If you have a collection of CDs that you’ve ripped into digital form, then you’re probably enjoying the music on your PC. But do you know how to also stream music that you’ve ripped on your smartphone or MP3 player?
You may be using Windows Media Player or iTunes to manually sync some playlists to your portable device. There is a way to stream music from your entire library anywhere that you are, as long as you’re connected to a wireless network.
iTunes Match and Google Music are cloud storage services that allow you to stream music. (I’ve summarized these services below.)
After you sign up for a service and install the application on your PC, you start by “matching” your music library with the available tracks offered by the service. The application will upload only the tracks that don’t match to the cloud storage.
The next step is to install the mobile app on your device and log into the service. Now you’ll be able to “stream” music from your entire library to your device!
Here are some details on the services:
iTunes Match: $25/year; no storage limit; up to 100,000 songs can be matched
Google Music: free; 50,000 song maximum
If you need help managing your music library, Digital Chaos Control can help!
Great ideas to expand a musical repertoire on mobile devices. Thank you for the great tips!
Awesome! I did not know that. Amazing what you can do once you know, right? Now the dilemna for me is should I use Google Music (it’s free) or just do iTunes Match since my library is in iTunes already? Maybe I just answered my question. LOL
Great info! It is good NOT to wait until you have a problem and lose all your data.
Wow! Thank you for summarizing the options for streaming music onto a mobile devices Pat! I had no idea – I usually listen to Pandora but I would prefer to listen to music I have in my iTunes library!