iTunes Match - How it works

mtmcgavock said:

My question is on how iTunes Matches your music to music on their servers. I've got i'd say 20GB plus of music which I know is on the iTunes Store, but not under what i've got filled under (E.g. Part of a album full of songs). So does iTunes match work on Artist/Song Title or does it also take the Album title into the equation?

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Not sure how it does this, but I've had ripped CDs that have matched all the songs but 1!!! Which really made no sense!

mtmcgavock said:

And if it does, does this mean it will presume they don't have it and start uploading songs, as I don't want to be uploading 20GB+ of music.

Thanks for the responses in advanced

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If it doesn't match (for whatever reason) it will upload the song provided it is higher than a certain quality (I think 128kbps but don't quote me on that might be slightly less).

I've also (and other people have) had songs get matched then the iTunes version given was the censored version

It's only happened to a few odd songs, but still...

mtmcgavock said:

Yeah, but were the CD's available for purchase in iTunes?

I've got loads of tunes from like 'Top Ten hits of the 80s' from years ago which I know aren't available for purchase as that album. Just wondering whether it pulls the song from another album on iTunes?

Also how do you find iTunes match, is it worth the money?

Thanks

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Yes they were! Ripping them in I would get all of the tag info automatically the way iTunes always has (and get album artwork from iTunes).

I don't have any CD's like that sadly so I can't comment, but I reckon it'll not match them with anything then?

I found it great, having all my songs available on all my devices (without having to store them on it) was good, especially for iPad. But coming up to my renewal next month and I barely get CD's or music anymore (I use Spotify) I might not bother, it's a nice convenience and nice to have I think if you get a reasonable amount of music over the year.

iTunes match doesn't appear to take any account of the tags when doing the matching process.

It uses some type of waveform analysis to check whether it has the song available to match, so if the song is available, but not the particular album that you have, then there is a very good chance that it will match.

There are some problems with the matching process though, and they go both ways. There are occasions where songs are matched to the wrong versions (i.e. the clean/uncensored issue referred to above).

Also, on many occasions some songs don't match when the rest of the album does. There is speculation as to why this is, but the evidence I have seen strongly suggests that this is often due to remastering (where there are slightly different versions of some songs) that mean that the ones in your album aren't recognised by iTunes. The result of this is that you get albums which are a mix of uploaded and matched tracks which can cause problems with varying volume levels or odd transitions between songs.