A Clear Explanation of iTunes Match

[Mr.Gene]

Is there an automated way of downloading your whole collection to your HDD?

Right now I have to delete the song/album then manually click down to redownload the 256 version.

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 ->

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.

 

[ladytonya]

I'm curious about exactly what Match will consider a duplicate. I don't have a huge amount of music, maybe 40GB. I large part of my collection are the NOW collaborations even though I might have the same song from the artist's original CD. I want to keep that duplicate there, though, because sometimes I like just listening to a whole album. Will it for example see that I have Heart of Gold in my Warner Brother's Revolutions in Sound collection but also on Neil Young's Greatest Hits? I know that the song is there twice, but I want it there twice so both albums are complete. I hope that even makes sense, it's late and I'm still reading on here and trying to figure out if I want to buy this service!

Another question I have is similar to what others have asked about LPs and live recordings. I have about 20 CDs that are the last 10 years of community band concerts for my community band. I want to be sure that I keep my band recordings and that Match doesn't see Armenian Dances performed by the Asheville Community Band and I end up with Armenian Dances performed by the Eastman Wind Ensemble or something like that.

I still have so many questions! Ugh! I think I'm going to bed, maybe I'll wait and enable this service this weekend when I have more time to read and educate myself to be sure I don't completely fubar my music collection!

 

[SeattleMoose]

That Big "Sucking Sound" .....

is all the private music created by home musicians being sucked into the cloud and made available for plagiarists.

Another BIG HIT "written" by Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, ad nauseum.....

 

[jamesryanbell]

is all the private music created by home musicians being sucked into the cloud and made available for plagiarists.

Another BIG HIT "written" by Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, ad nauseum.....

Yeah because we know that Apple has always been in the business of stealing music off of people's hard drives and then freely making it available to the whole world.

Oh wait.

 

[OTACORB]

How exactly will this work on my iPhone 4s? I don't necessarily need access to all my music, and I don't want to pay the data rates to download it all the time. I only want a portion of my music, and would like to be able to shut off downloads for "streaming" (at least non-wifi). Can I still choose a portion of my library to physically have on my phone? I also don't really want to wade through my entire library on my phone, I'd rather just see what is physically on my phone. Is this still possible? I really want to sign up, as syncing between computers will be nice, and at least some mobile access to my entire library would be nice at times, but I am afraid of unknowingly using too much data just to listen to music.

You can initially turn on iTunes Match on your iPhone, download all the music you want out of your library, then go back and turn off show all music. Now it will only show what you have downloaded and you won't have to wade through all your library that you didn't want to download. Very simply! You don't need to go back a sync the old way with iTunes, I seen someone tell you that. That is wrong information!

 

[AaronEdwards]

I would think (hope), that the limit is upped at some point. Perhaps even a paid upgrade like iCloud itself.

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Agreed, and in fact Apple is giving the studios and distributors a way to actually MAKE money off pirated songs that they normally would never see a cent of. (Not saying that everyone pirates)

The distributor here is Apple. They get 30%. The studios (I would use "record company") will make some money from this, but not nearly as much as if it was legally bought or streamed music.

And one thing is certain, the artists will maybe make some cents from this that they can tip their Starbucks barista with.

-------------------------------

A rather interesting thing about who would be getting the money from these$25/year. You get paid more money the more people are buying your songs on iTunes, the more times your songs are being played on the radio, or the more times they are being streamed on Rdio/Spotify/etc. But here there's only a sum of money, unless people think Apple is sending the record companies statistics from iTunes Match. Small and independent artists and record companies will get royally screwed by this.

I'd say that 99 out of 100 of those with 10000+ songs have downloaded most of them illegally. But it good to see that this thread is filled with some serious music collectors with deep pockets and enough free time to rip cds.

 

[komodrone]

I rather have iTunes' metatag, how do I do this?

 

[jamesmington]

so for the songs that can't be matched that I want on my iPhone.

will I have to import from my iTunes via wifi sync?
will these tracks even sync if they're not in iCloud?
can I download whole playlists via iCloud?

i only have 2gb data plan, so I can't imagine how much I'd utilize this service, besides converting the crappy rips I had from bad CDs

anyone else subscribing even though you have a limited data plan?

 

[OTACORB]

It is clear to me reading through this thread that many have screwed up librarys to begin with and expected iTunes Match to work miracles.

I took a couple of days to make sure all my metatags were what I wanted, I also made sure I had high quality album art. I like to have specific songs in specific genre's that I knew would be contrary to iTunes Store. I was unsure if Apple would re-genere them, but it didn't. It kept them exactly the same.

Thus far everything is working as expected. I think many have assumed this is a streaming service and that was made clear way back when that was not the case.

Folks need to do a bit of research and check things out before they buy this subscription. Some seem to have just jumped up and subscribed and didn't even know what they were getting.

Oh and when you turn on iTunes Match on your iDevice, it takes time for it to download all the data, especially the album art. So, it does require some patience, these things don't happen in 2 minutes.

 

[JohnDoe98]

my results with 24k songs was roughly as follows:

71% matched
23% uploaded (mostly classical music not on iTunes)
6% errors (I hope this gets fixed with time and subsequent matching attempts)
<1% duplicates/not eligible due too low bit rates (fixed by converting the files or deleting the duplicates)

I can't wait to easily upgrade those 71% matches by using playlists/automatic downloads.

 

[KeithJenner]

You don't need to go back a sync the old way with iTunes, I seen someone tell you that. That is wrong information!

As I gave that information I'll answer that.

What happens if they want to add another CD? I assume by messing around with the settings each time. Seeing as they don't seem to want to use Match on the phone then the option of not turning it on is a valid suggestion.

It wasn't wrong information. You have found another option. I never said they need to do that, just that they could.

Thanks.

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I rather have iTunes' metatag, how do I do this?

Not by using Match.

 

[Gemütlichkeit]

Weird thing is some albums are 50/50. Albums I ripped myself from the original CD's are showing half uploaded, half matched.

Doesn't make sense.

 

[gnasher729]

You are right we would all be surprised if people claimed any significant number of people had music libraries they paid 100k to amass

When Apple had sold about 5 million songs many years ago, they said that one person had downloaded (and paid for) 36,000 songs. I bet that person hasn't stopped.

And if you have a collection of 50,000 songs, then you surely figured out how to get them in the most economical way. Like first checking iTMS, Amazon CD and mp3, and play.com for the cheapest price. Getting reduced price iTunes vouchers whenever possible. Taking advantage of pricing errors (you'd be amazed) and of special offers (you'd be amazed).

And I know people who spend £7 a day on cigarettes. People spend a lots more on drugs and alcohol. Why shouldn't someone with a decent income spend $100,000 on songs, if that is their interest? It's surely a lot healthier (to you and the people around you) than spending $100,000 on drugs.

 

[Ice-Cube]

What happens if I edit a song's metadata in iTunes to a completely different song, will iTunes let me download the song according to the metadata I created? In that way, won't users use a single song to get loads of different songs just by editing the metadata?

 

[dav]

What happens if I edit a song's metadata in iTunes to a completely different song, will iTunes let me download the song according to the metadata I created? In that way, won't users use a single song to get loads of different songs just by editing the metadata?

To identify a song it scans the file itself, not the metadata.

 

[chasemac]

All I want to know is. Can You still burn a cd?

 

[Ice-Cube]

To identify a song it scans the file itself, not the metadata.

But to scan the file, they would need to look for information such as metadata right? What other data am I missing here?

 

[Marlor]

Does it match Mandopop and Cantopop? 99% of my music falls into those two categories.

I love the idea of iTunes Match, but I think it will be a bit limited for many users if it is limited to English-language tracks.

 

[maylen]

How does the iCloud matched song's metadata look like?
Is it like warner bros (c) for example , or its just as you uploaded it?
That would be strange with so much variations of user metadata

 

[Marlor]

But to scan the file, they would need to look for information such as metadata right? What other data am I missing here?

You can generate a "fingerprint" from an audio file. The technology is smart enough now to even match a poorly-encoded, truncated MP3 with its source.

If the fingerprints match, the song is the same.

Services like SoundHound are based on this principle... although they add quite a bit of heuristics when a match isn't found. Luckily, iTunes won't need to be quite so aggressive in its guessing because they have the full song available for analysis.

 

[baryon]

What's the point of you actually having to have songs in order to match them? Couldn't iTunes just allow you to upload/download anything from the Cloud, once you've paid the $25/year? Say you have 100 CDs, but you couldn't ever be bothered to rip them to your iTunes library. Now, in order to listen to those songs, you would need to inserts those 100 CDs and rip them, and then let iTunes match them and replace them with Cloud versions. Wouldn't it be easier, instead, to just type in the album names and let iTunes let you download the songs? No one really cares if you actually own the CDs or not, it's just a matter of allowing you access based on your existing songs, but some people have more songs while others have less, which makes it unfair. Why not just let everyone download anything, without having to previously own the song?

 

[KeithJenner]

No one really cares if you actually own the CDs or not, it's just a matter of allowing you access based on your existing songs, but some people have more songs while others have less, which makes it unfair. Why not just let everyone download anything, without having to previously own the song?

Yes, it's so unfair that we have spent thousands of pounds over the years to get our music, but Apple won't give it to you for nothing isn't it.

Do people really believe that they should have everything for nothing these days? Who is actually going to do the work?

Tip for you. If you spend your money on things then you will have more things than people who don't spend their money. That isn't unfair, it's life.

 

[baryon]

Yes, it's so unfair that we have spent thousands of pounds over the years to get our music, but Apple won't give it to you for nothing isn't it.

Do people really believe that they should have everything for nothing these days? Who is actually going to do the work?

Tip for you. If you spend your money on things then you will have more things than people who don't spend their money. That isn't unfair, it's life.

You don't get my point - I'm not saying I want to have it all for free, I'm saying that there's no way of Apple verifying whether you actually paid for the songs when you match them or not. Apple isn't charging for each matched song, you pay for 25 000 songs in one go. So, for Apple, it doesn't matter if you have 25 000 pirated songs or 25 000 songs you paid for, they don't get revenue from it. So from their perspective, other than just being nice and moral, what's the point of actually having the song prior to matching? Can't they just call the service an "unlimited download service" where they let you listen to any song for a year in exchange for a fee? Because that's what it really is, and there are many services like that already.

Why do people who pirated 25 000 songs get to upgrade them to legal, high quality versions, while people who have 2 ripped CDs only get to have those 2 CDs worth of songs?

 

[rdlink]

Interesting

I never did this during beta, because Apple said they'd be deleting the iCloud collections from time to time. Now that it's live I have tried an experiment with my Macbook, and it seems to have worked:

I matched my collection from my iMac, since it's the more complete collection. Then I deleted all of my music from my MBA, and turned on Match. It shows the collection on my Macbook now. But if I play a song it does not automatically download it. It plays it (almost instantaneously). But it doesn't download it unless I actually click the download cloud. Cool. Looks like actual streaming on the Mac.

 

[KeithJenner]

You don't get my point - I'm not saying I want to have it all for free, I'm saying that there's no way of Apple verifying whether you actually paid for the songs when you match them or not. Apple isn't charging for each matched song, you pay for 25 000 songs in one go. So, for Apple, it doesn't matter if you have 25 000 pirated songs or 25 000 songs you paid for, they don't get revenue from it. So from their perspective, other than just being nice and moral, what's the point of actually having the song prior to matching? Can't they just call the service an "unlimited download service" where they let you listen to any song for a year in exchange for a fee? Because that's what it really is, and there are many services like that already.

Why do people who pirated 25 000 songs get to upgrade them to legal, high quality versions, while people who have 2 ripped CDs only get to have those 2 CDs worth of songs?

Well obviously, if it allowed you to just list what you want to download then it would be incredibly easy for people to grab loads of music for free. Hardly anyone would buy anything from iTunes ever again if all they have to do is just tell Apple they want it and they get it for free

For pirated music, you still have to get that music in the first place (and hope that it matches). That means sharing/downloading, which is where people are potentially getting caught.

Edit: Yes, they could have gone for the unlimited use for a year service, but they obviously decided not to do it that way. As you say there are lots of those services around, so it isn't as if you can't use one of them. As usual, Apple have decided to do it a different way.

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I never did this during beta, because Apple said they'd be deleting the iCloud collections from time to time. Now that it's live I have tried an experiment with my Macbook, and it seems to have worked:

I matched my collection from my iMac, since it's the more complete collection. Then I deleted all of my music from my MBA, and turned on Match. It shows the collection on my Macbook now. But if I play a song it does not automatically download it. It plays it (almost instantaneously). But it doesn't download it unless I actually click the download cloud. Cool. Looks like actual streaming on the Mac.

Yes, it does stream to Computers.