Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.2 with iTunes Match and Audio Distortion Fixes

[ugp]

Since the update I can't get anything to match. Everything is in a waiting status and some items I was trying to re-match now say removed.

Also I cannot get my library to appear on my iPhone 4S. On my iPad everything is fine and I can download Songs/Albums. For my iPhone Albums and Artist appear but when you select one no Songs appear in the list. Just tells me no Music and to download via the Music Store.

 

[emvath]

Just curious, what kind of music do you have that so little of it matched?

Nothing abnormal. I bet at least 95% of it I could find on iTunes. For instance, I have all the studio albums from Carrie Underwood (ripped by myself from store bought CD) but not one song from her was matched.

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Were the songs that switched uploaded? Or some other status (like error or waiting)? Hopefully they'll have way more songs match as time goes on, but will they swap uploaded to matched automatically or would we have to remove files from the cloud and try matching again?

I stopped it before it could upload much. I didn't want to use the bandwidth (that's a whole other mess ) to upload that many songs. I had hoped that it would match most of it or something and I'd only have to upload a few hundred songs.

 

[SuperCachetes]

To those having a problem getting iTunes Match to Match all songs from an album, I've found that one problem is oftentimes ever so slight oddities between the iTunes version and the CD version of a song. A consistent problem I've found has to do with track length on certain tracks, as well as where tracks are cut. I've been able to trim certain songs down in an audio editor to match the length of the iTunes track. For example, when rounded down, if it's 3:55 in iTunes, I trimmed a track that's maybe 3:56.578 to 3:55.346. Suddenly, songs started matching.

You might be onto something, but I'm not sure that's entirely it.

I say this because I've done the opposite: I have songs in my library that I know for a fact I edited so that running time was different than the album version. (In the pre-iPod days, I used to burn mix CDs where I would trim ripped .WAV files so they would fit. For example, I would fade out a song early, removing 0:31 if the CD running time in Roxio was shown as 80:31). I also trimmed out really long intros/outros if I didn't like them on a few occasions.

So I have tracks in my library that I know were not the same length as the CD release, and they have matched up fine. As others have said, it's unmolested tracks that leave me stumped when they are not matched - especially since when I ripped the CD into my library originally, all the tracks were identified by iTunes.

My theory is that Match allows some tolerance between the iTunes track length and users' library track length, and it is probably greater than 1.5 seconds - if certain other conditions are met, like track name, sample match, etc.

 

[CraigM26]

I haven't had any distortion issues but I have had three songs I bought from iTunes mysteriously cut off about 20-30 seconds from their end. On the iPhone the sound goes silent and it still plays. On the PC, it jumps to the next song. So far it's only impacted old DRM songs that I never bothered to update to iTunes plus. I even tried deleting the songs off the computer and downloading them again from the purchased items but even the new downloads cut out in the same place.

 

[stevers]

Album Only

Anyone experience an issue where tracks that show up in iTMS as "album only" will not match?

Coma from the Guns N' Roses album "use your illusion I" doesn't match, and I'm wondering if its because the track shows up online as Album Only.

 

[justinfreid]

Mine was a 16.6 MB Delta Update

I got a 16.6 MB delta update which was downloaded and installed very quickly.
I'm using an up to date Lion install on a Mid 2009 MacBook Pro.

 

[tenton]

The problem was only evident in iTunes 10.5 and 10.5.1, I believe. The distortion introduced is very noticeable - a CD baroque lute music sounded like a very overdriven electric guitar once ripped.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the bug didn't exist before (with people discussing how iTunes handled pre-emphasis). And you can't miss the distortion, it sounded horrid. To the point where you really couldn't hear the music, it was mostly just distortion.

 

[ugp]

Anyone experience an issue where tracks that show up in iTMS as "album only" will not match?

Coma from the Guns N' Roses album "use your illusion I" doesn't match, and I'm wondering if its because the track shows up online as Album Only.

Coma for me matched but Dust N' Bones did not match.

EDIT:
I tried something just to see and on a couple of my tracks so far it has worked. I created an AAC version with iTunes and then deleted the MP3 version. Added to iCloud and the track matched now. Other tracks stalled at "Waiting" but some have matched this way. Give it a try and let me know if anyone else has luck with this.

Another Update:
For tracks I have stuck saying "Waiting" I selected "Update iTunes Match" from the Store menu and let it run through. These tracks for me changed to saying "Removed" and then on that track I can select "Add to iCloud" and they have either matched for uploaded.

 

[techman28]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the bug didn't exist before (with people discussing how iTunes handled pre-emphasis). And you can't miss the distortion, it sounded horrid. To the point where you really couldn't hear the music, it was mostly just distortion.

I attached a PDF print out from iTunes of the list of albums I just imported over the past few days before the update. Can someone take a look at the list and let me know if any of the albums might be pre-emphasis and therefore I should check them out and see if I need to re-import them?

Is someone could, it would really help me out. Thanks.

 

[stevers]

Coma for me matched but Dust N' Bones did not match.

EDIT:
I tried something just to see and on a couple of my tracks so far it has worked. I created an AAC version with iTunes and then deleted the MP3 version. Added to iCloud and the track matched now. Other tracks stalled at "Waiting" but some have matched this way. Give it a try and let me know if anyone else has luck with this.

Another Update:
For tracks I have stuck saying "Waiting" I selected "Update iTunes Match" from the Store menu and let it run through. These tracks for me changed to saying "Removed" and then on that track I can select "Add to iCloud" and they have either matched for uploaded.

Oh sweet, I'll try that. Thanks!

 

[ugp]

Found something interesting...

I took a copy of the new Drake Album which came from iTunes to begin with. Matched the album and 10 of the 20 tracks did not match and had to be uploaded. Not sure why this is... Tried the same thing with the new Nickelback album and worked 100% for the entire album.

 

[Tmelon]

Found something interesting...

I took a copy of the new Drake Album which came from iTunes to begin with. Matched the album and 10 of the 20 tracks did not match and had to be uploaded. Not sure why this is... Tried the same thing with the new Nickelback album and worked 100% for the entire album.

Same. 3 of the songs from the Drake album don't seem to Match for me.

EDIT:

Very strange. Just attempted the whole "Create AAC Version" and then rematching and one of them matched. The other two still don't.

 

[ugp]

Same. 3 of the songs from the Drake album don't seem to Match for me.

EDIT:

Very strange. Just attempted the whole "Create AAC Version" and then rematching and one of them matched. The other two still don't.

Yeah I don't understand why some match after converting to AAC but as long as it works I guess.

 

[RTW]

Some miscellaneous Match comments:

Since the upgrade to 10.5.2, I cannot match new files. It hangs on "Waiting." Prior to this, it would take about 1 minute to match an album that didn't require uploading. I don't know if their servers are overloaded or what, but this cannot be my problem alone.

I have upwards of 30,000 songs in the cloud now, so I'm pretty well-seasoned at this. In my experience, I have learned:

• A. Matches do not generate alternate results when you re-run them, i.e. I've never seen anything change arbitrarily.
• B. Match results "linger" in the cloud after you delete an album, so if you re-add the album and try running Match again, it will generate the same results (and the tracks previously uploaded will still be out there without having to re-upload them).
• C. Tags do not matter at all.
• D. Time lengths do not matter. Yes, editing the tracks a bit can force a match that otherwise didn't match, but I've seen a 5-minute track that is 3 minutes long with 2 minutes of silence at the end match to a 3-minute track with no silence at the end.
• E. Tracks do not necessarily match from their proper albums. I've seen many examples of entire albums that appear to match correctly, only to find that the singles on the album were instead matched to louder, newer, or more compressed tracks from singles compilations, etc. In other words, Match does not recognize the integrity of an album.
• F. Remasters never properly match. Ever. In some cases a 10-track remastered album will match none of the tracks, and in some cases they will match half and half, but rarely have they matched all of them as long as there are different masters out there as well.
• G. For those stumped about why AAC would match better than MP3, we must remember that these are compressed files being compared to compressed files. The "fingerprint" of the file must look different with a slightly different compression scheme, and finer details might be lost, possibly explaining why Match can't "hear" the difference between different masters of the same track.
• H. There is no "loudness" detection in the match algorithm, so the track you end up with may match to a much louder or quieter version that happens to be available on iTunes.
• I. For those stumped about artwork, you must have your artwork tagged/embedded in the file (don't use iTunes' own artwork mechanism which merely stores a local copy of the artwork and assigns it to each file). If artwork doesn't appear in the cloud, you can make a minor tweak to the files (change the genre or the album artist, etc.) and that will force an update to the cloud version and then artwork should appear.
• J. Match maxes out at 25,000 songs that do not have an iCloud Status of "Purchased." You can easily make a playlist to keep track of this. Any track you try to match over 25,000 will return a status of "Exceeded Limit."
• K. Once out in the cloud, tracks will not always appear on all devices. My library showed 33,000 songs on the iPhone but only 31,000 on the iPad. I had to go through the entire library to see what was missing and then "update" the match library using the minor tweak method described above.
• L. The point above is especially true if you add individual songs to an album or artist that has already been matched. The previously matched tracks might suddenly go dim in track listings and the download button will disappear.
• M. Lots of tracks marked "Album Only" in the store will only upload, never match.

Because most advanced users are not reporting these kinds of details online, please copy/paste/send this info to anyone you know who might be interested. If I had seen a list of comments like this it would have saved me some time in the beginning.

RTW

 

[hpman247]

Just wanted to say that after the update, I've had albums match that didn't as well as song that didn't, that now do. Especially some kpop songs and Nickelback.

Also the overall matching process is a lot faster

 

[milo]

Since the upgrade to 10.5.2, I cannot match new files. It hangs on "Waiting."

I've had some match, but now I'm left with about 400 songs that are still "waiting" with no way to do anything with them.

I've also had a number of files that were "error" and I couldn't figure out why that finally switched to matched or uploaded. This was after .2 but that may just be coincidence.

Good list, there are a number of other issues as well. One especially annoying one for me is that I have albums that matched but the downloaded matched files from iTunes stop playing about 30 seconds from the end. Repeated downloads on different machines have the exact same results, looks like the files coming from the iTunes server may be corrupted.

Also some major issues syncing and playing on iOS devices but that will probably require fixing in iOS.

 

[kjs862]

I'm also having a scrolling problem with my MBP.

 

[Rob9874]

I'm also having a scrolling problem with my MBP.

Me too. Very frustrating! Hope they release a fix soon.