone but not on your computer/itunes. I.E you synced music over to the phone then deleted the music from itunes

Not smart if it is music you wish to keep IMO. If the music is still in itunes, then it is now in the cloud ready to be downloaded on your phone so I do not see the problem

So how come I get a warning on my iPhone when I switch on iTunes match that says "iTunes match will replace the music library on this device"????

Because itunes match doesnt want to go through the hassle of figuring out what on your device is also in the cloud. It wants a clean slate. A cloud repository from which you can download from

You will never add music files to the cloud using anything but itunes. (except purchases) So it would be a lot of hassle for apple to do on device matching for a one time event

Because it is replacing the library file, not the actual music. The only way any songs would get deleted or lost is if you somehow put music on your iPhone that did not come from iTunes Music Store and is not in your iTunes library (ie, the only place it exists is on your iPhone). The only way that you can do this (that I can think of) is to have never sync'd/backed up your phone with iTunes and used a third party utility to put music on the iPhone.

If your music is managed by iTunes and you switch to iTunes Match it will wipe your music and display all your music directly from the iCloud. You can then download any track/album by clicking the ICloud icon. Once it's downloaded it will be on you iOS device.

If you always purchase your music on your iOS device or have downloaded it via purchased music from the store then your music won't be deleted.

This is not how it worked for me. All of the music that was already on my iPhone remained on my iPhone. The rest of the music that was in my iTunes library showed up with a cloud icon. Nothing was deleted.

OK, I see it now. The message is just a generic warning really. Took the plunge and it all works fine. Thanks for all the advise/input

Gary

Actually - it's a very simple way - you drag and drop your music directly onto your device in iTunes.

This avoids having it in the standard iTunes library.

So i took the plunge on iTunes Match today (just been made available in UK) and i'm really ******.

It ONLY works if you manage your music in iTunes to begin with.

I don't.

I find itunes cumbersome and rather manage my music via folders and drag and drop them into WMP.

I found this out because i uploading some tracks to test it and then turned on iTunes Match on my phone. It wiped the 32GB i had manually placed directly onto the phone, leaving me with just the test tracks.

This now means that if I want to utilise Match, I have to upload/match all my tracks by placing them into iTunes (not a problem as I can delete them) and then redownload them on my device.

As for playlists, looks like my ONLY option is to create them in iTunes as it takes too long on my phone

To be honest, signing up to a service called iTunes Match probably wasn't your wisest move if you don't use iTunes.