Apple Sending Out iTunes Match Renewal Notices to U.S. Users

Just sayin... said:

Incorrect. I have numerous CD's that, no matter how I rip them (iTunes or other product), certain tracks will not match. And I can rip directly into iTunes, or rip them with another product with verification on, and there are no errors. I can create perfect FLAC copies, create MP3's from them, then try to import - with NO success. I've just tried with two random ones from my nearby shelf of problem CD's, and Muleskinner Blues (track 4 from Deke Dickerson's Mr. Entertainment album) and Gabriel's Message (track 12 from the Dale Warland Singers Christmas with the Dale Warland Singers album) tracks both will not upload or match...no matter how many times I try (the rest of the album matches perfectly). I could go on and on and waste more time, but there are problems...legitimate problems that paid users and legal owners of CD's have that cannot be waved away with a simple "it's probably just pirates" explanation.

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I think some of the problem is the multiple rip.

Take a store bought CD, rip it to flac, then convert to mp3, import into iTunes, and it wont match up.

Take the same CD and rip right into Itunes, and it will match up.

I tried this on a few while I was troubleshooting. It you look at the 2 source songs, in itunes, you can see the differences that dont match up with the database info, they are using to compare. See the same song is different.

I tested this on a bunch of songs.
It also depends on song names and what database you use to get the info from. I use Tuneup, to clean then before MATCHING them.

Mike Valmike said:

Kind of. What I suspect happened is that the iTMS revamped a whole bunch of master tracks to the plus format at the same time, but not all. To this day I am stuck with an inexplicable two dozen or so songs that are in the old DRM locked 128k format, and redownload as such from iTunes-in-the-Cloud, despite my having taken every Plus upgrade offer and THEN iTunes Match.

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If you were suggesting this as a reason that the tracks I didn't upgrade to Plus weren't on the store, that's not the case for the soundtracks I'm talking about. They were available on iTMS for a while in Plus format--and, in fact, I upgraded a few--then for no readily apparent reason Square Enix Music removed all of them from iTMS for about a year. During which year Apple disabled the Plus upgrade feature, and now the soundtracks I wanted to upgrade are back. I don't think that the timing of the events are in any way related, just a really, really frustrating coincidence for me.

Mainly I wish I'd upgraded prior to them getting pulled, so I could re-download at Plus quality without worry, but I'll take Match as an alternate means of upgrading them out of DRM.

(And actually, there was a bug with the iTMS backend and a couple of related albums that I did upgrade before they were pulled that I and a few other people got bitten by, wherein having iTunes check for available music would cause it to redownload the tracks that you had upgraded to Plus quality in lower-quality DRM'd old-school format and delete your good copies. Some back and forth with support eventually had Apple apologize and acknowledge it as a bug with their system, which I assume has since gotten fixed.)

Really don't want to eat up my own cellular data plan listening to my own music which I have now just paid to store online. Pass.

For $25 I was able to upgrade all of my purchased iTunes music to iTunes Plus (no DRM and 256 kbps versions). That alone made it worth it.

It also allowed me to easily upgrade my ripped music to 256 kbps without having to reinsert a few thousand CDs.

Man, there are some dense people here. The reason why this makes news is because iTunes 11 is supposed to contain a some Match controls that may (or may not) fix many of the problems that arose in Match's first year, where iTunes 10 didn't have really any control over the way songs matched. We were supposed to get that new iTunes this week, over two weeks before anyone would need to re-subscribe. That would allow users a couple weeks to test out how iTunes 11 handled Match and decide whether to re-up or not. Now iTunes 11 isn't due out until the end of the month leaving users who bought into Match on or around Nov. 14 kind of high and dry. We either need to re-subscribe and hope for the best or give up without knowing what might be in store. Kind of a dick move on Apple's part, isn't it?

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brayhite said:

I'd much rather pay the equivalent to $8 more a month to have more music than I could ever listen to a month (Spotify), that can also be streamed and downloaded for offline listening.

Not renewing.

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Wait until some of the music you love goes out of print, switches labels, etc. Maybe you don't think it's possible, but I have wide swathes of my collection that are not available in any digital format anywhere for exactly those reasons (entire bands' catalogs for various reasons, for one, or versions of albums that don't exist today.) It'll happen to everyone relying on streaming services sooner or later.

Steve would never have approved these emails.

What's with matched music when you cancel the service? Will they still be available in the cloud?

I was very disappointed with how Itunes Match worked when I first subscribed, but during the past year I did use it alot. 25.00 is not a lot of $$ so i will be renewing.

A subscription expires and people receive a renewal notice - thank God that is front page news - otherwise I really would be lost in the whole thing.

Moved on to Google Music on my Nexus So I won't be renewing as Apple's service still does not function correctly, google will be doing a matching service soon and it should work properly as their service already does.

iTunes Match wasn't perfect, but now it works better than ever (for me). It's nice being able to access all my music without it taking up space on my iPhone or other devices. I'll renew for sure.

I've been thinking about subscribing to match, but I've been told it will wipe my 320KBPs files (or it did to someone else), and it will make only clean versions of songs available....

So I've been using plex...... It wakes up my computer when I want to access the files. And zumocast if I want to actually download the files.

komodrone said:

#firstworldproblems

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Congratulations, you've made a comment that applies to every post on this site.

If you really want to save the world, I'm sure there are plenty of other forums where you'd be happier.

brayhite said:

I'd much rather pay the equivalent to $8 more a month

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So doing the math, that's $96 per year, $71 more. Almost four times as much is a pretty big difference in price.

Mike Valmike said:

if you legitimately own the music, iTunes Match likely won't pose problems other than some non-matches of excluded tracks

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That makes no sense, it's not like iTunes can magically tell if a file isn't "legitimate", the files themselves are identical either way. And just because someone has the original CD to rip again doesn't make it OK for iTunes to screw up those files, some people have hundreds of CDs ripped.

Many many ripped CDs don't match properly either. That even includes recent releases and ones that haven't been remastered, including many cases where all tracks on an album are matched except for one or two.

Speaking of, did they ever fix Abbey Road? Tons of people had one track not match, is it better now or still broken?

Windlasher said:

Take a store bought CD, rip it to flac, then convert to mp3, import into iTunes, and it wont match up.

Take the same CD and rip right into Itunes, and it will match up.

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Maybe that's true in a few cases but many CDs ripped straight into iTunes still don't match properly. And it was established a long time ago that metadata makes no difference at all, it looks like Apple is using waveform analysis and nothing else.

took me 1.5 months to match all my music, 10,000 songs, now some of them (finally in the cloud) wont download to my device when I try to download them, some wont play right away once I have already downloaded them, it just doesnt work as advertised... wont be renewing, back to the old syncing way.

Replacing with matched tunes

Just a note to say that if you choose to replace your lower quality tunes with the match tunes, when you download it doesn't put the files in "logical" folder structure. Albums, Artists, Tunes. It saves them in you itunes/music/artist if the tunes has dual artists it goes into a separate folder again. So if you have an album with Rolling Stones and one track is with Eric Clapton, then all the tunes go in to one folder except one, that goes to another. Its really quite annoying. I like match but its infuriating.
Separately I would like to see them fix sharing a match account with family(wife), which currently has issues.

Not planning to renew

Add another person to the list who doesn't plan to renew iTunes Match. I can use Spotify to stream music to my iOS devices and my Apple TV can stream music from my PC.

Yes

mattopotamus said:

can itunes match be used for movies?

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Yes it does. https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/0...-digital-copies-included-with-disc-purchases/

appleman53210 said:

Yes it does. https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/0...-digital-copies-included-with-disc-purchases/

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That's not iTunes match, it's iTunes in the cloud (I know, their naming is confusing). Meaning it's available to anyone, not just those who paid the $25.

appleman53210 said:

Yes it does. https://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/0...-digital-copies-included-with-disc-purchases/

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milo said:

That's not iTunes match, it's iTunes in the cloud (I know, their naming is confusing). Meaning it's available to anyone, not just those who paid the $25.

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Funny b.c I thought itunes in the cloud only worked on my apple tv haha. Thanks

just checked and all of my purchases are there for viewing on my phone w/o taking up space

brayhite said:

I'd much rather pay the equivalent to $8 more a month to have more music than I could ever listen to a month (Spotify), that can also be streamed and downloaded for offline listening.

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I'm sure that, like Netflix, this is quite true for a lot of people, but it's funny how the utility of streaming services like Spotify depends entirely on what kind of music you listen to.

In my case, I tried it out, looking for a bunch of stuff that I'd want to listen to, and determined that it would be just a hair past useless to my taste. About a third of what I listen to is old import stuff that isn't on any digital store, anywhere, so no luck there (I need to buy used CDs off Amazon Japan); another third is newer foreign stuff that isn't on any US online store (although an increasing number of albums are showing up on iTMS, but not any other stores), and wasn't on Spotify; and the last third is funky offbeat stuff that is on iTMS (see previous), but almost none of which came up when I tried to find it on Spotify. There's another 5-10% of mainstream alt-rock/punk and classical that actually was on Spotify, but I'm certainly not paying $8 a month for 10% of the music that I actually want to listen to--I could easily just buy albums of interest for that much when the fancy struck and not need to worry about maintaining a subscription.

Point being Spotify, with its current selection, is of no interest to me. Not that it's a bad service--my wife would probably love it, although being a cheapskate she'd only use a free version--but it's (unsurprisingly) not targeted at the fringes.

Of course, this also makes iTunes Match of limited utility to me as well; most of the stuff I have on CD is on CD simply because I can't buy it on the iTMS. If I could, it'd almost certainly be cheaper than importing a CD, and definitely easier. Which isn't Apple's fault--it's the world's broken music industry.

On the positive side, the iTMS itself is increasingly allowing me to legally get music there is no reasonable way I could have before. Classic video game soundtracks, for example, that have been out of print since the '90s and were obscure to begin with, even in Japan, are now sitting there available to buy legitimately for a perfectly reasonable price.

milo said:

Congratulations, you've made a comment that applies to every post on this site.

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congratulations, you've exaggerated to the max.

What is the link to renew?

Also, do most of you put your whole music collection in match (ie full albums with songs that you don't listen to) or just select songs that you listen to?

Lately I've just been dumping full albums into it, but I don't listen to the whole albums, just a few songs.

malnar said:

Wait until some of the music you love goes out of print, switches labels, etc. Maybe you don't think it's possible, but I have wide swathes of my collection that are not available in any digital format anywhere for exactly those reasons (entire bands' catalogs for various reasons, for one, or versions of albums that don't exist today.) It'll happen to everyone relying on streaming services sooner or later.

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Well, yeah. And obviously iTunes Match would be great for you, considering it's basically a 25,000-song locker that Apple devices and iTunes can access.

But the majority of people probably have a small percentage of their music collection in the category of "no digital format", so streaming services are the best option.

And honestly, I can't really see why that'll happen to everyone relying on streaming services. If anything, the music you're referring to will eventually become available to stream, versus music available to stream now going away.

The day music isn't available for streaming is the day that either A.) the technology improves to a point where streaming isn't necessary, B.) record labels become real ******s, or C.) the Mayans were right.

milo said:

So doing the math, that's $96 per year, $71 more. Almost four times as much is a pretty big difference in price.

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milo said:

So doing the math, that's $96 per year, $71 more. Almost four times as much is a pretty big difference in price.

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Four times as much for 560 times as many songs.

And before you say I'll never listen to 14,000,000 songs (you're right, I won't), I also won't listen to 25,000. Or 15,000. Or 5,000. I listened to, maybe, 500.

In all honesty, it's not fair to compare iTunes Match to a service like Spotify. They serve two different purposes. One offers a music locker, the other offers a music streamer.

The problem is that consumers will compare them, because they solve the same problem: listening to music on the go.