iTunes Match Not Launched Yet as October Ends

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Apple launched this year an impressive cloud computing solution called iCloud that lets users better manage and share certain files, including music, photos and others via supported iOS 5, Mac OS X and Windows devices. One of the music-related features is called iTunes Match and it should have been available to interested music fans already.

What iTunes Match does is to help you mount your existing music collection in the cloud and access your tracks from there on any supported device. For $24.99 per year, any iTunes user can have his or her music library scanned by iTunes Match, which will then match every track in it with existing ones from iTunes. By “every track” I literally mean every track, even the ones that were not purchased initially from iTunes, as long as they have a correspondent in the iTunes store.

Apple will do you one even better as it will upgrade the quality of your tracks to 256kbps automatically for no extra charge. Unfortunately for those of you that love the iCloud and its features, iTunes Match is still a closed product, only available to American iOS developers at this time.

During Apple’s recent “Let’s talk iPhone” Eddy Cue announced that iTunes Match will be released at the end of October in the USA without revealing any actual launch dates for this music iCloud-powered product. That unofficial deadline has passed and Apple has not come forward with any details regarding the iTunes Match rollout.

iTunes Match is definitely an important features of iCloud and we should see it get official soon, although we can’t say what’s causing the delay. The company may still be waiting to finalize International deals that will help it offer iTunes Match features to its worldwide customers, although Apple never said it will wait to simultaneously launch the service in multiple markets.

So does anyone know why iTunes Match is delayed? Will Apple launch it in the very near future, thus missing its unofficial deadline by only a few days?