http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXrXDR694ZQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU

Improvements

1- Music app – The Music player (on my iPhone at least) is now suupppeeerrrr slowwwww. To the point where the UI is not responsive anymore. I can tap on a button and wait, wait, wait and then, the button go down. It also crash very often. To be honest, I have to quit the application and restart it whenever I change location because the app is confused.

2- Alert – Whenever I am not on a Wi-Fi network. I get this annoying alert every time I hit Shuffle: ”Cannot Play – Connect to a Wi-Fi network to play “Name of the song here”. You can enable cellular playback in Settings”.  Please remove it or allow me to turn it off. I know I can enable cellular playback but I don’t want to and I know I can’t play all the songs either but I like randomness!

3- Playlist – Because iTunes Match is ON, iTunes does not let me choose which playlist to sync with my iPhone. One would argue it makes sense since you can get them all from iCloud. Personally, I think this feature should be available. First, it is much faster to sync on my local network or with the USB cable. Second, I can’t necessarily download a complete playlist while I’m on someone else network and connectivity (speed) might be an issue. (Be it at work, Starbucks or else) Another argument is that I created smart playlist specifically for my iPhone in the past because I wanted, let’s say, at least the songs imported in the last 30 days. This way, at every sync I had the latest songs. With iCloud, now I have to manually download this playlist which is counter-productive and time-consuming. Not only do I have to click on Download but I have to wait for the songs to be there… Pouf!, simply went from happy-user to not-happy-user… I lost a feature!

4- Download- Even when I’m home, if I tap on the download button for a song, the song gets downloaded from iCloud. It uses my precious ISP bandwidth for no reason. Please allow me to download my song from my local network. The Music app is smart enough to know when I’m home and play all songs. It should be able to know how to sync from my local network. Also, it will be much faster.

Other Interesting Bits

1- I looked at iTunes’ activity a bit more since I purchased iTunes Match because I wasn’t sure exactly how it would work and I didn’t want any surprises on my ISP bill. I was shock to see that iTunes is actually uploading my music to Amazon AWS. (Apple: After building a $1 billion dollar data center, you still need Amazon Cloud Storage? Wow!) Whenever I download a song though, it came from Apple (West Coast California) or Akamai (Cambridge, Mass.) – I don’t really care where my music comes from or where I uploaded it.

2- As many people interested in iTunes Match, I liked the idea of being able to download a better version of a matched songs. Some music files in my Library were from almost 10 years ago when 128 kbps-rip was the standard. iTunes was able to match some of those and I am glad I can download a version at 256 kbps. The only thing is that whenever I replace a song, iTunes modified the “Kind” tag to “Matched AAC Audio file” and add my name and email address into the tags (“Account name” and “Downloaded by” instead of “Purchased by” when you buy a song on the iTunes Store). It is not a big deal per say but I am not a big fan of putting my name in there. I don’t like it either when I buy from the iTunes Store.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrW68jCy9pc

Source: Digital Life article on Arfa Karim Randhawa the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) in the world. She passed away January 15th, 2012 at only 16 years old. Wikipedia entry