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I just deleted my 3000+ Matched tracks and am now downloading it all in 256kbps non-DRM goodness. If many people are doing this (as I suspect they are), no wonder Apple's servers are taking a pounding.

Wait, you can do this? :eek:
 
Anyone else find the latest iTunes on Windows is a real memory hog when doing the Match? So much so, that my computer ends up freezing and then iTunes says there was a network error. :mad:
 
Wait, you can do this? :eek:

That's what many people joined this service for; not for access to your music anywhere in the world, but to upgrade all your music to 256KBit AAC.


( I have a few songs from 2001 that I only made a copy in 64Kbs) only had a 20Gb HD :eek:

iTunes Match doesn't touch anything that is below 96 KBit. Would be nice if you tried converting them to 128 KBit, matching, and then report how well this worked. There is unfortunately the possibility that 64 KBit is so bad that iTunes Match won't recognize it, that's why I would like to know.


If few seconds make such big difference then this algorithm is quite a failure.

It's not the some song then, is it? And the example that I had with all songs consistently shorter on my CD than on the iTunes Store, heaven knows what they've done to it. Like making the music play 5 percent faster to fit more songs on a CD. I wouldn't expect that to match. I also have multiple copies of some songs, coming from different CDs, and they are _not_ matched as duplicates, meaning that iTunes Match found they are different songs which it all had.
 
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That's what many people joined this service for; not for access to your music anywhere in the world, but to upgrade all your music to 256KBit AAC.

Yep, I joined up for this reason and to have all my older DRM iTunes refreshed without the DRM. Cheaper than using the iTunes+ upgrade method.
 
What a screw up.

Yeah it's a huge mistake to have a product so popular that everyone wants to sign up the moment it's released, thus choking up the servers.

Everyone should make a mistake like that

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Explain how its not a screw up?

- 2 days ago they prematurely open Match across the world, charge people and are then forced to refund them because they forgot to update the TOS.

given that it was only one day early they likely didn't HAVE to refund anyone, but it was cleaner than trying to program in a terms and condition change and extension on the folks that had signed up.

- Yesterday they launch, resulting in the iTunes servers being very slow for most of the day.

- Last night the authentication system completely died and was down for the pest part of the night, intermittently coming back online.

- Then they finally release Match, and have to close it within a day as their tiny server farm (NOT A CLOUD) cant handle the load.

All of which was caused by everyone and their brother wanting to sign up right now. If folks weren't so crazy to jump in right away there would be much fewer to no issues.

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My guess is that, in at least 18-months time, iTunes Match will become a free feature

Nope. The labels won't allow it. And unlike Google and Amazon, Apple doesn't roll without their partners on board.

IF Apple wanted to do this for free etc they would have from the start. Reduce the need for storage AND the negative PR of folks that paid money just a couple of months ago being pissed that now it's free. Rather like all those folks that had just renewed Mobile Me a month before only to have it cut to be replaced by iCloud and rather than getting a refund they got an extra month (but folks that were about to expire got as much as a year for free). If they demanded a refund they had to agree to a full cancellation of the account with deletion of all data and if they signed up for icloud when it launched like two months later none of it would be restored. meaning they were more or less told to suck it up and get over it.

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iTunes match was obviously overloaded with people joining. Apple wasn't ready capacitywise.

No system is going to be ready capacity wise when you have millions of folks demanding something NOW. Even if the servers could handle 100 million connections at the same time, the incoming connections (which are not under Apple's control) likely couldn't and would bog it down. Same as if it wasn't Apple releasing whatever.

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Here's a question I have: say I subscribe for a year and my library is matched and upgrade to the iTunes versions of songs...when my subscription lapses will I still be able to use iTunes in the Cloud to download those songs that were already matched when I was subscribed?

If you bought it from iTunes, yes. If it was matched. No. If you aren't paying you lose. Which is why iTunes Match is advertised as $25 YEARLY
 
It's not the some song then, is it?

Sample waveform determines that, not extra 2 seconds of silence in the end for example. I myslef have 5 versions of Wish you were here by Pink Floyd and 3 of the songs are longer from 4 to 7 seconds, but if you put song to song visually they all match, still iTunes Match fails to match any of those songs even the one i bought on iTunes.
 
As usual the information level in a message from Apple is very close to nil.
Apple is just not ready for centralized services - probably a part of the reason why enterprises are out of reach to the fruit-company

There is no money for company like Apple to be made there. That's why they don't go there.
 
Still confused on what Match is actually doing. It originally claimed to upload ~9k out of 15k. A day later, after setting up smart playlists to track this stuff, the Matched list is ~11k full and the Uploaded list is 1k long.

Now the Errored list is nearly 3k long. Tried a handful of "Error" songs, they play just fine, and no hint from iTunes or iCloud about what exactly the "Error" might be.

Turned Match on on an iPad - working quite well. Turned it on on an ATV2 - not so good - scrolling through the list is horrible, unacceptably horrible - went back to "sync"ing directly to the library.

For such a big change in The Way Things Are Done, at this point I'd give iTunes Match a solid B+. Pretty darn good for a 1.0 from Apple!
 
Still confused on what Match is actually doing. It originally claimed to upload ~9k out of 15k. A day later, after setting up smart playlists to track this stuff, the Matched list is ~11k full and the Uploaded list is 1k long.

Now the Errored list is nearly 3k long. Tried a handful of "Error" songs, they play just fine, and no hint from iTunes or iCloud about what exactly the "Error" might be.

Turned Match on on an iPad - working quite well. Turned it on on an ATV2 - not so good - scrolling through the list is horrible, unacceptably horrible - went back to "sync"ing directly to the library.

For such a big change in The Way Things Are Done, at this point I'd give iTunes Match a solid B+. Pretty darn good for a 1.0 from Apple!

It's great when it works. For me though it doesn't work at all.
 
Still confused on what Match is actually doing. It originally claimed to upload ~9k out of 15k. A day later, after setting up smart playlists to track this stuff, the Matched list is ~11k full and the Uploaded list is 1k long.

I may be wrong, but I suspect that the difference in the uploaded numbers may have been due to album artwork. Do you add your own artwork?

Mine comes up with some very large numbers for uploads, but the majority are artwork. Matching has been at over 80% for me so far, which is slightly better than I was expecting.

Not sure about your issue with errors. I haven't had any yet (touch wood).
 
Ask the guy who said he ripped a lot of his 16,000 songs (a lot of 80's CDs) if he still owns every single one.

Not currently having "every single one" is a lot different from "ripping then selling the CDs on eBay", or as you said:

Most of my collection came from CD's which I've long since sold as I never used them after discovering MP3 and using a hard drive "jukebox".

Loaning a CD and not getting it back (so that you don't have "every single one") is not the same as stealing music by selling the CD after ripping it and keeping the ripped copy.

The word is piracy.
 
iTunes 10.5.2 (11) Bug?

Perhaps addressed before but I just noticed that in iTunes 10.5.2 (11) that right clicking on any Library item in the left pane in iTunes produces an 'Eject Disk' as the only, and seemingly strange, option. Choosing this option on any of my playlist results in no apparent change expectantly. It seems that among others, the contextual menu would more likely be showing options relative to the library item in question such as 'Delete Playlist'?!

Just curious if this is indeed a bug.:confused:
 
Still confused on what Match is actually doing. It originally claimed to upload ~9k out of 15k. A day later, after setting up smart playlists to track this stuff, the Matched list is ~11k full and the Uploaded list is 1k long.

Now the Errored list is nearly 3k long. Tried a handful of "Error" songs, they play just fine, and no hint from iTunes or iCloud about what exactly the "Error" might be.

Turned Match on on an iPad - working quite well. Turned it on on an ATV2 - not so good - scrolling through the list is horrible, unacceptably horrible - went back to "sync"ing directly to the library.

For such a big change in The Way Things Are Done, at this point I'd give iTunes Match a solid B+. Pretty darn good for a 1.0 from Apple!

1. It uploads all the album artwork, so you would see a huge number initially. As the artwork is uploaded, the number goes down until you are left with songs to be uploaded only.

2. "Error" means something went wrong during the matching process. Since millions of people tried to get on iTunes Match the second it opened, and Apple's servers were a bit under pressure, that may have caused lots of errors. Select "Update iTunes Match" in iTunes in the Store menu, and it will try to match all those files again. If the problem was with Apple's server being overloaded, it should work fine the second time. Of course you _may_ have some damaged files that will _always_ show up as "Error".
 
Mine comes up with some very large numbers for uploads, but the majority are artwork. Matching has been at over 80% for me so far, which is slightly better than I was expecting.

Hot damn. Whenever I popped open iTunes to check status, it was usually...you guessed it...uploading artwork. I think you may have nailed it, thank you!

It's been suggested that AIFFing the "error" songs and then rematching often does the trick. Will try that and see what happens.

ETA: Just checked in again - the "Error" songs have all (without my intervention) turned back into "Waiting".
 
For the avoidance of doubt, I haven't sold any of mine.

Neither have I - 1500+ CDs are boxed and in a storage cabinet in the garage. (It didn't seem to make much sense to waste space in the den after they were ripped to lossless on the Windows Home Server.)

It was WeegieMac who said that he sold his collection after ripping it, and then went rather hysterical about "high horses" when it was discussed.
 
I no longer have any copies on my computer, as I deleted the library when I uploaded/matched using iTunes Match.
 
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Started off great last night for me in the UK at about 10PM, out of just over 7000 tracks, 2300 needed uploading on to the cloud, first 2000 went quite quickly, this last 300 is going at a snails pace though, about 1 track every 7 minutes.
 
One expected and one unexpected positive side effect from iTunes Match:

1. All my music is now DRM free. If I had paid for upgrading all my music with DRM, that would have been more expensive than iTunes Match alone.

2. In my collection there were quite a few songs with defects, like slightly damaged CDs and so on. A huge number of those are now matched, which means the problem is fixed for free. (Number of unmatched songs among these seems higher than average; there were some where I couldn't get any reasonable rip).


One question I have is, did I here that the more people upload the better matching would get? will they make the higher song available to all?

It would be nice, but Apple probably can't do this for legal reasons. There is also the problem that if I had a carefully done 256 kbit rip from a CD in high quality, and someone else ripped an old tape casette at 64 kbit and then converted it to 320 kbit and uploaded it (stupid, but there are plenty of stupid people), someone would have to listen to the stuff and pick the better one out. You would be majorly annoyed if you lost your high quality music that way.
 
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Hot damn. Whenever I popped open iTunes to check status, it was usually...you guessed it...uploading artwork. I think you may have nailed it, thank you!

It's been suggested that AIFFing the "error" songs and then rematching often does the trick. Will try that and see what happens.

ETA: Just checked in again - the "Error" songs have all (without my intervention) turned back into "Waiting".

On various threads in this forum, there have been a number of posts by people who have reported surprisingly low match counts (i.e. around 25%). I suspect that many of these people were taking the number of uploads (including artwork) as the unmatched songs.
 
Mine is going really slowly now, haven't been on for twenty four hours yet but I foresee it taking a lot longer to download the 261 items remaining.
 
You should stop all downloads and resume them.

last night around 23h I selected over 6000+ songs that had been matched by iTunes and deleted the local version to download the Apple DRM free copy, and at 7:30am when I woke up this morning they had all been downloaded without problems.

I have searched on varios sites and people only seem to be having problems uploading. :(


Thank you for the tip, I tried it but it never worked, still slow, worth a try though.

Thank you once again.
 
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