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Rogifan

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
Nov 14, 2011
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According to Kirk McElhern. Apparently Apple was using digital fingerprinting with iTunes Match but now with Apple Music is matching only based on tags. And the matching doesn't seem to take into account song length. Seriously Apple?

http://www.mcelhearn.com/apple-music-matches-files-with-metadata-only-not-acoustic-fingerprinting/

Marco Arment recommended people stop using iTunes Match and don't go anywhere near iCloud music library. Ouch.

http://www.marco.org/2015/07/31/apple-music-matches-files-with-metadata-only
I highly recommend disabling iCloud Music Library and migrating away from any reliance you have on iTunes Match. You can still listen to Apple Music without them. Don’t let these cloud-matching “features” anywhere near your music collection.
 
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This explains why, for example, Macworld editor Susie Ochs found that a live Phish album was replaced by studio versions of the same tracks.

The same thing happened to me. When iCloud Music Library loaded my phone with music I have on my Mac, Jellyfish "Live at Bogart's" (or maybe it was "Radio Jellyfish") was studio versions of the same songs. It didn't touch the files on my Mac, though.
 
I have a Kiss live album that Apple Music refuses to just upload. No matter what I add to the song titles (Live, Live in Los Angeles, Live at Dodger Stadium, etc.), it replaces the songs with the studio versions. Same with a couple of Dave Matthews Band live albums. But as the poster above me stated, the files are just fine on my Mac. It's only trying to listen to them from an iOS device that the wrong versions are played.
 
Interesting. That confirms my earlier suspicion. Note that if you have iTunes Match but not Apple Music, it still behaves just like before (i.e. matching based on the acoustic fingerprint only). I wonder what it does if someone subscribes to both?
 
Interesting. That confirms my earlier suspicion. Note that if you have iTunes Match but not Apple Music, it still behaves just like before (i.e. matching based on the acoustic fingerprint only). I wonder what it does if someone subscribes to both?
I believe if you subscribe to Apple Music iCloud Music Library replaces iTunes Match. And iCloud Music Library doesn't do digital fingerprinting.
 
I believe if you subscribe to Apple Music iCloud Music Library replaces iTunes Match. And iCloud Music Library doesn't do digital fingerprinting.
iCloud Music Library is used by both Apple Music and iTunes Match. It's basically just the library in the cloud. The matching algorithm is a separate issue. It's not obvious which (i.e. fingerprint or meta-data) should have priority if the user subscribes to both Music and Match ...
 
File under "just for the record" -- assorted weirdnesses encountered as my cloud library was stumbling into its existence:

I still can't figure out why one of my uploads occurred. I don't think I changed anything in the one track of an iTunes-purchased album, but one of its tracks got uploaded instead of just marked as Purchased. For the life of me I can't figure it out. I checked in my purchases for my account, and the entire album is still available for redownloading, so it's not like the original track "vanished" from iTunes because the rights holder withdrew liclensing or something, thereby forcing an upload.

Oh well. I'm just sayin'. If I see another one like that then I'll start doing some feedback to Apple. With this one, I can't prove I didn't somehow alter this one track's metadata, or do something weird like maybe buy that one track first on a mobile device and then transfer it to my iTunes library, and later buy the rest of the album from the iTunes app's store tab.

It should not make a difference to do that, but it might, I guess. Anyway I don't think that was my scenario. So I'm mystified. It's also remotely possible I first bought tracks from the album from iTunes before they did 256AAC and then I decided to get the CD and ripped it to AAC format, then maybe I completed my digital album purchase to get iTunes Plus format (remember they had some special offers for awhile like that) and then maybe I messed up when deleting "duplicates", leaving that one track in ripped AAC format at a lower quality or something, anyway it doesn't match, apparently, so it's an upload, reason unknown.

=====

I also have one ripped track of an album that was stuck on status Waiting for almost 24 hours even though many other changes were processed meanwhile. I don't know why that hapened. It's a Francis Cabrel track of an old CD, his Fragile album. The names of the tracks are in French. This track had a grave accent in the title, which was originally "Dernière Chanson". I noticed that for some reason it became Derniere Chanson when the CD titles were supplied, if they were supplied by Gracenote or edited by iTunes of that era, I don't remember. Anyway the song had no accent in it as of entry to my library a long long time ago. I changed it awhile back to have the accent, before I turned on the cloud library.

I half-wondered if it got hung up on Apple's censorship gig, i.e. did it think that "dernière" was a misspelling of derrière (one's behind, or butt) and translated it as "ass" and censored it?

Then I realized that was, well, a stretch. So I figure the upload failed on a net error.

Anyhow on the upload, it failed, all it said was something like "Error occurred" and a little yellow triangle or something popped onto the status like an asterisk, sort of, and the status went to Waiting. The yellow tag went away, I don't know when, maybe on relaunch. The library in the cloud had refreshed a few times since then but that one still said Waiting. I changed the title to "Dernière Chanson (The Last Song)" and it didn't even give that warning about how an upload was pending, it just took the new name even with status Waiting.

I think it just lost track of that error having occurred for some reason. Tonight I noticed it had finally uploaded with the name I had provided most recently. So maybe my net connection glitched when that track was going up before and somehow the error and the Waiting status cancelled each other out re further action. for quite a long time, through several times of being online or offline, and some app relaunches as well.
 
iCloud Music Library is used by both Apple Music and iTunes Match. It's basically just the library in the cloud. The matching algorithm is a separate issue. It's not obvious which (i.e. fingerprint or meta-data) should have priority if the user subscribes to both Music and Match ...
Ah ok. So it sounds like Music is taking priority in some cases? I guess I don't understand why they wouldn't use the same algorithm. Unless it has something to do with Music not having all the tracks iTunes does?
 
Unless it has something to do with Music not having all the tracks iTunes does?
And they want to minimise the number of songs uploaded (as it costs them storage space on their servers, bandwidth for the initial upload to Apple and bandwidth during downloads as they cannot propagate user-specific songs to their CDNs as well)?
 
Anyone figured out a way to bypass the matching algorithm yet?

For instance: I have a "Artist - Song (Live)" that :apple:Music would automatically replace with "Artist - Song" (the studio album version). Can I change the tags in such a way that :apple:Music will leave this alternate version alone?
 
Anyone figured out a way to bypass the matching algorithm yet?

For instance: I have a "Artist - Song (Live)" that :apple:Music would automatically replace with "Artist - Song" (the studio album version). Can I change the tags in such a way that :apple:Music will leave this alternate version alone?

I've found sometimes if you remove the songs from IML, change the song titles to something random (add a bunch of random letters at the beginning of the title) and then match it, it will upload instead of incorrectly match. This doesn't work 100% of the time, because I've found it still sometimes tries to match uploaded songs, but it's the best we have right now lol.
 
I've found sometimes if you remove the songs from IML, change the song titles to something random (add a bunch of random letters at the beginning of the title) and then match it, it will upload instead of incorrectly match. This doesn't work 100% of the time, because I've found it still sometimes tries to match uploaded songs, but it's the best we have right now lol.

I tried this and it worked for a little while, but now most of my uploaded songs have been changed to Apple Music in in iTunes and it's streaming the wrong songs. As a person with a lot of live albums, demos and alternate versions of songs this is a huge issue for me. I'm tired of constantly removing, renaming and re-uploading my music. It shouldn't be this much work to enjoy my music collection.

I think that I'm going to stick with Google music because at least with them I can flag incorrect matches and then it automatically uploads my version of a song, and unlike Spotify I can stream my local music. I will watch to see if Apple Music fixes the matching issues before my trial is up, but it is unusable the way it is right now.
 
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I think that I'm going to stick with Google music because at least with them I can flag incorrect matches and then it automatically uploads my version of a song.

Thisssss is what I'm waiting for. I have a lot of live/demo/unreleased tracks too, and it's pretty impossible to get them all to work.
 
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