setting up itunes Match while in Thailand

[hermespan]

well, Malaysia at the moment actually.

Despite disliking Apple's 'privacy' policies (at least better than Google's), and not liking using credit cards - I want to take advantage of this service. However, I am travelling in SEA and will soon be back in Canada.

How complicated is this going to be adding content from various countries (not online), as in ISPs will vary wildly. My second major concern is that the identity of my appleid will not match my credit card

Circumstances (in case it makes any difference)...

1. Canadian and Cambodian credit cards

2. Canadian purchase of iphone5 with cash and registered to 'John Doe'

3. Canadian itunes purchases of songs with anonymous Canadian gift cards so far

4. 2000 songs mostly from ripping library CDs and sharing websites

5. Most songs already in mp3 format

6. Most songs on external hard drives stored in Thailand (some loose, some in backups of itunes)

7. I am a computer retard

8. Appleid us registered to 'Fred Smith' in Zimbawe or some such

9. I do not own a Mac computer/ipad and while I might buy an ipad not sure if I will ever get a Mac laptop (which if I do will be a digital HD 'Air' model)

10. I have itunes installed on my 2 years-old PC laptop

11. All my itunes purchased songs are so far only on my iphone5

The goal is to get all content integrated with the least effort and technical knowhow and ideally telling Apple as little about my personal business (whereabouts and banking for example) as possible. And without losing my ratings and playlists of course.

Edited June 26, 2014 by hermespan

[hermespan]

Well, Apple from Makaysia, Apple Canada took my money and*started* to add album art work but then I got an error message that I needed to log out of Itunes store (where I purchased subscription), and I don't see any changes so far - 30 minutes later . I have a good wifi connected.

Perhaps simultaneously updating itunes was a bad idea? I stopped that process at. &0 %. But Apple is supposed to ve seamlessly integrated and a no brainer.

[ianwuk]

iTunes Match worked fine for me here in Thailand. However I had to leave my laptop on for months to upload all the songs to the cloud that it could not match and the upload process would routinely fail. I then had to make a new iTunes playlist with songs that met the criteria of being uploaded or matched by iTunes Match to avoid duplicates and such. It takes a long time to upload everything and sort it out but it is worth having except when the internet is slow or dies then your music collection is useless which is why I now just use an iPod Classic (more space that iTunes Match as well).

Go through all your current songs and edit the ID3 tags (artist, album artist, track number, album, genre and artwork) so that they are all correct otherwise iTunes has no clue and it just goes nowhere. That would be the first thing to do. Once you have cleaned up your local music then start adding it, little by little, to the cloud. I do believe your purchase history and all that is not really relevant, just make sure the Apple ID you use to sign in to iTunes Match has a valid credit card attached to it.

Edited July 1, 2014 by ianwuk