Itunes Match Question

iTunes Match works great with TuneSpan. I use iTunes Match myself and have no conflicts with TuneSpan.

You shouldn't need to set anything up differently, just use TuneSpan as normal even if you have iTunes Match setup.

One thing though... if you are assuming you will be able to stream your tracks with iTunes Match when they are not available after spanning (your external drive is not plugged in), that won't work.

iTunes Match only lets your stream your media when the track is deleted from iTunes, leaving the iCloud version available to stream. If you re-download tracks after deleting them, the files will go into your default iTunes Media folder.

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So, for example I have Track A spanned and playable from my external hard drive...

Then I unplug my external hard drive and am on the move... but now I really want to listen to Track A. So, I delete the track from my library leaving the iCloud version and iTunes now offers the track to stream, great.

But I get back home and want to get that track back locally, so I re-download it. But now, its in my default iTunes Media folder and there is a stray file left behind on my external drive, that's not ideal.

TuneSpan can help you with this though. None of those changes will have negatively affected TuneSpan. When you relaunch TuneSpan, you will see Track A as being marked as Restored, since the file for that track is now found in its original location in the default iTunes Media folder. You can span Track A to the span location of the stray file on your external drive and TuneSpan will detect that the file already exists there, and re-use that file and update the location in iTunes. So, you will be left with one file on the external drive again, and would have to repeat the process if you ever want to stream that track on the go again.

Does that make sense?

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Also, TuneSpan does not list tracks that are only available to stream in iTunes. This includes streaming podcasts as well as anything that is in iTunes Match that is not stored locally. This shouldn't be an issue though, since those tracks couldn't be spanned anyway. But, internally iTunes keeps the same IDs for a track when you delete it and stream it and re-download it, so in the example case above, TuneSpan will still be aware that its the same track that was once spanned and is now restored.

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I hope that helps explain some of the details, but overall, you should not need to do anything differently when using TuneSpan with iTunes Match.

Please let me know if any of that doesn't make sense or if you have any other questions at all.

Thank you for getting in touch!

Also, using TuneSpan on one computer with iTunes Match has no affect on on any other computers or iOS devices which you are using with iTunes Match as well. You can still stream your media as normal on your devices after using TuneSpan.

In general, TuneSpan only affect the one computer and the one library you are using it with.