The recording industry has changed a lot over the past 20 years. We went from buying CDs at Best Buy, to being able to copy a friend’s disc, to pirating our music, to buying our music. (And now, ironically, I’m back to buying my CDs on Amazon…) Over that 20 years, I’ve acquired a lot of tunes in a lot of different formats. Many have the wrong titles. Many have poor quality. And since I, like many others, became an iPod/iPhone user, all of those tunes are organized in iTunes, Apple’s free media management application. Well Apple has a newer service that helps with those formatting issues. It also helps with the sheer size of the library, by allowing you to stream it to any device from anywhere. That service is called iTunes Match.

Here’s the description from the website:

 iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device. … Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

If you have a big audiophile in your life and they’re (roughly) between 25 and 35, you might find a great gift in iTunes Match. update: You can buy iTunes Match with a standard iTunes gift card. So if you need an easy way to gift this, you’ve got it!