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I tried iTunes match for the file upgrade feature, as I have a lot of tracks ripped from CD's. Many of them did fine, but some were either missing for silly reasons like the trailing silence was longer or shorter on the match version than on mine, even though I could look in the itunes store and see it was the same album/track. Some previously purchased songs would not upgrade at all or downloaded duplicates, and a lot of cover art was wrong. Plus I could try to correct the album art and Match would set it back to what it thought it should be. Now understand, I'm talking about classical music, and Apple has always treated classical as the red-headed stepchild. But these errors were present even in common stuff like Billy Joel's Greatest Hits. I eventually turned it off entirely. (And turning off match in an ios device is a major pain, by the way!)
 
can u pay the $25 and download the better versions. then quit it after the year and still keep the better versions?
 
I do have one question, could I pay for match, upgrade the quality of the low quality files I have, then redownload them and then stop paying for match? So for the cost I could upgrade the overall quality of about 25% of my library?

This is what I use iTunes Match for. I had a lot of music that I ripped long ago from CD in lower quality, and also stuff I bought from iTunes before iTunes plus and DRM free music was available.

To upgrade my iTunes files to DRM-free iTunes Plus the "recommended" way, it would've cost me $96.00, and all my old ripped CD mp3s wouldn't be in any better quality. So, paying $25.00, uploading the whole mess to iTunes Match and the downloading whole new copies of everything made better sense.

I don't use it on my iPhone or iPad though. Both have music synced from iTunes the old-fashioned way, though I guess if I'm hurting for space I could always switch to it.
 
I don't use iTM, however I'm rethinking this. I paid an addition $100 for increased iPhone memory on a device I plan to use 2 or 3 years. This was so I could synce my whole music library and not have to manage memory like I did on my 3GS.

In 2 or 3 years Match would have cost $50 - $75.
 
I don't use iTM, however I'm rethinking this. I paid an addition $100 for increased iPhone memory on a device I plan to use 2 or 3 years. This was so I could synce my whole music library and not have to manage memory like I did on my 3GS.

In 2 or 3 years Match would have cost $50 - $75.

dont forget added data costs
 
def skipped iTunes Match.
i also have a 64GB iPhone which has more than enough space for all my music (one of the main reasons i upgraded from a 32GB ip4). i just prefer to have all my music with me without having to worry about internet usage. i'm only on a 2GB data plan. so i don't feel like paying the annual Match fee plus possibly needing to pay for a larger monthly data plan. plus Match was pretty buggy when it first came out (matching the wrong version of songs). i'm not sure how it is now. plus this is my only iOS device.
after coming the old iPod days (3rd gen was my first), i have a very well organized music catalog with a lot of playlists. syncing is simple.
 
I don't use it b/c of the 25k track limit (my music collection has 31k+ tracks) and I don't have enough of a need for iTunes match to spend the effort getting around (or working within) this limitation.
 
I just purchased iTunes Match a month or so ago.
It does come in handy, as ALL of my music is at my disposal.

The one main thing I do not like it how my kenwood tv dock, in my car, wont read the songs from the iPhone.
Meaning that when I had my songs stored locally on a 3gs, 4, 4s etc - all of my music would display on the car tv screen, thus I would plug in the Apple device and never have to turn the screen on. All my music, controls, album skipping, different tracks were all done via the kenwood car tv.

With iTunes match ON - I have to control all my music thru my Apple prodoct.
Meaning that now on a 3gs, 4, 4s - with iTunes Match ON nothing gets transferred to my car tv. I can NOT control song skipping, album skipping, etc.
I have to physically pick up my Apple product, turn on the screen, find that Im looking for & then it plays.
God forbid I want to change a song, I cant do that thru the car tv anymore with 1 simple push of a button.
Again - I have to pick up the Apple product and change it that way.
A royal pain in the you know what.

For that reason alone, I dont know if Ill renew iTunes Match.
It IS NICE to have my music anywhere, but driving and looking at my phone isnt something I envisioned when I changed from storing my lusic locally, as opposed to in the cloud with iTunes Match.

Simple solution would be to ALLOW all my music stored via iTunes Match, with my iPhone plugged into my car iPhone dock connector, to show up on my car tv / iPod interface like it is stored on the iPhone's hard drive. Just like how it works when I have my music stored directly on my iPhone.
 
never used iTunes match. I'd rather have things local on my phone. Plus I can use the storage for things other than music if I want (pics/vids). That's a pretty big deal to me so I got a 64GB phone. I'm slowly adding more and more to it. I love having a ton of space. Hated the 16GB 4s.
 
One of my biggest issues with iTunes Match enabled on my iOS device is that I have music videos and live performances from my favorite artist that are labeled as music videos and the moment I enable iTunes Match, I can no longer sync those videos.

If its a Music Video that I have purchased through iTunes then it will appear in the Videos.app, but videos that I have taken from YouTube will not appear, this bugs me.

I also don't like the fact that it converted my Explicit tracks to Edited/Clean version and I seems to have many errors/network issues, so I finally gave up and turned it off.

I just bought the new iPod nano, I still enjoy buying physical discs and I still enjoy walking around with my iPod nano.
 
Love it. It's amazing how much things have changed!

Things don't have to change if you don't want them to :) To me, there is still something special about ripping my own CD's, editing the tags to my liking, making a playlist and then burning it.
 
I bought iTunes match because:

1) I wanted to have access to my full music collection from my iPhone at all times. I have the 64GB version but thought it's even better to have all my music with me all the time. I have around 100GB total.

2) I bought the 256GB rMBP and I don't have room to store my iTunes collection locally, so it's on my external hard drive. When I want to listen to music from my rMBP and am not connected to my external HD, I simply stream my music from iTunes.

In theory, it would have been a very well spent $25 for me. That would be if iTunes match worked as intended.

In reality, iTunes match is the buggiest piece of Apple software I have ever used. It was worse than what I'd expect from a Beta service on day one and it still is today.

Why it sucks:

1) While initially uploading my music collection, it would often get stuck in a loop uploading nothing. For example, it would stay at "uploading song 235 of 6354" for hours while actually uploading data at full speed. I had to notice and cancel the uploading process every time it did that and restart from where I left off. Given that my Canadian ISP has very low bandwidth limit, this glitch made me go over my data cap.

2) There are tons of weird glitches with the iPhone playing a song from iTunes match. No album art, song info doesn't match the song that's playing, previous track button not working when offline, getting censored versions of explicit songs, songs being auto-deleted from my local storage even if my iPhone isn't full, etc.

3) You can't sync your iPhone the regular way if you have iTunes match. Meaning you have to download everything from the cloud. This is fairly long if you want to fill an empty 64GB iOS device, and again rapes my poor Canadian internet data cap. There's also no global "Download all" button, so you have to go manually and click the "Download all" button for each artist. When you have hundreds of artists, that's not cool.

4) Uploading to iTunes match always crash. It depends on when you do it, but it didn't improve since launch. It's been almost 2 weeks since I can't upload anything because I get an error 4002 or the upload process will either cancel or restart for no apparent reason. This happens to a lot of people, Apple forums are filled with people complaining about this. There's no real way to fix it, you just have to wait for Apple servers to work again. It happens all the time. Meanwhile, I can't add new music to my iPhone / iPad since regular syncing is disabled.
 
Just to add to what others have said....why pay for itunes match and use your data on top of that (obviously not relevant if you have unlimited...unless it is att and the threat of throttling is there.)
I agree, and it's why I don't have iTunes Match. I also don't have unlimited data and there are many places near where I live and work that I can't get good access to the internet. When I do have internet, my speeds are kind of slow too, so I don't really want to be downloading a lot of large files often.

i just cant imagine the data costs its would be to download my music as I go. Horrifying at the costs of data now a days.
That's the hidden cost on top of paying for iTunes Match. I'll be curious to know how much people will be saving if they didn't have to pay for a larger data plan because of all the extra data they are using. Each month I use up almost exactly every megabyte of my monthly data, so I know I will definitely have to pay more for data if using iTunes Match. With US data prices nowadays, I would most likely pay for a 32GB or 64GB iPhone within a short time.
 
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So far I don't use it. I have multiple specialized iTunes libraries, for one thing. Some items are delberately in more than one library but might have slightly different tags for my purposes in each of those libraries. Further, some of the libraries are mostly stocked with the rips from the CDs I had been buying until iTunes Store turned up on my screen one day. Some of the CDs are pretty esoteric unless you're a big fan of stuff like what Musical Heritage Society used to crank out onto LPs.

Meanwhile, I had spent a lot of time getting the rips tagged the way I wanted them for my purposes. Edited names, edited start/stop times in some cases, etc. I like it all how it is. I switched the names of a lot of classical stuff so it would make sense TO ME on small-screen iPods. This is a lot of work. I don't want to match and then be stuck with iTunes version of what some track should be named. If you listen to classical music on small-screen iPods then you know what I am talking about.

All my "syncs" are manually controlled. I don't have all of anything on any device except backup drives. Again, I like it the way it is.

i have DSL rated at 3.1Mbps and that's sometimes what I get, but often not what I get. The upload of match would be a major experience of tedium, knowing what I've gathered from other people's related posts. I mean I haven't even downloaded Mountain Lion yet and plan to take my laptop and a fresh USB stick over to a relative's house when I decide to hit the app store for that upgrade. So the very idea of trying to match maybe 100GB of music from a cleaned up "general" iTunes music library is a complete mental turnoff. I'd probably fry my router before it ever completed.

I've considered cleaning up my general iTunes library and then using match for it, since the idea of the higher quality is appealing, but so far that's as far as it goes; the thinking stage. I get that far and ask why I would bother when I don't want then to use it the way it works. If we could match and download the higher quality matched item, great, and leave everything else alone including track names and other tags plus album art etc., that would be different. I still don't know if it would be worth it to me. The time I spent was spent over years. I don't really feel like investing a lot more time in most of that music's digital attributes. If I want to listen to it, I know where it is right now and how to get it onto another of my devices and how to understand what it is (so how to sequence it in a playlist) when I look at its names on the small screens of iPods. I know, that does sound kinda like "good enough for government work" but so be it, that's how I feel about it at the moment.
 
Me neither I wouldn't use it that much to justify the pricing of iTM. I bought a 32gb iphone and I have an iPad also which I rarely use for listening to music. Think its more relevant for people who have lots of IDevices I.e nano fo jogging iphone for work@travel ipad for home etc etc
 
with things like spotify and pandora, I am surprised people still download music. I have zero songs in my itunes library.
 
with things like spotify and pandora, I am surprised people still download music. I have zero songs in my itunes library.

Both of those services are pop heavy, no matter how you try to slice it, you just never hear any of the b side stuff or non top charing tracks. If you like pop and only the radio played stuff, then so services are great, otherwise they just dont offer up enough variety. Again, also the cost of streaming when on cellular data is ridiculous.
 
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