A Clear Explanation of iTunes Match

[superspiffy]

iTunes Match for small iOS device with big music library?

What if my iPhone is too small to physically hold my entire iTunes library? Would Tunes Match solve this problem? To my understanding, the songs from iTunes Match gets downloaded to the device while it is being played. So if I play my entire library through my iPhone, won't the phone run out of storage before I could play all of my collection?

 

[geg]

What if my iPhone is too small to physically hold my entire iTunes library? Would Tunes Match solve this problem? To my understanding, the songs from iTunes Match gets downloaded to the device while it is being played. So if I play my entire library through my iPhone, won't the phone run out of storage before I could play all of my collection?

You can delete songs or albums at any time on the device by swiping left-to-right. So if you did happen to listen to your entire library, you'd have that option as you went along. I think someone else mentioned that the device may switch to a sort of streaming mode at that point too...not sure if that's correct.

 

[mario64]

Lost Ringtones and Explicit Versions

I really like my Apple ecosystem. I have had an iPhone since launch day and upgraded on launch day of the 3G and 4. I have and iPad 2 and unibody Macbook. I have had Mobileme since launch day. For the most part everything just works. I strongly recommend Apple products for people to use at home.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend iTunes Match at this time. I have (had) unique, custom ringtones for almost everyone in my address book. With iTunes Match, I have lost all my custom ringtones.
In addition, I have several songs with explicit lyrics. Most, but not all have been replaced by the bastardized, religio-facist versions.
Until Apple fixes these issues I will recommend that everyone I know steers clear of iTunes Match. Maybe Apple should have held off until next year to bring this feature out.

 

[Explorz]

I was doing the same thing, but then it hit me smart playlists!

Here's what I did.

Create a smart playlist with following conditions.
1.Bit Rate in range 96 to 254 kbps.
2. iCloud status is matched.

Then you delete the songs. After that I created another smart playlist
1.Bit Rate is 256 kbps.
2. iCloud status is matched.

First playlist shows all of the matched songs in your library between 96 and 254 kbps.
Second playlist have will this -> Image icon. Click it and it'll queue all of the songs in that playlist for download.

You can do the same thing to all your purchased songs that are still 128 kbps. Just switch iCloud status from matched to purchased.

But you can't delete songs from a smart playlist. What am I missing here?

 

[_Refurbished_]

I am trying to manually add a few songs one by one to the cloud, and iTunes match hangs on the first step. Is anyone else having this problem? Sometimes it's lightning quick, sometimes it takes forever.

 

[Roessnakhan]

1) Can I somehow download all the matched songs with higher bitrate quality without having to click 5k times?

http://www.macworld.com/article/163620/2011/11/how_to_upgrade_tracks_to_itunes_match_fast.html

 

[shorn]

Anyone have an idea on how it handles iTunes LP albums?

I'm guessing it just skips the itlp files and any vids included within?

 

[geg]

http://www.macworld.com/article/163620/2011/11/how_to_upgrade_tracks_to_itunes_match_fast.html

Man, I would caution against doing this, at least not with a lot of inspection first. People are having all sorts of match problems - different versions of songs, "clean" vs. "explicit" showing up, Beatles Mono box set being "matched" as Stereo, etc. You could screw up your library pretty well. At least make sure you have a separate backup, or maybe just do this an album at a time as you think of them, once you've check that all is good...

 

[movieator]

Subscribed yesterday, and it seemed to work great for the most part. And yes, I have quite a few songs that are not necessarily legal from way back in the day (early 2000s) before the music store came into existence.

I mean, let's face it, before iTMS, many people used Napster, LimeWire, Kaaza, etc to find music. It's just something that was done. I would venture to guess that many users here have a good amount (I have about a fifth) of my library from illegal downloads.
Was it wrong? Sure. And I haven't done it since the launch of the iTMS. But great many people were doing it. So let's not throw stones here.

 

[Roessnakhan]

Man, I would caution against doing this, at least not with a lot of inspection first. People are having all sorts of match problems - different versions of songs, "clean" vs. "explicit" showing up, Beatles Mono box set being "matched" as Stereo, etc. You could screw up your library pretty well. At least make sure you have a separate backup, or maybe just do this an album at a time as you think of them, once you've check that all is good...

I would definitely recommend doing that as well, always have a backup.

 

[geg]

I would definitely recommend doing that as well, always have a backup.

Also, this might be something to wait a few weeks on...lots of people are reporting albums that come up half-matched/half-uploaded, so you'd only be upgrading half of each of those. I can't imagine they won't fix at least this issue pretty soon, as it is costing them bandwidth and storage to be uploading so many tracks that they already have on their iTunes servers.

 

[brewser]

so far so good. It matched 9500 of my 11000 songs. It's just about done uploading the 1500 it couldn't match. The whole process only took about 24 hours.

 

[basesloaded190]

Quick question here. I have noticed that when playing music now on my phone, there is a lot of dely between switching songs and even the song playing. It appears as though the phone it trying to get the music from the cloud, but this is music that is stored locally on the phone. Is it using data all the time now when playing music?

As soon as i turn the phone on airplane mode, it's fine again. Anyone else notice this?

 

[alecp763]

Quick question here. I have noticed that when playing music now on my phone, there is a lot of dely between switching songs and even the song playing. It appears as though the phone it trying to get the music from the cloud, but this is music that is stored locally on the phone. Is it using data all the time now when playing music?

As soon as i turn the phone on airplane mode, it's fine again. Anyone else notice this?

I haven't seen this, at least not yet. After I downloaded an album off of the cloud, it played back just fine with no delay. Is your phone memory completely full? I've heard rumors that if it's full it will actually stream rather than download, but I don't know for sure if that's true.

Also you could try the #1 IT support tactic - reboot!

 

[basesloaded190]

I haven't seen this, at least not yet. After I downloaded an album off of the cloud, it played back just fine with no delay. Is your phone memory completely full? I've heard rumors that if it's full it will actually stream rather than download, but I don't know for sure if that's true.

Also you could try the #1 IT support tactic - reboot!

It's strange, I turned wifi off and just going on 3G and there is no longer a delay. So this is my main question. With songs that are in fact on my phone (not the cloud), every time I change the song, I see the circle up at the top spinning like the phone is using data for some reason. I doubt it is, but still curious to know whether or not it is for sure.

 

[xizar]

A new bit of irritation (though I'm sure it's been addressed)... Activating iTunes Match on my iPhone has made removed songs that were already on my phone that my computer says wasn't uploaded because an error occurred.

edit:
I discovered that, on those greyed out tracks on your phone (ipod?), you can play the tracks by selecting a track that *isn't* greyed out, and use the fwd/back buttons to get to them.

 

[alecp763]

It's strange, I turned wifi off and just going on 3G and there is no longer a delay. So this is my main question. With songs that are in fact on my phone (not the cloud), every time I change the song, I see the circle up at the top spinning like the phone is using data for some reason. I doubt it is, but still curious to know whether or not it is for sure.

I've noticed that too - on wifi, the "data wheel" pops up for a bit when a load a new song. I think all it's doing is checking the cloud for updates to the metadata - for example, ratings, artwork, play counts (although I'm confused if it syncs these... See my previous post which is as of now unanswered ) and that kind of stuff.

 

[MacSlut]

How I'm dealing with more than 25K songs

I have a ton more than 25,000 songs. I had a ton of CDs from being a DJ and bought a ton used, etc...

I ripped most of the CDs when hard drives were small and more expensive, so now I want to upgrade them via iTunes Match.

It would be great if Apple allowed us to either pay multiples of $25 per year or select only 25K songs to be matched.

Instead, what I'm doing is creating another iTunes library with selected songs totaling less than 25K, and using that with the match service, then replacing the songs in my original "master" library.

I've got smart playlists to divide the songs into bit rates and file kinds so I can determine which I want to convert first.

Additionally, I'll sort through the songs to put most of the music I'm likely to listen to in iCloud, but that's going to be pretty challenging since it's so subjective.

Anyway, this service is well worth the $25... I just want to pay more for more.

 

[ladytonya]

I finally jumped in and have actually had a few pleasant surprised. First, I thought that it would default to the credit card I had on my account. Wrong! I had an existing credit remaining from an iTunes card and it used that. Awesome, it didn't come out of my pocket, at least not directly! I'm thinking that maybe that happened for me because I do have a credit card on file with them and am not just trying to use an iTunes card for my subscription.

Next, I actually have less songs in my library than I thought. I started the process and then once it sorted, I looked at the bottom of my library and had some old college lectures and a few other things that I deleted. I ended up only having 6805 and not 8 or 9k like I originally suspected. So far, so good! It has already gathered info and is almost through matching. I only have 5 tracks that have feel labeled as ineligible. Two are digital booklets, which of course I knew, but the other 3 are just really random. One is Silent Night sung by Sarah Brightman which was an iTunes single of the week at Starbucks last Christmas season, one is The Chicken Dance, and one is Mack the Knife (like I said, totally random, but no problems really). I only have 16 duplicates and I thought I would have more because I am not super anal about my library.

Now I'm just waiting for it to finish, there's about 500 songs left to finish but unfortunately I have to leave. I was hoping to at least get to the point of seeing how many had to upload before leaving. Oh, well!

Anyway, after all the reading and research that I have done to anticipate any problems, I have to say that I am happy. I will probably wait until tomorrow so I can be sure everything is finished before turning it on at work, but my ultimate goal is to be able to listen on my computer at work. For me, this is going to be a great service, unless something really bad happens with my library in the next few minutes. LOL! I guess everyone is different, but so far, so good, and I love it!

Edit: So now it's finished and it is only uploading 894 items. Out of close to 7k, I think that's pretty dang good! Plus, I know about 500 of those are from community band CDs, so I knew they wouldn't be matched. Anyway, now that I'm all matched, I'm outta here! Hopefully some of you that are having trouble get things worked out, it really does seem like a great service!

 

[geg]

Now a bunch of "iTunes has timed out" error messages (on my continuously-available FIOS internet connection). Again, why does iTunes give up whenever an error pops up, instead of automatically re-trying? When would someone EVER not want to complete the task they're trying to accomplish? I've noticed this problem forever while downloading podcasts. For how much care they take with product design, Apple really has missed the boat in iTunes sometimes.

 

[akelley3]

Easy way to update songs to 256K

1. Right click on the the top bar of your iTunes library and check iCloud Status

2. Sort your library by iCloud Status.

3. Highlight all the "Matched" songs, right click and delete.

4. Confirm to delete the files and then click "Move to Recycle Bin" (I wouldn't empty your recycle bin just as a precaution until you re-download the songs)

5. Highlight all the "Matched" songs again, right click and click download.

That should update all matched songs to 256K. I would recommend backing up just in case. It worked perfectly for me.

 

[Gjwilly]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

I have a question. I've subscribed to iTunes match with the intent of cleaning my metadata up but discovered it just replaces the song file, not metadata. Is there any way to correct the metadata?

Use a program like MP3Tag.
You can use it to manually fix the data or it can automatically download the data from services like Amazon.

 

[timmmy]

This is BUGGY.

Not all of my album artwork is showing up.

Some albums that should have been matched, and yes, meet all of the required criteria weren't....all I get is a cloud icon with an exclaimation point

 

[brian3451]

Streaming????

The Apple website you can stream with iCloud but it also downloads to?

 

[Spooner83]

When Apple let's us buy lossless music in iTunes, I'll start paying for music