I can't believe it. I wait months for Apple's much-anticipated put-all-your-music-in-the-cloud iTunes Match service... I even go out of my way to a manual download and install when neither my Mac's "Software Update" nor iTunes' "Check for Updates" can find iTunes 10.5.1 (not a real hassle but it shows that I was motivated)... I'm ready to subscribe... and what do I get? The following promise:

and then THIS:

AAAAARRRGGHHHHH!!! So I have 58,580 songs that were not purchased in the iTunes store — over twice the legal limit. I think Apple should be proud of me for still using iTunes instead of sending some little box out to brush me off. Argh!

Ah, well, as long as I can wait another six weeks, I can still upload EVERY SINGLE SONG to Amazon's Cloud Drive, which will work nicely with the shiny new Kindle Fire that will show up on Thursday (and which I ordered six weeks ago on  the day that it was announced).

Update 1: MacWorld has already published a kludgy but tolerable solution to the 25,000 song limit in iTunes Match. It involves creating a sort of shell second library and syncing that (without affecting the complete, main library). It might be worth a try. Here's a link to the article with full instructions.

Update 2: I waxed eloquent about my soon-to-arrive Kindle Fire just two paragraphs ago. Then I read actual, hands-on reviews of the device and, well, it doesn't look so good. (Here's Wired's scathing review and a compilation of several others.) Well, zut, alors, as I learned to say in France. The estimated probability-of-return is high enough at this moment that I just ordered one of the other new Kindles, the wifi Kindle Touch, which will arrive next week. Wired was much kinder to this one. I have a little experience with another version of the Kindle and, just like they say, it weighs almost nothing, the battery lasts forever, and the e-ink is very easy on the eyes (especially in bright sunlight). Well, that may be the way I end up going. We'll see.