HT4913 If the music library on my iPhone will be deleted when I enable iTunes Match, does that mean that I will not be able to access that music library when I temporarily turn off iTunes Match on the iPhone, e.g., when on the subway & can't connect to Ma

Question

I have subscribed to iTunes Match and have employed it to listen to music on my Macbook Air and iMac.  On these devices it seems to operate by streaming music to the device rather than deleting the device's current iTunes library and downloading songs as they are played from iTunes Match. Not so on the iPhone as far as I can tell. Consequently, to date I have not activated iTunes Match on my iPhone 4S.  I presently have 40-50GB's of music on my iPhone, sync'd from my iTunes music library on my Macbook Air.  I am concerned that if I enable iTunes Match on my iPhone I will lose the music library already on my iPhone, as Apple seems to be representing that once iTunes Match is enabled on the iPhone the current music library, carefully compiled, will be gone from the iPhone forever (unless I later re-sync it from the iTunes library on my laptop), that it will be deleted.  Although this would free up a lot of space on my iPhone, I bought the 64GB phone just so that I could keep a lot of music on it and accessible at all times.  I am concerned that in certain instances, say if I am in the subway and want to listen to music on my iPhone but  don't have internet access below ground, that I won't have much music to listen to, only those songs previously played and thus downloaded onto the phone from iMatch, presenting me witrh a rather limited choice of music to play instead of the 40-50GB's I now have to choose from. Apple seems to have presented me with the choice of the lesser of 2 evils: i) enable iTunes Match and lose the music library already on the iPhone in exchange for access to iTunes Match and a greater number of songs than I can fit onto the phone (my library exceeds the phone's capacity) when a Cloud connection is available or ii) don't enable iTunes match and limit myself to only those songs, a considerable portion of my library to be sure but not all of it, that I can fit in the phone's storage space, i.e., the 40-50 GB's I have on there now.  If I choose the latter course, each time I purchase an album I'll have to delete another album to make room for it on the phone.  Apple thus offers me a sort of Hobson's choice, bad all the way around.  Do I have this right? The Apple techs I've spoken to don't seem to have a handle on the "deletion" aspect of enabling iTunes Match on the iPhone.   Right now, I'm too scared of "losing" my iPhone music library to enable iTunes Match on the iPhone. [Possible work-around, albeit a pain in the ***: I suppose that I can enable iTunes Match on the iPhone and spend the next couple of weeks 24/7 downloading songs from my iTunes Match library back onto the phone to replace at least some of those deleted when Match was enabled, thereby rebuilding a proxy library on the phone itself to play when I'm stuck in a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan while maintaining access to thee larger iTunes Match library, more music than my phone will hold, once we come back into the light and my Cloud connection is restored.] Comments, suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

See Recover your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device.
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