iTunes Match Comes To UK

Last night a couple of reports emerged of iTunes Match, Apple’s cloud music storage system,  going live in the UK and a number of other countries around the world.

Tonight it seems as if Apple if rolling it out for real, and having updated our iTunes to version 10.5.2 we immediately saw the iTunes Match option appear in the left hand menu. 

Clicking on it will bring you to an information page where it gives you the option to Subscribe for £21.99 a year. The same service costs $25-a-year in the US. While we did proceed to the next step we didn't go as far as to subscribe as, well, we didn't want to.

Reports around the internet suggest that the service has also come online in countries such as New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Ireland and Australia.

iTunes Match is a service which scans your iTunes library and having recognized all the tracks will create a mirror collection in iTunes in the cloud.

So all music bought from iTunes as well as music ripped from CDs will be available to you wherever you go, in handy 256Kbps AAC, DRM-free files. Any files not in the iTunes library of 20 million tracks can be uploaded manually.

While there has been no official word about the roll out from Apple, it seems as if this is for real. We want to hear from you if you have managed to get the service up and running or if you will be signing up once you get updated to the latest version of iTunes.