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Apple Sending Out iTunes Match Renewal Notices to U.S. Users

iTunes Plus Upgrade Workaround?

So here's what I want to know:

iTunes Match has been suggested by a number of people as a method of doing an iTunes Plus upgrade (from old DRM'd, 128K tracks) now that the upgrade no longer exists in the store. In my case, I bought a bunch of Final Fantasy soundtracks back when they were DRM'd, but they got removed from the store before I'd upgraded them, and they just got added back this week... except now no Plus upgrade option. Dang.

Apparently Match will let me effectively upgrade all these to 256K, un-DRM'd files, which would be awesome, if I match them all then delete the cruddy ones and let them re-download.

Assuming that's the case, what I'm curious about is what happens if/when I let my subscription lapse a year later? Obviously nobody will know until at least a couple weeks from now, and my assumption is that if I try to re-download any of the tracks at that point I'll get the DRM'd 128K version again, but I'm kinda curious.

Either way, it's a whole heck of a lot cheaper than re-buying all the albums, and actually I'm pretty sure cheaper than a Plus upgrade would have been for that much music--just a question of whether backing up the tracks is on me or not.
 
I love this service. It's just about the only "iTunes" anything I actually like.

I'm surprised to hear that a lot of people are still having difficulty using it... I have had zero problems with iTunes Match since day one.

Whenever I get new music, I throw it in iTunes on my desktop and it's automatically on my phone without me having to do anything. Brilliant. Renew me for another 10 years please.
 
Makosuke said:
So here's what I want to know:

iTunes Match has been suggested by a number of people as a method of doing an iTunes Plus upgrade (from old DRM'd, 128K tracks) now that the upgrade no longer exists in the store. In my case, I bought a bunch of Final Fantasy soundtracks back when they were DRM'd, but they got removed from the store before I'd upgraded them, and they just got added back this week... except now no Plus upgrade option. Dang.

Apparently Match will let me effectively upgrade all these to 256K, un-DRM'd files, which would be awesome, if I match them all then delete the cruddy ones and let them re-download.
Click to expand...

Kind of. What I suspect happened is that the iTMS revamped a whole bunch of master tracks to the plus format at the same time, but not all. To this day I am stuck with an inexplicable two dozen or so songs that are in the old DRM locked 128k format, and redownload as such from iTunes-in-the-Cloud, despite my having taken every Plus upgrade offer and THEN iTunes Match. Nothing I do appears to have any ability to upgrade those tracks.

FWIW on the main topic... I suspect many of the folks having trouble are atypical users. That doesn't excuse the problems with the service, but puts them in perspective -- they don't affect most people in normal usage. I was frustrated at the 25k announcement because I had too large a library, so I spent my next sick day pruning the collection of pure chaff, and there turned out to be an awful lot of it. I got things down into the 12k songs range even keeping dozens and dozens of bootlegs. It's astounding just how much filler builds up in a music collection. Those of us, and I include myself in this to some extent, who are digital media hoarders are NOT who iTunes Match was designed for.

After fine-tuning, re-ripping some non-matches, re-sourcing others, and basically doing what I could to troubleshoot, I'm very happy now with a ~14k song library of which around 11k songs are matched, ~1k are purchased, ~1.5k are bootlegs that won't match, and a few hundred are my own performance recordings... leaving probably only 200-250 songs that should be matched but are not (such as Tool and Def Leppard songs that are excluded from iTMS). Given the scope of the service, this is a pretty solid success rate. And I love being able to access it all on any iDevice or Mac that I have anywhere.
 
Nice that they warn you. Hate it when companies don't and slyly take my money :p

Of course that's my fault entirely, but nice touch!
 
Love my iTunes Match. It is already worth the $25/year just for the convenient access to all my music on all my iOS devices/computers. When it starts streaming on more than just my Mac, It'll be worth far more than what I'm paying for the service.

I can understand that 25,000 tracks might be limiting to some people. I have 10,000 songs currently and I am hardly a music enthusiast. But $2/month isn't a bad deal for its limitations.
 
tarasis said:
Same issue for me, I have 26,000 tracks and it won't let me sign up. I'd pay a bit more if they offered the option but they don't so I'm considering trying Amazon's solution.

Most of my stuff won't match as its soundtracks, many are limited editions and aren't available digitally anywhere so iTunes doesn't have a hope in hell of recognizing them.
Click to expand...

remove 1000 to get it under 25k.

Sign up and put them back. It just wont sync past 25k unless you bought them from iTunes. Thats what I did.

itunes.jpg
 
Windlasher said:
remove 1000 to get it under 25k.

Sign up and put them back. It just wont sync past 25k unless you bought them from iTunes. Thats what I did.
Click to expand...

Thanks Windlasher.

I presume you have to actually remove them rather than simply disabling 1000 tracks? The thing I dislike about this idea is that future tracks won't get uploaded unless I remove yet more tracks.
 
I'd much rather pay the equivalent to $8 more a month to have more music than I could ever listen to a month (Spotify), that can also be streamed and downloaded for offline listening.

Not renewing.
 
I like iTunes match on my computers, but in iOS 6 it is a complete disaster. You can't delete songs that you have copied to your phone (so that you can listen when you don't have wifi) unless you turn it off on your phone. I have had all kinds of weirdness with it after iOS 6. It was fairly nice under iOS 5. Hopefully, Jonnie Ive can fix the Forstall disasters in iOS6 like the match implementation.
 
tarasis said:
Thanks Windlasher.

I presume you have to actually remove them rather than simply disabling 1000 tracks? The thing I dislike about this idea is that future tracks won't get uploaded unless I remove yet more tracks.
Click to expand...

I dragged them to a folder on the desktop.

Create 2 folders

Drag out 1/2. let it upgrade the remaining 1/2.

Drag out the upgraded tracks and put the 1st 1/2 back.

let it upgrade those, then put the other 1/2 back.

Be careful. I had a bunch get stuck and had a lot of the ones with explicit lyrics replaced with the mild ones. I don't really care but 2 live crew just isn't the same without all of the dirty words.

As I stated before I probably wont be renewing. I think there are many bugs and it has cost me a bunch of songs that I had to restore from backup.

Its a good way to upgrade all of your songs, albeit a bit of work.

I collect music and was a DJ for many years which is why I have a huge collection. Maybe the reason it gets stuck is only on large libraries but its still enough of an annoyance to piss me off.
 
I'm looking forward to not wasting another $25.
No renew for me--total reliance on a strong data/cell signal makes this unusable on my iPhone.
 
Windlasher said:
I dragged them to a folder on the desktop.

Create 2 folders

Drag out 1/2. let it upgrade the remaining 1/2.

Drag out the upgraded tracks and put the 1st 1/2 back.

let it upgrade those, then put the other 1/2 back.

Be careful. I had a bunch get stuck and had a lot of the ones with explicit lyrics replaced with the mild ones. I don't really care but 2 live crew just isn't the same without all of the dirty words.

As I stated before I probably wont be renewing. I think there are many bugs and it has cost me a bunch of songs that I had to restore from backup.

Its a good way to upgrade all of your songs, albeit a bit of work.

I collect music and was a DJ for many years which is why I have a huge collection. Maybe the reason it gets stuck is only on large libraries but its still enough of an annoyance to piss me off.
Click to expand...

You are one brave person. I did have some tracks that I needed to upgrade to 256K but I can guarantee you that you have tons of crap in those songs (by crap I mean that what they replaced it with is not what you had). The matching is inconsistent and bizarre and often I don't find out how it screwed things up until many months later.

For example, I have an album that has explicit lyrics. Track one matched with the clean version, track 2 the explicit, track 3 back to clean, etc.

However, I have little sympathy for people that had iTunes screw up their pirated music. I'm not saying that nothing in my library is questionable, but if someone had problems with music that they don't have a copy of, then it's hard to feel sorry for those people.

I keep one library on my main machine that is in lossless format for the most part and then download or stream to all the other machines and devices. But even with extremely mainstream albums that I ripped myself in lossless from the CD, iTunes match gets at least one track it can't match on a ridiculously high number of albums. I would guess there are a lot of people who replaced all their music with whatever match hooked them up to, that just haven't discovered that they lost what they had.
 
Nunyabinez said:
However, I have little sympathy for people that had iTunes screw up their pirated music.
Click to expand...

This. Also, if you legitimately own the music, iTunes Match likely won't pose problems other than some non-matches of excluded tracks (again, Tool and Def Leppard come to mind). If you own it through iTMS, you don't even need match because you can already cloud it. If you have the source CD, you can re-rip it if need be until it matches correctly (and let's be real here, most silver store-bought CDs match properly). If you bought it off another service then yeah it's a crapshoot because it depends whether that service has lock-in or not. But if it's non-DRM stuff it should be the same as if you own the CD... just get it again if it fails, and retry; and most stuff should match properly anyway. It's the guys wondering why their 50 gigs of Torrentazos downloads aren't syncing up that are angriest with Match.
 
Here's my final post on the Apple support (!) site:

This past weekend, I completely deleted and restored my iTunes library, verified all files weren't corrupted, re-did the Genius and iTunes Match parts, and the 4002/4001 error persists. I've tried calling Apple and, in my 90 minutes of trying, got nowhere. In this final go-round, I've got > 8 hours into this project (trying to fix a product that "just works"), and I'm throwing in the towel.

I've re-evaluated my listening activities, and have just subscribed to Pandora One for a year to discover new music, and will purchase tracks from either Amazon or the iTunes store (whichever has the better deal) for my long-term music enjoyment. I wish iTunes Music Match and the concomitant iCloud service would have worked better for me, but the time and aggravation I've experienced trying to get this service to work are deal breakers for me.​

I'm done debugging a product I had to pay for - with little to NO support. Adios iTunes Match.
 
Mike Valmike said:
This. Also, if you legitimately own the music, iTunes Match likely won't pose problems other than some non-matches of excluded tracks (again, Tool and Def Leppard come to mind). If you own it through iTMS, you don't even need match because you can already cloud it. If you have the source CD, you can re-rip it if need be until it matches correctly (and let's be real here, most silver store-bought CDs match properly). If you bought it off another service then yeah it's a crapshoot because it depends whether that service has lock-in or not. But if it's non-DRM stuff it should be the same as if you own the CD... just get it again if it fails, and retry; and most stuff should match properly anyway. It's the guys wondering why their 50 gigs of Torrentazos downloads aren't syncing up that are angriest with Match.
Click to expand...

Why do you assume that just because someone has lots of music that they pirated it? I have 20 Uhaul book boxes full of CDs in the basement that I own and ripped into my library. It took me months but it also freed up a wall in my office. I have also purchased over $8K of music from iTunes. Not saying that EVERYTHING in my library is 100% kosher, but 99% of it is.
 
Worst Apple product / service I've ever used. Less than 10% of my music matched and the service was as slow as can be.
 
Mike Valmike said:
...If you have the source CD, you can re-rip it if need be until it matches correctly (and let's be real here, most silver store-bought CDs match properly)...
Click to expand...
Incorrect. I have numerous CD's that, no matter how I rip them (iTunes or other product), certain tracks will not match. And I can rip directly into iTunes, or rip them with another product with verification on, and there are no errors. I can create perfect FLAC copies, create MP3's from them, then try to import - with NO success. I've just tried with two random ones from my nearby shelf of problem CD's, and Muleskinner Blues (track 4 from Deke Dickerson's Mr. Entertainment album) and Gabriel's Message (track 12 from the Dale Warland Singers Christmas with the Dale Warland Singers album) tracks both will not upload or match...no matter how many times I try (the rest of the album matches perfectly). I could go on and on and waste more time, but there are problems...legitimate problems that paid users and legal owners of CD's have that cannot be waved away with a simple "it's probably just pirates" explanation.
 
I was really excited about this a year ago, but since subscribing to Spotify Premium (mostly so I can listen offline on my iOS device at the gym--the free service was fine for me otherwise) I've become much less interested. I don't think I'll renew. And just in case, I'm going through the remaining 100 or so of my old M4P files to upgrade them to M4A while I can. :D

Also of note, Apple isn't just sending out renewal notices. I disabled auto-renew as soon as I signed up, and they sent me a simple expiration notice with instructions for renewing if I want to--two weeks ago (30 days before its expiration), at that, so either this news story is a bit slow, they sent them out in batches, or renewal and non-renewal notices are different.
 
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