Competition is good. Your move Apple!
The more competition the better, we might get to where we should be already, which is 'lossless',
truly CD-quality files. Then we can hope for the option of even better quality. After all, it's only been about 30 years since a mainstream quality upgrade, that's not long in technology is it?
> All matched songs - even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs - are instantly made available in Cloud Player
Has anyone ever managed to get iTunes match to match anything other than songs purchased via iTunes? I tried it on a few beatles songs and there was no match. At that point, I figured it was a scam.
iTunes has matched the vast majority of the music I would hope it would, but it can be quite fussy and when a CD track is a second or two longer (even just for silence between tracks on a CD rip) it can fail. You can sometimes do a quick and dirty edit with iTunes 'stop time' preference, then re-encode the track to shorten the resulting copy, then re-match, and it sometimes stop you from having to dig out an old CD for just one track to match. There is definitely room for improvement, but it's not as terrible for me as has been in your experiment.
With any of these services I can only advise everyone to always have a full backup of your existing music library before you start matching and replacing any files. Otherwise, if you have a large collection you might not realise that Apple replaced your ever-so-slightly-different recording version you got on a limited edition promo CD until it's too late. Though if you only ever listen to top 4o hits you will probably be ok.
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Why? I have always been curious about why MP3 is better/worse than AAC.
To cut a long story short, AAC is a newer, better codec so can do better with the quality for our human ears than MP3 can at the same bitrate. Though at 256kbps, many would argue that most people won't really hear much difference between AAC and MP3, if any, unless they are using atypically good audio equipment. When everyone was selling 128kbps I think it did make an appreciable difference though, IMHO.