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It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it's probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison's phonograph.

Last week, rock veteran Neil Young chimed in with his assertion that the digital music files we listen to today are of much lower quality than the original recordings. Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, he said that the technology now exists to deliver much higher-quality audio to music fans, and that he had even talked to Steve Jobs about a possible solution.

iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

The world's biggest search engine company turned its music initiative up a notch today. Google Music now includes an MP3 store, in addition to the cloud-based music storage that launched into beta in May. At the company's event in Los Angeles today, they removed the "beta" label from Google Music and made it available to all U.S. users. For the cloud storage part they launched originally, they're keeping the "free" price tag firmly applied.

Rather than charging for storage, as Apple and Amazon do, Google is allowing users to store up to 20,000 tracks for free. So how will they make money? They've partnered with three of the four major music labels (Warner Music didn't sign on) and several independent ones to sell high-quality, 328 kbps MP3 files to users. Google will take a 30% revenue share on each track sold.

In May, Google launched a long-awaited music service that landed with somewhat of a thud. Compared to some of the rumors that were flying around, Google Music turned out to be a rather basic offering. It was nothing more than a "cloud locker" for one's own music files. Not a streaming service. Not an MP3 store. Instead, the service was more analgous to Amazon's Cloud Drive, except without an accompanying music store.

That's about to change, according to a report from the New York Times. Google is currently in negotiations with music labels to launch an MP3 store as part of Google Music. The move would put Google in more direct competition with Amazon and Apple, the latter of which is the market leader in digital music sales.

The release of one of Apple's biggest updates to its mobile operating system yesterday was not without issues. As iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch owners flocked to their computers to upgrade their devices to the new OS, Apple's servers were apparently caught off guard.

The first snag many noticed was the estimated download time for the software. As more people downloaded iOS 5, some began to see prolonged wait times, sometimes up to a few hours. The problems only got worse from there.

The iTunes app store will contain just over 13,000 healthcare-related apps by 2012, a sign that the caring and treatment for the sick - or even those fearing they are sick - is moving to the mobile device.

Analysts also say that these apps are increasing in price during a period of rising healthcare costs and a significant rise in the number of professional-aged people without health insurance.

Apple's new subscription rules requiring publishers to fork over 30% of revenue generated from apps in the iTunes Store have claimed their biggest victim to date. As of last night, the iPhone and iPad apps for the Financial Times went missing from the App Store.

The new rules have not thrilled publishers, but reactions have been mixed. Some media companies, like Hulu and the New York Times, have decided to play along with Apple and offer a significant cut of their subscription revenue to the tech giant in exchange for access to millions of iTunes customers. Others, like Amazon, have opted to build HTML5 Web apps as a way to circumvent the new rules.

There was a lot of buzz prior to today's announcements at WWDC about the deals that Apple had reportedly struck with the major record labels. Even before any Apple executives took the stage, many industry observers had crowned Apple the heir apparent to music in the cloud, decreeing that its offerings would surely trump those recently announced by Google and Amazon.

But now that the dust has settled and the glimmer has faded from today's keynote at WWDC, we have to ask, has Apple really triumphed here? Did we see the future of digital music unveiled onstage?

The most believable of the iCloud rumors is that Apple's upcoming service is a "Cloud iTunes" - meaning a way to access all your music, movies, podcasts and more from any Internet-connected Apple mobile device like the iPhone or iPad. Some think it may be much more than that - imagining iCloud also as the successor to Apple's MobileMe, an uncharacteristically underperforming product that provides email, contacts, calendar and online storage to paying customers. This combination of rumors makes the most sense because it would allow Apple to directly compete with Google's Android operating system, or, perhaps, offer something even better.

The manufacturers of the Grace Digital Radio have teamed with audio industry disruptor Michael Robertson and his newest startup, DAR.FM (Digital Audio Recorder). The integration of the two technologies means that owners of the Grace hardware can now use the DAR website to queue up talk radio shows from all over the country, the dial and the 24-hour broadcast schedule to be played on-demand, including with fast-forward and rewind functionality.

"Radios have historically been speakers where broadcasters control what blares out," Robertson writes on his blog today about his first partnership with a digital radio manufacturer. "A new day is upon us where listeners are wrestling control away from broadcasters and can now control what comes out of their radios. "