Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
I've been a developer since the mid-1980s, so I have much experience.

Look at something as simple as the Y2K problem. Where programmers used 2 digits for the year, so '00' could mean either 1900 or 2000. Adding just 2 digits took 6+ months of development work for 3-4 programmers. I experienced it and lived it, and helped many companies out with their issues. Of course, the madness that the media portrayed of 'planes falling out of the sky' was ridiculous, but there would be massive failures without our work.

Research any articles about it, and realize that just adding 2 digits and storing dates as 01-01-2000 instead of 01-01-00 was not the only thing that had to be done.

It's possible there might be a 16-bit issue (The highest number that 16 bits can store is 32,768). If something in the code is stored as a 16-bit number, every reference must be changed to a 32-bit number to fix this. And all those references must be found. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I am not sure what is more disingenuous: assuming that server software which got to production 3 years ago was written with 16 bit values, or comparing THAT to a cross-industry problem related to software written across lots of platforms, OSes and languages, during 30 years – or more.
 
  • Like
Reactions: milo
What is the population of users that have in excess of 25k songs in their iTunes libraries.

I am about 17k am my wife both wants me to stop wasting money and to delete "all that junk" in my library.

Almost everyone I know has over 25k tracks.

I am not sure what is more disingenuous: assuming that server software which got to production 3 years ago was written with 16 bit values, or comparing THAT to a cross-industry problem related to software written across lots of platforms, OSes and languages, during 30 years – or more.

Also, consider that memory and storage space were severely constrained until, what, the late 80s? Early 90s even?

Any system more than 10 years old at Y2K was probably running on a machine where those two extra bytes were legitimately needed somewhere else for essential functionality, and there were definitely a lot of machine that old.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • Like
Reactions: milo
Apple's services are confusing me.

I pay for Apple Music... does this mean I get the Match service included? or at an additional cost to the monthly sub price?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Benjamin Frost
I am not sure what is more disingenuous: assuming that server software which got to production 3 years ago was written with 16 bit values, or comparing THAT to a cross-industry problem related to software written across lots of platforms, OSes and languages, during 30 years – or more.

I'm not sure why you want to argue about something you know very little about.

Apple says it'll take a while, I write reasoning why it 'could' take a while, going from experience. I was simply responding to someone saying that it was brain-dead easy. I just pointed out the 'could be hard' position to someone who said it 'should be easy'.

Now you want this drawn out fight about something you know very little about. Agree that it 'could be hard' and say that it 'could be easy' as well. It could be either, neither of us know. There is no reason to call names though.
 
I bet it's a licensing issue with the labels that they are trying to resolve. Their contracts probably only permit that number of tracks per user. I know Spotify has limits on various playlists and collections and I'm led to believe they are again restrictions agreed in their licensing deals.

I don't think so. In the case of Spotify - and Apple Music - there are certainly licensing issues. But this is dealing with music that I already own (CDs etc). Apple is just storing it in a different place - not sharing it with anyone else.

That said - you may well be right. For record companies are mind-bogglingly stupid when it comes to license terms.
 
I don't think so. In the case of Spotify - and Apple Music - there are certainly licensing issues. But this is dealing with music that I already own (CDs etc). Apple is just storing it in a different place - not sharing it with anyone else.

That said - you may well be right. For record companies are mind-bogglingly stupid when it comes to license terms.

Remember Apple doesn't know you own the music. You could have illegally downloaded a lot of the tracks in your iTunes library. If one or more of those tracks in your library is matched and is a bad quality rip, Apple automatically updates it to iTunes purchased quality for no additional cost. I'd say the limit is almost certainly a licensing restriction imposed by the labels - to stop the biggest pirates from legitimising huge libraries of stolen content.

I'm guessing the labels will also want a bigger slice of the pie if they do agree to allow Apple to offer its customers 100k tracks. Money and difficult negotiations would be good reasons for the hold up getting the library limit increase done.
 
  • Like
Reactions: milo and RabbitLuvr
Google is "free" only if you think your privacy is worth nothing.
Hate to tell you, Apple stores the same information and for the music matching, they have to, otherwise it would never work. But even with the other services (such as Maps, Voice Search, etc.), at least Google gives you access to see and modify all of your history, including being able to delete it. Apple still records these things (no I don't trust them saying they don't), but you have no way to verify what they have recorded. And no, I don't really believe Google permanently deletes what you ask them to, but you at least get the opportunity to know what they have.
 
Really, Amazon matches EXACTLY all your songs no matter the variant... Come on... First of all, I doubt they actually would have 50% of all the songs I have, let alone match them. Must have a hell of a restricted collection to get a 100% match...
Any that are available, they have matched 100% correctly (I do have some that are simply not available through any online store and those don't ever match of course) and I have some pretty obscure music that they match correctly 100% of the time.
 
Hmmm... Amazon sez they provide "high quality 256kbps MP3s". Not excited yet. Apple Match cleans my songs from words they dislike. Google doesn't seem to actually do matching, they just upload to the cloud (or am I missing something?). It's like with toothpaste. You can get a whitening one. You can get one for sensitive gums. You can get a strengthening one. But you can't get one that does all three.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Hawk999
Why would someone with a large library over 25k trust their music to a flaky DESTRUCTIVE service lie iTunes Match? Yes, I've had my music library destroyed by Match twice (Luckily I had most of it backed up before I turned it on, but I still had to spend weeks reburning CDs) will never use it again.

Whether you're upgrading your operating system or your iTunes library it is always a good idea to back up first. No upgrade process in the history of mankind has been 100% successful 100% of the time, but people seems to like to forget that and just complain anyway when something goes wrong.

Take some responsibility for your actions.
 
25000 songs, 50000 songs, 100000s songs, whatever...

I'd settle for improved matching. I frequently have two, three, or even four songs per album that simply won't match, including 256k MP3s from Amazon and 320k rips direct from CD. I find it really maddening.
 
  • Like
Reactions: milo and jimthing
Apple is gaining (and maintaining) a serious reputation for producing bad software and especially services. And they seem to be completely uninterested in stopping doing so. Over the last 5 years or so they release non-hardware products which utterly fail to do what they say on the tin. So much so that many users get fed-up and jump ship to the competition, where/if available, or just give-up trying to fix issues, as you feel like you need a masters degree in computer science to do so.

When is this gonna stop. Who knows. But one thing's for sure, they need to kick the arses of their software engineering teams, as they seem to be getting paid continually for bad half-working utter crap. And it's us users who have to run the gauntlet of these failures.

Ever phoned Applecare for help; they hardly ever know what they're talking about, and keep having to pass you on to second line support almost every time, who then promptly tell you it's YOUR problem or YOUR the only one who has the problem, despite you pointing out the gazillion forum threads with other users having the same issues. Useless, is the word.

Settings:
- Apple Music: OFF.
- iTunes Match: OFF.
- iTunes in the Cloud: OFF.
...all because they DO NOT WORK PROPERLY.
 
  • Like
Reactions: iRock1
Have you actually listened to all that music? I mean, sat down and really listened without doing anything else?

I agree with the various nuanced arguments for >25,000 songs. In my case, I like collecting/digitizing obscure and local artist material that will never see the light of day in the iTunes store and/or Apple Music.

I am also an overly meticulous song tagger and playlist creator. I am still dreaming of the day when my library's entire metadata can be truly seamlessly accessible on all my devices. Exactly no difference in functionality between iTunes and iOS and AppleTV (ratings, groupings, album art, etc.). For my test <25,000 song library, I'm happy that rating and loving tracks transfers between iTunes on both Mac platforms and the PC version.

As far as iOS Tunes, I'm not as much impressed. I'm really glad it preserves playlists. However, it just allows the opportunity to 'love' and 'unlove' tracks, but indications of that setting are not visible until you drill down to the full-screen track view. Also, no ratings are provided in addition to 'hearts'. This, to me, shouldn't take up too much space, especially on the full track view.

I'm a compulsive rater/song evaluator. I use ratings to choose which tracks I would rather listen to frequently, occasionally, rarely, or not at all. This helps me weed my track count to at least under 100K. So, I think iOS Tunes and AppleTV needs to provide the same desktop iTunes functionality rather than a subset, especially in the area of rating songs and moving tracks to playlists. Seamlessness all around is my mantra.

At any rate, here's to 100K song support before Thanksgiving. I can then have another thing for which to be thankful...
 
  • Like
Reactions: milo
As far as iOS Tunes, I'm not as much impressed. I'm really glad it preserves playlists. However, it just allows the opportunity to 'love' and 'unlove' tracks, but indications of that setting are not visible until you drill down to the full-screen track view. Also, no ratings are provided in addition to 'hearts'. This, to me, shouldn't take up too much space, especially on the full track view.
As always, just tap the song information to reveal ratings:

IMG_4222.jpg
 
As always, just tap the song information to reveal ratings

Thanks Erik for the reveal.

However, I believe this is another indicator of a sketchy user interface. Why not show the ratings all the time in the song detail screen? So what if the album art gets reduced by a few pixels. One of the keys to a successful user interface is the reduction of steps.

Now that I know the non-obvious method of accessing ratings, my main beef remains no indication of loving/not loving in the list views and just in the song detail screen. If you are going to bother to love a song, why not see it in a list view, to compare and potentialy influence your song selection?

Best.
 
I could almost live with the 25K limit if only iTunes would allow me to directly specific which songs go to iCloud and which do not. I want the control over what music in my collection will stream by virtue of Match.

Maybe I'm out of line here. Does anybody know how to do this? I basically want to have explicit, manual control over the nebulous iCloud Status column within iTunes.
 
Can folks with libraries over the 25K limit please check and see if Match (either iTunes Match or Apple Music matching) is still throwing up errors? Got a tip suggesting the limit might have been raised.

Thanks!
 
Can folks with libraries over the 25K limit please check and see if Match (either iTunes Match or Apple Music matching) is still throwing up errors? Got a tip suggesting the limit might have been raised.

Thanks!


Not for me at this moment.

I have 47.452 tracks in my library and iCloud Music Library will not load my library.
 
Any that are available, they have matched 100% correctly (I do have some that are simply not available through any online store and those don't ever match of course) and I have some pretty obscure music that they match correctly 100% of the time.

I have many thousands of songs released only on vinyl on small labels, often in small batch releases, many for DJ's, pre 2000.

Are you telling they got that? I wouldn't find these things even if I was looking all over the internet for them from private buyers. So, like I said, they're not matching my stuff; there is a crapload of things that never made it into any system.
I've been collecting music since the 1970s.
 
Can folks with libraries over the 25K limit please check and see if Match (either iTunes Match or Apple Music matching) is still throwing up errors? Got a tip suggesting the limit might have been raised.

Thanks!

I would love to help as I'm on the limit with just over 25,000 tracks in this library (including purchases) but when I clicked on iTunes Match I'm getting this message, even though I'm already using iTunes Match on this computer. :rolleyes:

Screenshot 2015-11-06 10.22.34.png

It's currently working well so I'm not going to tempt fate by clicking Add This Computer.
 
I have many thousands of songs released only on vinyl on small labels, often in small batch releases, many for DJ's, pre 2000.

Are you telling they got that? I wouldn't find these things even if I was looking all over the internet for them from private buyers. So, like I said, they're not matching my stuff; there is a crapload of things that never made it into any system.
I've been collecting music since the 1970s.

He said they're matching the tracks that they have available for sale in their mp3 store. Which is a huge improvement over apple, which fails to match wildly popular tracks that they have for sale. Only matching 12 out of 14 tracks on a Beatles album is just dismal.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.