Audiotap (audiotapapp.com) works great. Uses wifi while at home and 3G on the road. I drove from my home on Long Island to NJ, about three hours, and listened to my music in my iTunes Library the whole way! You need to be logged on to your Mac and have an audiotap service running too. Looks just like iTunes app, playlists and all.
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Apple Launches iTunes Match with Release of iTunes 10.5.1 [Updated]
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Audiotap (audiotapapp.com) works great. Uses wifi while at home and 3G on the road. I drove from my home on Long Island to NJ, about three hours, and listened to my music in my iTunes Library the whole way! You need to be logged on to your Mac and have an audiotap service running too. Looks just like iTunes app, playlists and all.
My iPad is jailbroken and I have looked at the the files created when downloading by tapping the cloud icon vs downloading by playing and they are identical--as are tracks that came from iTunes synching.
Right now my iPad is barely functional and keeps warning about being low on space. Yet not one track has been removed from music library. And I downloaded many of the tracks on there by merely letting it play a large playlist non-stop.
In iTunes my iPad is listed as being over capacity. If this is not a situation that would require space freed up I don't know what is.
Michael
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Uh, Apple called it that. You can call it streaming all you want but as has pointed out to you many times Match is both streaming and downloading. If someone wanted they could only use it to download and never stream anything.
Wrong again. Getting to be a trend with you. All I did was point out that you were factually incorrect in your reply to someone who specifically mentioned iPhone.
You on the other hand have assumed that whatever iTunes Match is to you must apply to everyone and can't seem to understand anything contrary. And you wonder why people come down on you?
Michael
At wit's end
My library is 15,000 songs.
I started at 7:00 this morning. It's now been 16 hours.
I had gotten all the way to 90% through Step 3. All my songs had status, different cloud icons, everything. It was looking good.
Then I noticed that Step 3 had stalled. So I stopped Match.
I had the 4010 error. Some idiot on the Apple forums said Store, Alt-Turn Off iTunes Match would fix the problem.
I did that, turned Match back on, and found to my horror that ALL MY MATCH SETTINGS ARE GONE.
SIXTEEN FREAKING HOURS OF WORK LOST. I am ready to strangle that guy.
I lost AN ENTIRE DAY. I'm back at square one. I have to start over from the beginning with the 6-hour-long execution of Step 1, and I can't work on this tomorrow because I have to go out (nor during the week).
THIS IS A FREAKIN' NIGHTMARE.
My library is 15,000 songs.
I started at 7:00 this morning. It's now been 16 hours.
I had gotten all the way to 90% through Step 3. All my songs had status, different cloud icons, everything. It was looking good.
Then I noticed that Step 3 had stalled. So I stopped Match.
I had the 4010 error. Some idiot on the Apple forums said Store, Alt-Turn Off iTunes Match would fix the problem.
I did that, turned Match back on, and found to my horror that ALL MY MATCH SETTINGS ARE GONE.
SIXTEEN FREAKING HOURS OF WORK LOST. I am ready to strangle that guy.
I lost AN ENTIRE DAY. I'm back at square one. I have to start over from the beginning with the 6-hour-long execution of Step 1, and I can't work on this tomorrow because I have to go out (nor during the week).
THIS IS A FREAKIN' NIGHTMARE.
In my case a huge amount. Trying to match the whole library has always failed so I've had to add a few tracks at a time. Finally it made it past step 1 with the full library and is on step 2, almost 9000 songs matched out of 23000. I'm not optimistic that it will make it through step 3, or that it will even mark all the Matched songs if the upload fails before it's done.
I guess Apple isn't prepared for people with $20,000 dollars worth of music to match.
Looks like Apple isn't prepared for much of anything with this service. And you can legally end up with that many files without spending nearly that much.
Share a library between users?
Will iTunes Match allow me and my husband to share one library? We share an iMac (with Snow Leopard) at home, I use an MacBook (Snow Leopard) and iPad2 at work, and we both use iPod Touches. On our iMac at home, we each have our own user. So far, I haven't even figured out how to share a single iTunes library (that we run off of an external hard drive) between our users on our iMac (although, admittedly, I haven't had time to try very hard). Anyone know if we can use iTunes Match to both stay connected on all our devices to the same library? After all, when you are married, what's mine is yours, right?
Will iTunes Match allow me and my husband to share one library? We share an iMac (with Snow Leopard) at home, I use an MacBook (Snow Leopard) and iPad2 at work, and we both use iPod Touches. On our iMac at home, we each have our own user. So far, I haven't even figured out how to share a single iTunes library (that we run off of an external hard drive) between our users on our iMac (although, admittedly, I haven't had time to try very hard). Anyone know if we can use iTunes Match to both stay connected on all our devices to the same library? After all, when you are married, what's mine is yours, right?
Just sign into iTunes on each of the computers using the Apple ID that's paying for iTunes Match and you're good to go.
Yes, 10 devices (computers included) can share an Apple ID associated with a particular iTunes account. All 10 of this devices will share the same library, playlists, etc.
No, you have to create the smart playlist on a computer running iTunes, and the playlist will then filter over to the iOS device. Changes made on the uOS device will affect the playlist system wide (to include deleting it).
Just got this service and upgraded all my library on my PC. Even for non iOS users this is a pretty cool service. I was able to un-DRM all my old stuff from my iPod days to use on my Android. I also upgraded all of my eMusic MP3s to 256kbps. It was a bit of a pain as I couldn't download more than about 40 song batches w/ out recieving an error from iTunes, but it still worked well enough in the end.
Seems crazy to me how much they opened the opportunity to steal music. For $25 the possibilities are endless to copying multiple friends' libraries or even just downloading piles of illegal music and legitimizing it.
Seems crazy to me how much they opened the opportunity to steal music. For $25 the possibilities are endless to copying multiple friends' libraries or even just downloading piles of illegal music and legitimizing it.
Sigh, so we aren't totally pc-free.
My problem is my car radio doesn't understand how to interact with my iPhone since I have turned Match on. Instead of trying to download the songs, it just skips over them. Creating a smart playlist would allow me to select all the songs of a certain criteria and download them before connecting to my car radio.
I love Audiotap. You can choose the streaming bit-rate from your i-device which comes in handy. Sometimes when on your home wi-fi you want a high bit-rate, when out and about on the 3g crank the bit-rate down to =<128kbps.
I probably spent like 20 hours making my iTunes library a perfect match to iTunes, so I can speak to this.
The audio fingerprinting (lala software) appears to be VERY accurate. Your track needs to be the exact match of what is available in iTunes for it to be a match. Example of where a track will not get matched:
Nirvana's Nevermind album. On the CD, the last track is about 20 minutes long. It has the track, a lot of silence, then the "hidden track." Now if you look at the album available on iTunes, it just has the 2 tracks available separately. So no matter what you do, that one 20 minute track isn't going to get matched because it's simply not available like that in iTunes. So you can leave it as an uploaded file, or if you're anal retentive like me, you go to Amazon and buy the two tracks at $0.99 a pop and then those match just fine.
Several albums will have some quirks like this where the tracks on CD are not exact matches of the tracks on iTunes, so iTunes Match will not match them.
EDIT: I suppose if you have the software to do it you could rip the track in a lossless format and then cut the two tracks separately on your own and make them match, but that wasn't an option for me.
I assume that's the sort of thing that's going on...but Apple needs to improve their software to handle the case of tracks like that as well as ones that are a tiny bit different in different CD releases. Users shouldn't have to replace their tracks or manually edit them to get a legitimate CD rip to be matched. Maybe that means adding more possible things to match to, or maybe it just means allowing matches that are slightly "less accurate". If Shazam can often get a match from holding up a phone to a speaker, there's no reason iTunes shouldn't be able to match songs that have slightly different lengths.
Not true. I have an example where Match matched the same-named tracks from a live album to a completely different live album of MUCH worse sound quality. My version is a recent release with stellar sound quality while the "matched" tracks are from a completely different concert that was apparently sourced from an old audience bootleg and isn't truly an official band release (gray area thing, but legal.) The rest of the tracks matched to a newer release that is slightly better in sound quality than the one I have (newer remaster,) so it has nothing to do with audio fingerprinting - BUT IT SHOULD!
Apple's kind of screwed us here by not giving us any kind of override capabilities for situations like this, and I'm pretty stunned. I understand they want to give the illusion that this works perfectly 100% of the time, but I've yet to see a single person who can say that. I have almost 500 songs in my 20,000 song library that shouldn't have matched (so far that I've found,) so they did a pretty great job, but they shouldn't have stranded us with those things that mistakenly did get matched.
I've heard a couple people say that trying to match again more recently with the same files has had some improved results but no real specifics. Hopefully improvements are already being made but I haven't seen any concrete evidence of it yet.
Assuming there are fixes, they need to have some way for users to make another attempt at matching files (assuming they're not just going to do it and make the swaps automatically - if they do that they should at least pop up a message to the user so they know it's happening).
It has everything to do with audio fingerprinting. That does not mean that every matched track is paired with the correct song version. Two different things.
You can remove all metadata, change the track's name to "untitled" and it will be matched exactly the same as if it had complete metadata. That is definitive proof that it is using wave analysis.
But it doesn't just "match" to a given song. They have a song fingerprint that is then assigned some sort of ID field that identifies the song that Apple has on their server. If that ID is not the correct one then it means you will not have the exact same song that it should match to.
The problem appears to involve several issues. One is that the relationship from the song's fingerprint to the iTunes database is many to one, or perhaps many to many. That means that several songs, with discernible wave fingerprints, can all point to the same song on Apples servers.
Then there is the issue of songs being exactly the same for x number of seconds into the song. Since tracks are matched so quickly it seems this can fool the process. This can be the case with explicit tracks and indeed they were a problem during the beta. So Apple did "something" to work around that. Perhaps they added an additional level of matching for tracks on the "problem" list. So if a track that has an explicit version is matched based on the first few seconds of the song, and that track is flagged for additional checking, perhaps match does a secondary check further into the song.
I think these things will be worked out as time goes on. But I don't think we will see a "let me match this on my own" feature as it could be abused. What I can see is a way to force an override upload rather than use matched track. This would likely come with a limitation, such as "no more than 10% of your iTunes library."
Michael
There are a number of improvements they could make. First, they could look at metadata to improve those "many to many" situations - the wave analysis would narrow it down to a small group of songs but if the file has the proper artist/album/title it should look at that to help make sure it matches properly (both in cases of wrong matches and uploads instead of matching). Many people have descriptors like live, explicit, remaster, remix, etc in the metadata so it would make sense to look for those in the case of ambiguity.
Second, if there are multiple possible matches or they find a close match but aren't 100% sure, they could bring up a window to ask the user to select the proper match from a list of choices. Shouldn't be something that can be abused since it's just narrowing things down and not letting people match to any song they want.
And I agree about the option to force an upload, hopefully they'll implement that and not make it too restrictive in terms of how much of the library it can be used on.
Ideally, they should let you (after the main match is done):
Right click a song
Select "Manual Match" or something.
Give you a selection of songs it thinks it is a match for.
Let you either select it or just change it to upload your own version.
Also, drop down the artwork and meta data while you are at it.
Too bad that will never happen.
Right click a song
Select "Manual Match" or something.
Give you a selection of songs it thinks it is a match for.
Let you either select it or just change it to upload your own version.
Also, drop down the artwork and meta data while you are at it.
Too bad that will never happen.
I don't know where you're getting your information about it being based on audio fingerprinting, but I'm pretty sure it would take a lot longer than it did to audio fingerprint my 21,000~ songs quite quickly and found 6000 that needed to be uploaded.
Of the original matches about 500 are incorrect in one way or another (this could grow as I listen to more, obviously.) These are songs that were from un-remastered CDs, or made from vinyl needledrops, or Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs/etc. pressings - all wildly different versions than their standard, widely commercially available versions. If it's fingerprinting by audio, then it would definitely not match any of these. But if it's using Gracenote like iTunes does to get its info, and then a little more stealth decoding based on all other tracks with it (you know, one track might be questionable for various reasons, but the rest are identified as "album x," so that song must be "song x," or else upload.)
I'm sure Apple will work something out, because if they don't they're going to lose most of the people who are having issues with it when it comes time to renew next year - if we last that long. There are too many other options now for them to not fix this quick with flexible ways to make sure your EXACT music is available wherever you want it. They wouldn't even dare suggest only 10% of the library be uploaded to fix iTunes' own problems with matching. That's grounds for quitting iTunes Match right there.
Do you think wave analysis has to "listen" to each song, in real time, to completion, in order to function? Well that is not the case: It's just a few seconds in most cases. So assuming a 20,000 song library, with zero purchased through iTunes store and none ineligible, that would only take approx. 14-16 hours to match.
I also gave an easy to test scenario that proves it is using wave analysis. Never mind the fact that by your logic I could copy one song 20,000 times, change the metadata of all the copies to different songs, and have an instant library thanks to iTunes Match.
For those who care, or want to try themselves, during the beta when I removed all metadata from a test iTunes library and compared matching times with and without metadata they were the same. They matched the same too, of course.
That is a good idea, though you are also probably correct that it won't happen (the part about allowing you to force an upload should be fine).
I like the idea of bringing up a selection of songs that it can match to. Of course I can see the record labels saying that that is essentially letting you choose a song other than the one you presumably "own."
I have no proof of this only a hunch, but I believe Apple had to agree to not use user metadata for matching whatsoever in order to get the record companies to agree to allowing Match to exist in the way that it does. So I don't see Match ever allowing user metadata to override wave analysis, or even to help it.
What I would really like to know is how many songs the average iTunes library contains. I have a feeling it is far less than the 25k (non-purchased) tracks allowed. by iTunes Match. If so there is a lot of noise being generated that will not really affect most users. A cursory check of my friends and family found not one person with over 10k songs, let alone 25k. Maybe I travel in circles of people that don't listen to much music. I "thought" I did but compared to the huge numbers I am seeing in Match threads apparently I do not.
Michael