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Apple's HomePod speaker needs an iOS device to work
If you were hoping to use the HomePod as a regular Bluetooth speaker, forget about that. Apple has revealed more about the wireless capability and audio sources for its Siri-powered device, and while it has the necessary hardware for Bluetooth streaming, currently it only supports third-party services through Apple's proprietary AirPlay protocol. As was expected, that pretty much eliminates Android and other devices as sources, even if you're running Apple Music, making the HomePod a product strictly for Apple device owners.
Apple rolls out more accurate iTunes matching for Apple Music
Apple Music's ability to match and sync songs that users had already purchased in iTunes was a notable feature when the service first launched last year. Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as the iTunes Match tool that preceded the streaming option. Well, it looks like Apple is working to improve how that all works. The Loop reports that the company is rolling out an update that uses the iTunes Match audio fingerprint to handle syncing those songs you've bought. Before now, Apple Music was using a less accurate version of iTunes Match that relied on metadata to pair tracks.
Apple increases iCloud Music Library limit to 100,000 tracks
Apple has made good on its promise to increase the iCloud Music Library limit to 100,000 tracks. This was previously set at 25,000, so the change increases the cap threefold. The move was first teased in June, with Eddy Cue, the company's SVP of Internet Software and Services, promising it would arrive before the year's end.
Apple Music arrives June 30th at 11AM Eastern, Beats 1 an hour later
Determined to try Apple Music and its accompanying Beats 1 radio the very moment they're available on June 30th? The streaming service's senior director, Ian Rogers, is happy to help those early adopter impulses. He says that iOS 8.4 (and thus Apple Music) will be available at 11AM Eastern on that day, and Beats 1 will go on the air one hour later. It's not clear what you'll hear if you tune in to the station right away, but the first slate of programming will include an interview with Eminem as well as appearances from everyone from Cara Delevigne to (unsurprisingly) Beats brand co-founder Dr. Dre.
iTunes Radio starts streaming in Australia
We've seen quite a few hints that iTunes Radio would soon be available outside of the US, and it's now clear that there was something to all those clues: The music service is now available in Australia. Listeners on the island nation can get the same personalized radio streams as their American counterparts, and they can strip out ads if they fork over $35 AUD per year for an iTunes Match subscription. Apple hasn't confirmed rumors of impending iTunes Radio launches in Canada and the UK, but we imagine that it's just a matter of time before music lovers in those countries can tune in.
Daily Update for March 21, 2013
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen. Subscribe via RSS
iCloud, Dropbox, Amazon top US cloud services
According to a study recently published by Strategy Analytics, Apple's iCloud and iTunes Match are tops among US consumer cloud services. The study polled 2,300 Americans and found, among other things, that 27 percent of respondents have used iCloud and/or iTunes Match. Further, 17 percent have used Dropbox and 15 percent of participants have used Amazon Cloud Drive. Unsurprisingly, the data skewed young, as most of those who use cloud services were between 20 and 24 years old. Apple's was the only service with more female than male users. You can read additional detail in the press release below. To the cloud! Show full PR text THE CLOUD STORAGE WARS: APPLE LEADS WITH 27% MARKET SHARE Dropbox hits 17% of market share with no associated content ecosystem Over half of Americans online have never used cloud storage service Boston, MA – March 21, 2013: Apple is dominating the cloud storage wars, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google according to Strategy Analytics 'Cloud Media Services' survey. In a recent study of almost 2,300 connected Americans, Strategy Analytics found that 27% have used Apple's iCloud followed by 17% for Dropbox, 15% for Amazon Cloud Drive and 10% for Google Play (see chart). Usage of cloud storage is heavily skewed towards younger people, in particular 20-24 year olds, whilst Apple's service is the only one with more female than male users. Amongst the big four, Google's is the one most heavily skewed towards males. Cloud storage is overwhelmingly dominated by music; around 90% of Apple, Amazon and Google's cloud users store music. Even Dropbox – which has no associated content ecosystem – sees around 45% of its users storing music files. Dropbox's recent acquisition of Audiogalaxy will add a much needed native music player to the platform in the coming months. "Music is currently the key battleground in the war for cloud domination. Google is tempting users by giving away free storage for 20,000 songs which can be streamed to any Android device, a feature both Amazon and Apple charge annual subscriptions for," observes Ed Barton, Strategy Analytics' Director of Digital Media. "However, the growth of video streaming and the desire to access content via a growing range of devices will see services such as the Hollywood-backed digital movie initiative Ultraviolet – currently used by 4% of Americans – increase market share." Barton continues, "The cloud's role in the race to win over consumers' digital media libraries has evolved from a value added service for digital content purchases to a feature-rich and increasingly device agnostic digital locker for music and movies. Dropbox being used by 1 in 6 Americans shows that an integrated content storefront isn't essential to build a large user base, however we expect competition to intensify sharply over the coming years." Strategy Analytics found that, the big four cloud storage services aside, recognition of other brands was uniformly low. Furthermore 55% of connected Americans have never used a cloud storage service – although, amongst consumers who have used one, one third (33%) had done so in the last week. "There needs to be considerable investment in evangelizing these services to a potentially willing yet largely oblivious audience," suggests Barton. "Given the size of bet Hollywood is making with Ultraviolet, this will be essential to their success given a crowded market and widespread apathy. However, more fundamental questions remain - is the use of more than one cloud service going to be too much for consumers to handle and will consolidation in such a fragmented market become inevitable?" Barton concludes, "Although cloud storage is fast becoming a key pillar of digital platform strategies for the world's leading device manufacturers and digital content distributors, there's still a lot of work to do in educating consumers – particularly those over 45. With over half of consumers yet to use any consumer cloud based service, 2013 predictions for the 'year of the cloud' seem unrealistic. However given the market influence of the leading players pushing the concept, in particular Apple, Amazon, Google and Ultraviolet, I won't be surprised to see mainstream adoption and usage spike within the next two to three years in the key US market."
Strategy Analytics: iCloud, Dropbox and Amazon top cloud media in the US
We often focus on market share for hardware, but cloud media services increasingly dictate our lives after the devices have reached our bags and pockets. Wouldn't it be nice to know who rules the online media landscape? According to Strategy Analytics' just-published study from the fall, it's Apple's iCloud and iTunes Match that are top dogs in the US at a combined 27 percent of usage -- a not entirely surprising lead when Apple has pushed hard on iCloud's media syncing since iOS 5, and has large swaths of market share in MP3 players and tablets, not just smartphones. There's a considerably tougher fight involved for just about everyone else, however, including Google. Dropbox and Amazon Cloud Player are almost neck-and-neck at 17 and 15 percent respectively, while Google Drive holds just 10 percent. Music is clearly the driving force, Strategy Analytics says: when audio represents 45 percent of the content on a generic platform like Dropbox, companies ignore tunes at their own peril. Just don't confuse market share with absolute popularity. A full 55 percent of those asked hadn't used a cloud media service at all, which suggests that there's a long road to travel before we're all streaming and syncing our collections.
A year with iTunes Match: How would you fix it?
Last week, Macworld took an in-depth look at the idiosyncrasies of using iTunes Match a year after the service had its belated launch. And, with this morning's outage, it doesn't appear that things are getting any easier for the service. It didn't help that an already rough road got even rockier with the release of iOS 6, and how it's made iTunes Match more broken than it was before. As stated in the article, when iTunes Match works, it works well. But when it's broken, it's like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall -- except you have no clue as to how to put it back together again. Macworld's Kirk McElhearn offers several solutions as to how to fix it. But, how would you do it? Let us know in the comments.
iTunes Match down for many
After a brief outage yesterday that affected iMessage and FaceTime, Apple's iTunes match service is now apparently down for some iOS and Mac users this morning. As noticed by AppleInsider, iTunes Match content stored in the cloud just stalls at 0:00 without any error message. Apple's iCloud system status webpage says all services are online, but this may change if the outage continues or becomes more widespread.
SuperSync 5 will add support for iTunes Match
SuperSync is a really impressive app that you've probably already heard about if you've ever tried to keep iTunes libraries between various computers synced together. It basically scans your iTunes library as you add to it, and then tracks different libraries across Macs and PCs to make sure that they're all the same (or at least that they all follow whatever rules you've set up for them). And now, SuperSync is adding support for iTunes Match. SuperSync will help iTunes find the best quality copies of those songs and sync them to any other computers you've set up on the system. It's another bit of powerful functionality in an already powerful app. SuperSync is available from the website for US$22.95 for the ability to sync between two computers.
Users reporting a big bag of hurt with iTunes Match and iOS 6
I don't use iTunes Match and I probably never will. I have seen a constant stream of complaints from people who use the service, with their music libraries unceremoniously deleted, re-downloaded and deleted again -- and that's just one of the many issues I've seen since the service began. Now iOS 6 appears to add another irksome wrinkle into Apple's service. Detailing a number of issues in iOS 6 pertaining to iTunes Match on his iPhone, Apple Discussions member Steve Lawrence notes that: Once you have downloaded music to your iPhone, you can no longer delete it. Which means that eventually your iPhone will be full.* You cannot decide to download just the tracks you want to listen to from an album any more. It's the whole thing or nothing. Another user reports maddening issues with corrupted songs. Since the beginning, there has been a lot of confusion as to how Match does its thing. Apple doesn't really provide a streaming music service, where all your stuff is somewhere accessible via the cloud, but instead offers your music available for download on any device at a given time. *In fact, iOS 6 manages the memory automatically, deleting the oldest and least played songs first. Still, why not allow a user to control this? What happens when your device is almost full but you want to download a huge app like Infinity Blade? Automatic is great, just give us a manual override. Are you seeing issues with iTunes Match on iOS 6? Are you happy with the service?
Apple rolls out iTunes movies in the Cloud to UK, Australia, Canada, more
Earlier today, Apple rolled out iTunes Match to Hungary and Poland, but now it appears the company has also started expanding iCloud's media offerings to countries that already have the iTunes Match services. Here in the UK, Apple has expanded its iTunes in the Cloud offerings to include movies users have already purchased through iTunes. In allowing users to redownload any film they have purchased through their UK iTunes account, Apple is giving customers a way to easily track and retrieve previously purchased content. This is especially helpful for users with smaller hard drives in their MacBooks and iOS devices. Now they don't have to back up and store all the large media purchases they made. When finished watching a film, the user can just delete it and the redownload it again when necessary. However, from my iTunes UK account I can verify that not all films are available for redownload from all studios...yet. In addition to the UK, Apple appears to be rolling out iTunes movies in the Cloud to many other countries including Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and several Latin American locals. Update: Via MacRumors, here's the expanding list of new countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia.
iTunes Store opens in Hong Kong, Taiwan and 10 other Asia-Pacific territories
Our Apple-loving compatriots on the west side of the Pacific Ocean have been able to purchase the latest in iPhone and iPad software from the App Store for a while, but believe it or not, they've been shut out of the iTunes Store. Apple has just opened the virtual iTunes storefront in a dozen locations across the Asia-Pacific region. The "big three" Asian markets that will get access to music and movies for the first time today are Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. Other locations that are going live today are Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. All of the new stores will feature local content as well as the big international favorites. Apple chose to launch the new branches of the iTunes Store complete with iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match subscriptions.
Apple opens iTunes Store in Hong Kong, Taiwan and 10 other Asia-Pacific territories
Many Apple fans on the opposite side of the Pacific from Cupertino haven't had much of a choice to shop from iTunes, even though they've had the App Store for some time. There's now a much better sense of balance: Apple just flicked the switch on the iTunes Store for music and movies in a dozen countries and territories across the Asia-Pacific region. The company singles out our own Richard Lai's Hong Kong as well as Singapore and Taiwan, but we'd be remiss if we didn't mention that Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam are also getting the media catalogs, which include local content along with the international hits. It's a full catch-up as well, with iTunes in the Cloud re-downloads and iTunes Match subscriptions available in every new country. If you're a huge Andy Lau fan but wanted his albums from the most iPhone-friendly store possible, the wait is over.
Amazon rumored clinching major labels for cloud music rights, iTunes Match feels the heat
When we last checked in, Amazon was thought to finally be pushing for full music rights in its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services. It might be a smooth operator at the negotiating table: subsequent tips to CNET maintain that the top four major labels (a currently-independent EMI as well as Sony, Universal and Warner) have all signed deals that will let Amazon offer the same scan-and-match music downloads and streaming as Apple's iTunes Match. The pacts would let Amazon offer access to every song a listener owns without having to directly upload each track that wasn't bought directly from Amazon MP3. Aside from closing a conspicuous gap, the deal could end a whole lot of acrimony from labels who were upset that Amazon preferred a free-but-limited service over having to charge anything. The online shop hasn't said anything official yet (if at all), but any signatures on the dotted line will leave Google Music as the odd man out.
iTunes Match book delivers useful guidance in minutes
Writer Lex Friedman has covered Apple's iTunes Match cloud music service for Macworld, his home base, but if you want all your Match instruction in one convenient ebook, you're in luck. Friedman has written Sams Teach Yourself iTunes Match in 10 Minutes, a full guide that provides all the instruction any Match user could need. The ebook ($7.99 in the Kindle store, $9.99 in the iBookstore) might cover some familiar ground in the basics of how the service works and what it does. It's definitely adding value, though, when it comes to the details of forcing your low-bitrate tracks to upgrade, tracking down sync errors or controlling which playlists download to your iOS devices. If you have a friend or relative just jumping onto the Match bandwagon, it might make a thoughtful gift (and one that will cut down on the support calls). One tip from the book that was new to me was how to use the Settings app on the iPhone to reset local music storage and start fresh with iTunes Match. Open Settings, tap General, then Usage. Once the space allocations get calculated, you can simply wipe all the music from your device with a single click -- best to do it when you've got WiFi and time to spare, though.
Apple reportedly working on "adaptive streaming" for iCloud music
The Guardian is reporting that Apple is working on a new method of "adaptive streaming" for music stored in iCloud that will "adjust itself to the bandwidth and storage available on the receiving device." The UK paper is less clear on exactly how that new format will be implemented, saying that it could offer high-definition audio to users of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch or alternatively offer a streaming service. The latter makes sense when the Apple acquisition of streaming service Lala.com in 2009 is considered. The service will apparently be available at some unspecified date to upgrade iTunes Match. According to a source for The Guardian, a London-based studio has been asked to prepare audio files for a new adaptive streaming format. The source was quoted as saying "All of a sudden, all your audio from iTunes is in HD rather than AAC. Users wouldn't have to touch a thing – their library will improve in an instant." Adaptive streaming could allow mobile users to access their music in a less bandwidth-intensive manner, while those on a fast network at home or work would hear the music in studio quality. It's unknown whether the files are converted to smaller, lower-quality types in real time, or if Apple will store a master file in a number of different formats. Whatever Apple will unveil in terms of adaptive streaming, the curtain could be opened to music fans as soon as the announcement of the next-generation iPad next Wednesday, March 7.
Daily Update for February 22, 2012
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Apple reportedly readying iTunes Match for Japan
Japanese Mac site Macotakara notes that the Japanese version of iTunes has been updated with a "Purchased" tab via iTunes in the Cloud, which also suggests that Apple is about to launch an official version of iTunes Match in Japan. iCloud has been up and running in Japan for some time, but only for sharing books and information across apps. iTunes in the Cloud will allow Apple's Japanese users to access purchased songs from the iTunes Store on any of their devices, and iTunes Match will allow users to "match" their music to iTunes Store for additional functionality. iTunes in the Cloud has reportedly already gone live in Japan, and it seems like Apple is on the brink of releasing iTunes Match in Japan. That could possibly mean that other new international markets aren't far behind.
