How to Use iTunes Match

[milo]

Yet if the track is above 256Kbps, it will lower the matched quality.

But you can see the bitrates of all the files. It doesn't replace anything automatically, just be careful only to replace files that are lower bitrate.

Content only available via Apple devices?

iTunes Match also works on windows.

It has uploaded your songs to the server then. If it matches a song, you get the standard 256Kbps iTunes Store version.

That's if you play it from the server. It doesn't touch whatever file format is in your original iTunes library.

I don't understand all the hates about iTunes Match! It's been great experience and a joy to use for me.

Because other people have had results vastly different from yours. Depends a ton on your library content and how many songs you have.


Great idea, terrible execution.

 

[JuryDuty]

Itunes match is a waste of money when you have services like google play which let you store thousands of songs in the cloud for free.

This. And Google Play works so much better. Too bad--I'd stay in the Apple ecosystem on this one if I could. But I can't. So I won't.

 

[Mums]

I've been struggling with iTunes Match since the beginning. It's pretty bad and has never gotten any better. I've actually slimmed down my collection to make it work for me, but I always wind up going over 25k when I add back in what had been removed. There seem to be an awful lot of 25k+ people out there like me who get stuck once their collection hits the magic number. You would think Apple would have at least upped the limit by now, but they can't even be bothered to fix their terrible matching. Won't be subscribing again unless something significant changes. Sticking with Google Play and I'll be uploading my collection to OneDrive in anticipation of a music app from Microsoft that can take advantage of it. (And if not, I still have all of my music safely stored away as well as on a couple of drives at home.)

Spot on. I liked the idea of iTunes match at first but it never worked properly. I'm using Spotify now for all music except a couple radio programs I stream through iTunes: Drone Zone from Soma FM, and Cryosleep - ambient channels.

 

[VeryVito]

iTunes Match is a perfect example of Apple's Cloud strategy to date:

1. Take a real-world problem that people experience due to lack of local storage space

2. Move it into the cloud, but add even MORE storage limitations.

3. Then tie everything you just removed from the user's device to a single account -- no, not that one, the one you created five years ago, when they called it mac.com.

4. Lock it from the original user, but continue to tell his family members it's available.

5. Send emails to the original mac.com address (ensure the server has been discontinued)

6. Tell the users there is a billing problem.

7. Ensure the iDevice will not retrieve content from the "cloud" (giggle) while the user is driving unless they enter/change and reenter their password at least four times. (Bonus: Have Siri offer to "help" mid keystroke)

8. Automatically bill for the next year's worth of servicing as well.
​

tl;dr: Apple's iCloud/.mac/.me services are still AMAZINGLY terrible, and by integrating them deeper into iOS and OSX, the company is just making everything EVERYTHING worse than it was, say, in the Snow Leopard and iPod days. It's bad for free, but it gets even worse when you pay for the "extras."

 

[andreyirra]

That's the main reason I got iTunes Match. But I haven't noticed any of my CD collection replaced with "high quality" versions. They're all exactly the same as when I imported them (standard MP3 files at 128kbps). I even imported some albums from vinyl, hoping they'd get replaced by higher quality versions. But they weren't either.

The only thing I like about iTunes Match is that I don't have any music files taking up space on my iPhone.

EDIT: I'm going to amend this. I just went back to my iTunes collection and got info on random tracks. It appears that some ripped albums actually have been converted to higher quality, in most cases those that I've had in iTunes for over a year. More recent tracks have not yet been converted. Maybe it takes time...

They are not autoconverted. You hace to delete them from itunes. The song will remain with a cloud icon. If you clock on it then you will download the "upgraded version".



As for me, I had it one years and that was that. It erases all the lyrics. The album art is mismatched, disappears, changes...

Another annoying quirk is the automatic upload. I wanted to add a song and then change the metadata and add artwork. By the time I was changing it (2 seconds after) I always had the legend telling me iTunes Match was underway so I couldn't modify it. Sometimes I would continue changing the metadata just to have it disappear and being changed back to the original wrong one, no artwork included. Sometimes I had to delete the song from Match and then re-add it with the correct info before it got changed again. That's not "just works".

 

[Uofmtiger]

I have used it since the beginning and while I rarely use it, I find it convenient and I like having a backup copy of my files on the cloud in case of a disaster (even if they are lower rez than my lossless files, they are immediately available and my main cloud backup would take weeks or months to restore my library).

I have tried Google Play and it would never take my entire library. It would say it was done when it reached about 8000 songs and when I rescanned, it would just add about a hundred. I have over 23,000 tracks and I ended up giving up on it...however, it also turned me off on their paid music service, since having your own music available was the main reason I tried them.

The way I use it is with Siri in the car and with the AppleTV when my computer is off or when I am away from home. It is also nice for ad free iTunes Radio (which I also find convenient when I am lounging around the house). I feel like I am getting my $25 a year out of it even though it is not the main way I listen to music.

 

[gnasher729]

Hmmmm, never thought about that. So even after you discontinue iTunes Match the 256 Kbps AAC DRM versions of my library that I downloaded from iCloud do not convert back to the original lower quality ones? Thank you for that information.

Exactly. You join iTunes Match for a year. It will replace all music with DRM with DRM free music (if you used iTunes for a long time and have music with DRM). It will replace all lower quality music with 256kbit AAC. You just have to re-download all the music. If you cancel iTunes Match, you keep what you have.

I even had some music at 80kbps which iTunes Match doesn't accept, changed it manually to 128kbps, and then iTunes Match upgraded it.

 

[gnasher729]

Why does it match 12 out of 13 songs of an album that iTunes clearly has? Granted it got 80% of my library right. 10% I knew it wasn't going to match due to live recordings, old hip-hop albums, etc. The remaining 10% should have matched.

I noticed problems with albums that are slightly different in the UK and the USA. That is really common. So you bought an album in the UK, and the one song that isn't in the US version doesn't match. That also explains why some people have problems and others don't. If you bought the CD that is used for iTunes Match, you have no problem.

Another problem for me was old CDs that have since been remastered. iTunes Match often fails to match the old CD in that case.

Interesting experience with music from Amazon: 98 percent got matched, but not everything.

On the other hand, it actually matched a few hundred songs that I recorded from LPs!

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They are not autoconverted. You hace to delete them from itunes. The song will remain with a cloud icon. If you clock on it then you will download the "upgraded version".

You can create a smart playlist that will list all songs that are matched but are not in 256kbit AAC.

 

[blacktape242]

never had a problem with iTunes match, i love the service.

 

[kukheart]

I had iTunes Match but have opted out, basically everything I have is 256 kbps or better. However, the only warning that I give is that if you buy music on iTunes but also found it on CD later it's really annoying. Example, I bought like 50 b-side tracks from Radiohead, and then bought deluxe editions of all the albums, those b-sides included, and imported them all into iTunes, Apple lossless, which is basically the best audio from what I've seen. Deleted everything else, however when syncing to iPhone it never comes out right, showing the album tracks out of order or listing the same album twice. I know all of the iTunes tricks to keep albums perfectly is sync but still annoying.

I put a small example below with the last track of Sgt, Peppers showing new ablum, that album is also all ripped in Apple Lossless.

Just venting for now.

 

[applesith]

Yet ANOTHER link bait garbage article from Lory Gil. Every one of her articles starts with "How to..." with information that is already easily available directly from Apple's website and a million other blogs. It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

Um no, more like MR is a very authoritative domain and they want to increase Google rankings for "itunes match" "how to use itunes match" related queries.

 

[volcanic]

iTunes Match and Family Sharing Not Compatible

I've been a casual user of iTunes Match since it came out, but the biggest issue that's come up for me is the incompatibility with Family Sharing. My partner and I share a single Apple ID account across our devices and he uses Match a lot more than I do (I don't like how it downloads instead of streams my music, filling up storage on the device that then has to be tediously manually deleted song by song).

I was going to move him to a separate Apple ID with Family Sharing however then learned that iTunes Match does not work with Family Sharing so he would not be able to access it. Apple Support told me a year ago this was a feature they were probably going to add.... but nothing has happened since. This makes no sense to me that everyone in a family can not access the music collection that you have purchased and own the cds. This is the biggest iTunes Match Fail that I have experienced.

FWIW, I don't mind these "how to" articles on MacRumors because I often learn some great info in the comments section, more so than in the article itself.

 

[thelookingglass]

Yet ANOTHER link bait garbage article from Lory Gil. Every one of her articles starts with "How to..." with information that is already easily available directly from Apple's website and a million other blogs. It's just a matter of time before MacRumors becomes another cheesy blog full of crap like "5 tips to improve your sex life with Apple products" or "These 5 tips will help you lose weight with the new Apple Watch!" or "5 tips to save you time on your morning commute using Beats radio."

Wait, but what's wrong with these articles? MacRumors would do well to go beyond simply posting Apple news. If some of them end up being semi-informative, that's even better.

 

[unplugme71]

No, what I think is that people do a Google search for things like this, and the first result is usually the one that matches the closest. So when a person types "how do i use itunes match" they get the MR article "how to use itunes match" at the top.

As long as its accurate and current, what does it matter then?

 

[oneMadRssn]

What im trying to point out is what are people still doing on anything itunes for music...Having a itunes library is for grandpas.

I'd rather not agree to pay a monthly fee for the rest of my life for an incomplete catalog that changes all the time for any reason or no reason.

 

[Take Flight]

I imagine something is going to happen to this service with the Beats transition.

I actually haven't used it, but want to go ahead and turn it on to get better versions of some of my library before it goes away or is rolled into the streaming subscription service.

Sounds like the main issue is that you have to do some serious library hygiene on the front end to ensure everything gets matched correctly to Apple's library (proper naming conventions, etc.).

 

[Porco]

Match is a bit rubbish really. It didn't work at all when I first signed up. Then it did, mostly, but was often very slow to do anything.

It frequently fails to match all tracks on mega-selling CDs when imported, which after this length of time is kind of inexcusable. It should also offer much more control over when it updates, because it's quite annoying to have to have internet access to get track names, but then turn it off before you import a CD to make sure that if you have your own artwork to add it doesn't update Match immediately after the import stops… and you don't want to try and add artwork after the fact because that is unreliable.

It stopped working altogether for me on iTunes 10.7 (the last good version of iTunes IMHO), so I had to 'update' my main machine's music library to iTunes 12. Meh.

I've often been on the brink of cancelling, but when it works it can be quite useful. It's in dire need of an overhaul though, regardless of rival services' superiority.

I have said numerous times my most important piece of advice of for anyone considering iTunes Match is to make a clean, separate local back-up of your music (perhaps to a USB hard drive etc) before you do anything. Then if it all goes wrong, you won't lose anything.

 

[Scarpad]

I let my Sub lapse I'm using One Drive I can store up to 50,000 tracks and they show in my Xbox One and my other devices, unfortunately not IOS yet, I also use Amazon Music since I'm a prime member, ITunes match never improved from the inception, it often mismatched artwork or left it out entirely.

 

[decafjava]

What im trying to point out is what are people still doing on anything itunes for music...Having a itunes library is for grandpas.

I'd rather not agree to pay a monthly fee for the rest of my life for an incomplete catalog that changes all the time for any reason or no reason.

Quite, that said I haven't tried iTunes match yet as my entire library (for now) fits on my 128 GB iPhone 6. Plus I live in Europe an we don't have access to iTunes radio.

 

[SmileyDude]

I had iTunes Match but have opted out, basically everything I have is 256 kbps or better. However, the only warning that I give is that if you buy music on iTunes but also found it on CD later it's really annoying. Example, I bought like 50 b-side tracks from Radiohead, and then bought deluxe editions of all the albums, those b-sides included, and imported them all into iTunes, Apple lossless, which is basically the best audio from what I've seen. Deleted everything else, however when syncing to iPhone it never comes out right, showing the album tracks out of order or listing the same album twice. I know all of the iTunes tricks to keep albums perfectly is sync but still annoying.

I put a small example below with the last track of Sgt, Peppers showing new ablum, that album is also all ripped in Apple Lossless.

Just venting for now.

I've had plenty of problems like this with iTunes -- Match or not. The problem usually boils down to a difference in metadata. Make sure everything matches, not just the album name. The number of tracks, the number of discs, the year, the genre, uncheck the compilation box, etc, etc. It doesn't take much for the Music app on the iPhone to decide that you have two songs from two different albums despite them being from the same.

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I'd rather not agree to pay a monthly fee for the rest of my life for an incomplete catalog that changes all the time for any reason or no reason.

Serious question here -- has anyone lost music that was in Match because it suddenly wasn't in the catalog? Without hearing otherwise, I would think it was more like iOS apps that have been pulled from sale -- still available for download for people that had purchased it (assuming that hasn't changed either -- I haven't looked lately).

Seems like at the very least your matched track would convert to an uploaded track.

 

[Dolorian]

I subscribed to iTunes Match recently and I am finding the upload process (Step 3) to be ABSURDLY slow. While it did match about half of my whole library and it has uploaded many songs already I still have 5000+ songs to go in this upload process and at a rate of about less than 200 songs in a period of 24 hours it may well take a month to upload it all. I have stopped the process and started it again several times and have restarted iTunes a few times as well but it stays at about the same speed.

Granted my internet speed is slow by modern standards but speaking from my past experience uploading music to Google Play Music, it shouldn't take this long.

 

[Primejimbo]

I use iTunes Match, and over all I am happy with it. I'm on my 2nd year and it saved me money too. I had so many CDs that were damages and scratched. I was lucky that those CDs got matched and I was able to download a better copy from iTunes.

 

[scapegoat81]

Someone correct me if i'm wrong. If I subscribe to iTunes Match, & the album/songs ARE NOT in the iTunes store, it won't "Match" it, therefore not uploaded to iCloud ?

If that's the case, it's a no-go for me. I really need a service like this, but I have a bunch of albums that are currently not in the iTunes store. I haven't gone through my entire collection, but i'm sure i'll come across many more.

 

[BSben]

Someone correct me if i'm wrong. If I subscribe to iTunes Match, & the album/songs ARE NOT in the iTunes store, it won't "Match" it, therefore not uploaded to iCloud ?

If that's the case, it's a no-go for me. I really need a service like this, but I have a bunch of albums that are currently not in the iTunes store. I haven't gone through my entire collection, but i'm sure i'll come across many more.

If the songs are NOT in the iTunes store, then they will upload from your collection to the cloud.
I have had only one problem with the service, and that is that I have all Kraftwerk albums in German (which i somewhat prefer) iTunes match for some reason thinks it has a match, and when I am using iTunes match to listen or download to my iPhones, iPad it will download the English versions as the German ones are not in the UK store. That is a very minor problem, so for me the service works very well.

 

[scapegoat81]

If the songs are NOT in the iTunes store, then they will upload from your collection to the cloud.
I have had only one problem with the service, and that is that I have all Kraftwerk albums in German (which i somewhat prefer) iTunes match for some reason thinks it has a match, and when I am using iTunes match to listen or download to my iPhones, iPad it will download the English versions as the German ones are not in the UK store. That is a very minor problem, so for me the service works very well.

I appreciate the input. Thanks !