iTunes match and new iphone

Jose M Olaya wrote:

->When I activated iTunes match on my iphone, it deleted my library file and replaced it with itunes match. Now some songs are greyed out but without the icloud icon (maybe they haven't been uploaded yet from my mac?) while others I can play.

on your iPhone, iTunes match by default displays all the songs that are now available to you in the cloud. it does not download any of them until you either start to play them, or you manually start a download. You can start a manual download a couple of ways. (1) click on the icloud icon (2) in album view at the bottom of the track list, click "download all"

1) When I add a new song to my library, will it be matched/uploaded if unmatched automatically to the iCloud and then onto my devices, or will I need to click on the icloud icon in my iPhone for each new song that I add?

When you add new songs/albums to iTunes on your computer, so long as you have iTunes match turned on (look for the cloud icon next to your music library), it will periodically scan for changes and if it finds new songs, it will try to match them and if it can't match, will upload them (providing they are eligible - certain formats are not). You can also manually have iTunes Match scan for changes by selecting "Update iTunes Match" in the Store menu. There is also a contextual menu item you can use. Once these songes appear on your iphone, the same thing happens as described above, i.e nothing gets downloaded unless y ou either play it or manually download it.

2) What happens when I get a new iphone? since iTunes doesn't sync music directly to the iphone anymore, and it does so through the iCloud, will I have to download over my slow DSL connection all my music? isn't there a less painful way?

I'll have to let someone else handle this question. I'm not sure what happens if you turn iTunes match off, sync via USB to add songs to the iPhone, then turn iTunes match back on. Hopefully there's a way to populate an empty iPhone library via USB after iTunes match has been turned on to activate the service, then back off for a tethered sync.

More over, how on earth will I choose what songs to download on my iphone? I have thousands of songs If I have to click on the icloud icon for every singer/album that'd be slow.

I believe it is possible to create playlists and then have everything in the playlist downloaded. There are discussion threads here that talk about it or perhaps someone in the know will chime in here.