A Clear Explanation of iTunes Match

[Tinmania]

Sorry if I missed this somewhere in the thread...I have a bunch of songs that show as ineligible. When I viewed info, they all have old iTunes email addresses. Anybody know if this is the reason they are not eligible?

These email addresses have been updated in "my account", so it isn't a different account, just the old email address. I probably need to contact Apple if this is the case.

Oh, and in my infinite wisdom, I started the match process before using TuneUp. I wanted to see what couldn't be matched before I dropped $50, but I may still purchase it to get remaining album art. I sure hope there will be a way to re-scan your library...

Yes you can delete all the songs from the cloud and have them re-matched with (presumably) new metadata.



Michael

 

[Cecret]

Having the same issue. Some songs on some of the albums cannot be uploaded and are marked "error" when most of the tracks are "matched." Hopefully this is just a kink that will be worked out in time.

This is driving me up a wall. I can't get it to match the complete albums for some of my stuff.

I did an experiment and deleted the entire album "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac. It's in the iTunes store...not as a special "enhanced" or "remastered" version from what I can tell, and then took my CD and re-ripped it.

Match comes on, says that it can match 6 of the 11 songs, but it uploads 5 of them for no apparent reason. I've tried different rip methods (MP3 or AAC) and it still insists on uploading some of the tracks on the CD and Matching the others. No reason given. It just does it.

Here's what I mean:

Image

 

[CmdrLaForge]

I still have two questions that I don't fully understand

1) Can I somehow download all the matched songs with higher bitrate quality without having to click 5k times?
2) What happens to songs that I purchased with a different account (e.g. wife etc..)

Any ideas on those two?

 

[Tinmania]

I still have two questions that I don't fully understand

1) Can I somehow download all the matched songs with higher bitrate quality without having to click 5k times?
2) What happens to songs that I purchased with a different account (e.g. wife etc..)

Any ideas on those two?

1.) Yes. Select them all at once, right-click, and choose download. I would delete them out of the local iTunes library first (after backing it up).

2.) Not it my experience. But if you burn them to CD, you can then re-import and match. (Just an idea!)



Michael

 

[nemaslov]

I can't understand why people think that if we have over 25,000 songs in our library that we've been stealing music. I'm 41 years old and have been buying CDs since they first came out, I have a HUGE collection. Then I got married. My husband is a music geek and runs a side business as a DJ. In addition to 700 or so CDs that I owned, he had close to 2,000 when we first got married. Believe me, for a DJ this is really not excessive. Now, we've been married for 11 years and have purchased more music. More recent purchases have of course been digital but over the years, probably thousands of those CDs have been burned into our iTunes library. We even still sometimes do weddings where we will get a request that we don't have in our collection. When you're a DJ, there is no such thing as having too much music! We would gladly pay for being able to have more than 25,000 songs! For now, my husband is going to continue using Spotify, which he has been using since it was released in the US. I am probably going to subscribe to iTunes Match because I don't have anywhere near as much music nor do I have the same kinds of need as he does. Everyone's collection is different, everyone's use of the service is different. It's a brand new thing so I am sure that as it rolls out and evolves, it will change, just like everything else. Personally, I'm excited about being able to listen to my music at work and that is the main thing that I will be using the service for, at least for now. $25/year is a bargain for that service, at least in my opinion!

I am certainly with you here and a lot of it is generational. I'm in my 50s and worked in the record biz many years ago. Bought tons of LPs then CDs and received lots of promo CDs. Collecting for 30 or 40 years gives you a huge collection that many of us are now importing digitally. I'd be curious how many who are amassing collections now will still have all their digital files in 20 or 30 years. I know their answer is that won't have to because of collections in the cloud.

Yes 2 bucks a month? Can't even buy one latte for that. I'd pay more to hold 100,000 songs (many of which can't be found on Spotify, iTunes and the like).

 

[iBug2]

Don't even need to be over 50. I'm 29 years old and my collection is close to 30k, half of them are CD purchases, some of them are iTunes purchases and some are pirated. iTunes match won't do much for the pirated material since most of my pirated material isn't available as official releases anywhere anyway, and that's the reason I pirated them in the first place (bootlegs, unofficial releases etc).

But then again, there are some of my pirated music which is available in iTunes which will be upgrade to 256kbit, and I already counted 3 albums, which would have costed 30$ if I purchased them anyway, so for 29$ I'm already getting them upgraded and even more. So I think iTunes match is a no-brainer as long as anyone has 3 albums or more which they'd benefit from upgrading.

 

[citi]

I can't understand why people think that if we have over 25,000 songs in our library that we've been stealing music. I'm 41 years old and have been buying CDs since they first came out, I have a HUGE collection. Then I got married. My husband is a music geek and runs a side business as a DJ. In addition to 700 or so CDs that I owned, he had close to 2,000 when we first got married. Believe me, for a DJ this is really not excessive. Now, we've been married for 11 years and have purchased more music. More recent purchases have of course been digital but over the years, probably thousands of those CDs have been burned into our iTunes library. We even still sometimes do weddings where we will get a request that we don't have in our collection. When you're a DJ, there is no such thing as having too much music! We would gladly pay for being able to have more than 25,000 songs! For now, my husband is going to continue using Spotify, which he has been using since it was released in the US. I am probably going to subscribe to iTunes Match because I don't have anywhere near as much music nor do I have the same kinds of need as he does. Everyone's collection is different, everyone's use of the service is different. It's a brand new thing so I am sure that as it rolls out and evolves, it will change, just like everything else. Personally, I'm excited about being able to listen to my music at work and that is the main thing that I will be using the service for, at least for now. $25/year is a bargain for that service, at least in my opinion!

I am a proffesional DJ and I just looked at my itunes count. Over 12,000 and growing every day. Of course, even without the must play songs, I'd still have an extensive collection because I love music.

 

[milo]

If it's on iTunes, it will be matched. If it's not, then it'll be uploaded.

That's what's supposed to happen but there are plenty of examples of songs on iTunes that aren't matched and either uploaded or "not eligible" instead. And that includes files with metadata that matches the iTunes versions exactly.

It would be nice to be able to do a test run and see what matches before forking out the cash.

Why would you want to see a song match list? If it doesn't match, it uploads to Apple and you have access to it.

Because much of the appeal to me is upgraded files, and because I don't want to spend days uploading files that should be matched. I don't think it's so unreasonable to expect the service to work roughly as it has been promised to work. And "ineligible" tracks aren't uploaded either, which means you can't easily put them on an iOS device that has Match activated.

On the other hand the music I have that "not eligible" is listed as "Protected AAC audio file".

So how do I unprotect it?

Are they songs bought by another account and not authorized on your computer? Can you play the songs? They should get matched (or be listed as purchases already) as long as they are authorized on your machine.

 

[rsnyder666]

but I am still in the camp as some people that have an entire album matched save for one song. What is that about?

I like you had good luck with very few issues. I've checked a little and I noticed that some albums with songs had different release dates, so perhaps the song was slightly different.

One album was entirely the same, but one song was named slightly different. I haven't listened to each version, so perhaps the songs are different.

One album has five versions on iTunes alone, (remastered, deluxe, rereleased, import), and my CD version matches none of those. Four songs didn't match up.

Out of the millions of songs, it does not surprise me the software has some issues matching every song.

I'm pretty happy so far. Just the songs upgraded from 96kbps! (downloaded from an artist's site, didn't know they were that rate or I would have bought them elsewhere) would have cost me more than $25. And my son can pick and choose the music he wants on his iPad easily. Same for my wife on her iPhone.

 

[kiddnets]

anyone else having trouble completing the upload step?

This is my 4th try and I am stuck again at 30/2,300....it spins at a low number for a while and either restarts from scrratch automatically or I have to manually restart to get it moving again but then it goes back to step 1 and takes forever to get back to where I am at now...any help?

 

[stovetop6872]

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?

 

[Alonzo84]

Sorry if I missed this somewhere in the thread...I have a bunch of songs that show as ineligible. When I viewed info, they all have old iTunes email addresses. Anybody know if this is the reason they are not eligible?

These email addresses have been updated in "my account", so it isn't a different account, just the old email address. I probably need to contact Apple if this is the case.

Oh, and in my infinite wisdom, I started the match process before using TuneUp. I wanted to see what couldn't be matched before I dropped $50, but I may still purchase it to get remaining album art. I sure hope there will be a way to re-scan your library...

No, it's not because of your old iTunes ID. I have the same issue but with only 4 songs. They are part of 4 different albums that were all purchased with an old iTunes ID and the rest of the tracks for each album matched just fine. Prior to enabling Match, those songs were labeled as Protected AAC files. Now they are just labeled as regular AAC files, save for those 4 tracks that are "ineligible" for some reason. I can't find a reason or explanation as to why a single song from an entire album purchased from iTunes would be ineligible.

 

[Mal]

I'm curious, is there a way to see which tracks you've already redownloaded from iTunes Match? I've got Smart Playlists set up for all the various categories, but don't seem to see any way to check that. Not a big deal, but it would be nice to know.

EDIT: Solved by simply looking at one of the files. A Smart Playlist showing Kind contains Matched would suffice.

jW

 

[ericg301]

has anyone figured out how to download music, in advance, to the iPhone? i've got my matching/uploading figured out...but don't know how to download an entire playlist to my phone without playing each song first

 

[malnar]

Anyone have The Beatles In Mono box being matched by iTunes Match? Yeah, that shouldn't match. It's apparently being matched with STEREO tracks! I've got all kinds of unusual stuff - non-remastered albums being matched with remasters, etc. Were there no music geek devs in the beta? How could no one have found this problem? How is there no way to choose to use your own files rather than what iTunes has?

 

[Trotsky40]

I like you had good luck with very few issues. I've checked a little and I noticed that some albums with songs had different release dates, so perhaps the song was slightly different.

One album was entirely the same, but one song was named slightly different. I haven't listened to each version, so perhaps the songs are different.

One album has five versions on iTunes alone, (remastered, deluxe, rereleased, import), and my CD version matches none of those. Four songs didn't match up.

Out of the millions of songs, it does not surprise me the software has some issues matching every song.

I'm pretty happy so far. Just the songs upgraded from 96kbps! (downloaded from an artist's site, didn't know they were that rate or I would have bought them elsewhere) would have cost me more than $25. And my son can pick and choose the music he wants on his iPad easily. Same for my wife on her iPhone.

I have been investigating and found the same thing. For instance, one I have found is that the CD version of James Taylor's Greatest Hits has the original 1976 version of "Something in the way she moves" but the iTunes version of the same album has a 1988 re-recording of the song. All the songs on this album matched except this one.

 

[mrjosh]

No, it's not because of your old iTunes ID. I have the same issue but with only 4 songs. They are part of 4 different albums that were all purchased with an old iTunes ID and the rest of the tracks for each album matched just fine. Prior to enabling Match, those songs were labeled as Protected AAC files. Now they are just labeled as regular AAC files, save for those 4 tracks that are "ineligible" for some reason. I can't find a reason or explanation as to why a single song from an entire album purchased from iTunes would be ineligible.

Thanks Alonzo!

Tinmania - thanks for your help too. It's much appreciated. I think if I do delete things, I'll do it in small batches.

 

[milo]

I'm running Match with 10.6.7

That's good news, did it make it through all the steps, and is everything working OK? Mine is hung up on step 1 although that could be unrelated to OS version.

I don't understand why people still don't have Lion.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, it doesn't run on all macs. So the mac with my iTunes library will never run Lion - hopefully that's not true.

Oh so the poster's info is wrong? That would explain why nobody else is saying it.

Assuming it does work on 10.6, then Apple is wrong.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4054

Make sure you meet the iTunes Match minimum requirements
iTunes 10.5.1 or later
OS X Mac 10.7 or later for Mac

 

[CmdrLaForge]

1.) Yes. Select them all at once, right-click, and choose download. I would delete them out of the local iTunes library first (after backing it up).

2.) Not it my experience. But if you burn them to CD, you can then re-import and match. (Just an idea!)



Michael

Why deleting them first ? Would I have two copies other wise? How about setting up a new and empty library? Could I just simply fill that from the cloud ? How would I identify the missing songs?

 

[Tinmania]

has anyone figured out how to download music, in advance, to the iPhone? i've got my matching/uploading figured out...but don't know how to download an entire playlist to my phone without playing each song first

Scroll to the bottom of a playlist and choose Download All.



Michael

 

[Lareson]

Anyone have The Beatles In Mono box being matched by iTunes Match? Yeah, that shouldn't match. It's apparently being matched with STEREO tracks! I've got all kinds of unusual stuff - non-remastered albums being matched with remasters, etc. Were there no music geek devs in the beta? How could no one have found this problem? How is there no way to choose to use your own files rather than what iTunes has?

Yeah, I had that issue. I ended up having to put [Mono] at the end of every mono song so that it wouldn't get swapped out. iTunes Match doesn't look at the actual song file, just the metadata so if there's nothing in there to distinguish it from the iTunes version, then you're gonna get that one instead.

This version is better than the previous beta releases, but it's still not 100% matching songs. On my Anthology 3 album, it matched all of the songs except for 1, which is strange.

 

[CDutch]

I have a bunch of Matched songs with 128 to 196 bit rates. How do I download the 256 bit rate versions from iTunes? I highlighted them all put can't seem to find the option to download.

Thanks in advance.

 

[geg]

I'm having a lot of issues. The Beatles Mono problem seems so easy to address...can't they detect mono vs stereo? I see a lot of other issues, too, some of were mentioned above...we have no control over getting older, dynamic masterings replaced with newer, sometimes dynamically-squashed "loudness wars" versions. Match also seems to not be able to recognize alternative mixes as separate versions. And if you have a collection with some oddball stuff you're kinda screwed - I tried to match Steven McDonald's "Redd Blood Cells" project (where he added bass to the White Stripes' "White Blood Cells") and sure enough, some of the songs are being "matched" as if they were the original White Stripes album. This would be workable if there was a way to override it, but there doesn't seem to be. So, if you can't get Match to work, you simply CAN'T LISTEN to the music in question on your device. And that's a problem.

And the 96 kbps limit is a hinderence if you have any early 20th century music, as that's often ripped in mono at lower bitrates (80 kbps mono = 160 kbps stereo, after all, and the dynamic range doesn't really require more to sound good). You have to either re-rip it all, or if you can't do that (some of this kind of music is passed around by collectors, and some of it is public domain) you have to artificially inflate the bitrate by reencoding and maintain two versions if you don't want to delete the original files, all so the inflated-bitrate version can get uploaded.

There's also lots of errors that are problematic, especially with a large collection. "Duplicates" that just aren't duplicates, for one. "An error occurred" on a lot of tracks, that you have to find, go back in, and try to manually submit to Match again - if there's an error, why wouldn't iTunes try to process the track again itself? Is anyone EVER going to say "oh, okay, I don't need that track"? Not to mention the problem of albums IN THE ITUNES DATABASE being half-matched and half-uploaded, which I'm noticing on lots of stuff.

Anyway, I'm really not seeing this as ready for prime time...

 

[alecp763]

iTunes Match vs. Play Counts

Hello everyone - I need some help.

I signed up for Match last night, and it matched/uploaded just about all of my music. I've been messing with it today trying to figure out how it works, and ran into an error that I can't figure out - play counts.

I downloaded a new album (CAMP by Childish Gambino, if you're wondering), imported it into iTunes, uploaded it to iCloud/Match, and it was listed as "Matched." The album showed up on my iPhone and my iPad. Perfect!

I listened to it a few times on my phone, rated a few songs, etc, then opened up iTunes to see what it did. It pulled down the ratings from the cloud, but not the play counts. I plugged my phone in and synced (wifi sync wasn't connecting due to an unknown error) in hopes that an itunes sync would pull the play counts down, but no luck...

Anyone else tried this or have a similar experience? I have a few playlists built around play counts and would really like to have my play counts updated. Thanks!

 

[geg]

Yeah, I had that issue. I ended up having to put [Mono] at the end of every mono song so that it wouldn't get swapped out. iTunes Match doesn't look at the actual song file, just the metadata so if there's nothing in there to distinguish it from the iTunes version, then you're gonna get that one instead.

This version is better than the previous beta releases, but it's still not 100% matching songs. On my Anthology 3 album, it matched all of the songs except for 1, which is strange.

Did putting "mono" in the titles actually make the albums upload all the tracks and not match at all? I thought Match was scanning the audio too. I have albums named differently (some bands I add the year before the album title to allow them to sort) and that doesn't seem to affect matching.