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So, you legally purchased those 100K songs, or you ripped them off and are now bitching and complaining that you can't get them all legitimized by Apple? Give 'em and inch and they want a frickin mile! Andrew sounds like a greedy SOB to me.

Some people actually obsessively and legally collect music. Some people create music and have friends who create music. Some people have jobs involving have jobs involving maintaining large collections, whether DJs or media producers. All these people are likely to have (mostly) legal collections of music that well exceed 25,000 songs.
 
My music collection was wiped out when both of my externals crashed on the same day. It was a personal digital armagedon.
SO...though the tracks are gone forever, iTunes doesnt know this yet, and still thinks the files are there.
What is the iTunes match actually checking?
Just song titles? does it analyze the actual file?


I'm in the same exact position. OS X chewed up another hard drive, AND my big Drobo after a reboot. Now wondering if I'll be able to recover my music based upon the iTunes entries. If not, I guess I'll have to go with Piratebay.

It would be nice if, since OS X so easily ruins partition maps, they built in some kind of data recovery to the disc util.
 
I think it's time for Apple to release an iTunes for Android app. If they want to really compete with google, they're going to have to go after Android the same way they went after Windows users.

Because Android products are eating up more and more of the market. I know that I personally will not have another iPhone until I can get it contract-free for under 300 dollars on a pay-as-you-go plan (ie Sprint).

I have an android phone right now that cost me 100 dollars up front and is $25/month plus tax with unlimited text and plenty of voice and 3G data for my needs with no contract.

So using iTunes Match wouldn't cost me $25 a year. It would cost me $25 a year plus $30-50 dollars a month.

I would pay $25 for an iTunes App on Android plus $25/yr for iTunes Match to be able to easily sync/stream my library from my mac pro at home.

If they don't offer it, I'll just keep using google music. Less awesome, but certainly not worth hundreds of dollars a year and a contract lock-in just to avoid having to convert some Apple Lossless albums into MP3 and drag them over to my phone.

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I'm in the same exact position. OS X chewed up another hard drive, AND my big Drobo after a reboot. Now wondering if I'll be able to recover my music based upon the iTunes entries. If not, I guess I'll have to go with Piratebay.

It would be nice if, since OS X so easily ruins partition maps, they built in some kind of data recovery to the disc util.

It's almost certainly going to do audio fingerprinting of the files. This is what the Lala.com sync did, and that's the only reason that Apple bought Lala to begin with...they wanted that fingerprint sync tech and the associated patents.

So it's probably bad news for you.

When I had lala, I experimented with renaming files to see if it could tell if something was what it said it was, or what it sounded like, and it clearly wasn't fooled by metadata or file name changes...it does some kind of fuzzy hash on the audio files themselves. It could recognize ALAC and mp3 and AAC files all the same, and basically seems to have just "skimmed" them really quick and from that fingerprint was able to match them with the library.I had some files which were ALAC and got corrupt with a hard drive failure/recovery, and the last 5-10 seconds were scrambled. It recognized most of them as being valid for matching, but the two with the biggest audio errors did not sync. I had to re-import the CD into iTunes to get lala to like the files.
 
Fix Music

What I really want is something that fixes songs. I have a lot of music (all legally purchased) that is at lower bit rates (ripped it from my legally owned CD's back when hard drives were smaller) and I have some music that somehow is broken, the ends of songs are lost so instead of being 3 minutes and 45 seconds it is 3 minutes and 20 seconds (for example).

What I would like is for iTunes to go through my music library and download the fixed, full length, full bit rate versions of all of my music that it can find. It should move the old copies into another folder and prepare a text report explaining what it did to solve problems and any other problems it noted that are not solved.

This is not hard to do, just time consuming for a human to do. Machines are great at this sort of thing.
 
I can't get iTunes Match to work. I purchased it and while it is scanning, I get this error message..

"We could not complete your iTunes store request. An unknown error occurred. (4010)"

Any advice? Or do you think the service is just overrun at this point and it won't let me go through.
 
I can't get iTunes Match to work. I purchased it and while it is scanning, I get this error message..

"We could not complete your iTunes store request. An unknown error occurred. (4010)"

Any advice? Or do you think the service is just overrun at this point and it won't let me go through.
the service is literally not working right now
 
Prepaid Card? Might work...
Does anyone know any trusted sellers of virtual prepaid cards that are proved to work on iTunes? I'm in the same position: outside US, registered in the US store long time ago using an iTunes gift card :confused:
 
I can't get iTunes Match to work. I purchased it and while it is scanning, I get this error message..

"We could not complete your iTunes store request. An unknown error occurred. (4010)"

Any advice? Or do you think the service is just overrun at this point and it won't let me go through.

I get the same error... I guess there's nothing we can do but wait.
 
Does anyone know any trusted sellers of virtual prepaid cards that are proved to work on iTunes? I'm in the same position: outside US, registered in the US store long time ago using an iTunes gift card :confused:


Visa

I cant guarantee it will work for this though. I've used this concept in the past with a high success rate for trial periods that would have later turned into subscriptions if not cancelled. Vendors usually can't tell if it's a prepaid card/debit card.
 
I saw this blurb in today's slashgear article about the Itunes Match preview:

However, the service is optional and will cost $25 a year. If you don’t want to pay that amount, you can still manually upload the songs you did not purchase from iTunes, although this limit is set to 25,000 songs. And even better is that the 25,000 songs are in addition to your free 5GB of iCloud storage space.

If true, that's pretty interesting. For those of us with meticulously ripped and tagged libraries it looks like it could be possible for us to just upload up to 25,000 tracks to iCloud (without having to pay for all the space those tracks would take up) and still be able to do the streaming/downloading stuff. If that's the case then the $25 yearly fee is just for the matching service--which would be useful for people with slow upload speeds (or bandwidth limits or other reasons they don't want to upload their entire library) or for people with low quality files who want the 256kbps AAC versions.

If true, it looks like iCloud will provide Google Music/Amazon Cloud type functionality for free, and the $25 fee will be an add-on "convenience" type thing.

Of course, with only one source "reporting" this, it could also be a load of BS. Anyone else seen mention of this? I wonder if it's a new addition to better compete against Google/Amazon.

Edit: Link to article I cited: http://www.slashgear.com/itunes-match-beta-released-to-developers-30175090/

Edit2: Anyone know how iCloud deals with ALAC? IIRC, Google music transcodes FLAC down to a lossy mp3 either prior to or after uploading (not sure which). I'm wondering if Apple will take an ALAC down to 256kbps AAC or if they leave them alone.
 
Visa

I cant guarantee it will work for this though. I've used this concept in the past with a high success rate for trial periods that would have later turned into subscriptions if not cancelled. Vendors usually can't tell if it's a prepaid card/debit card.
Thanks a lot for the link! I'm afraid it concerns physical credit cards and not virtual ones, after going through the links... Maybe I should ask my cousin to get a prepaid Visa for me while he is still at the US and see if that works. Hope it does, I really want to use iTunes Match :(
 
It's beta.

But this beta was rushed and is far too buggy and unusable, albeit the issues seem to be on the server side of things.
 
If true, it looks like iCloud will provide Google Music/Amazon Cloud type functionality for free, and the $25 fee will be an add-on "convenience" type thing.

Of course, with only one source "reporting" this, it could also be a load of BS. Anyone else seen mention of this? I wonder if it's a new addition to better compete against Google/Amazon.

Edit: Link to article I cited: http://www.slashgear.com/itunes-match-beta-released-to-developers-30175090/

Edit2: Anyone know how iCloud deals with ALAC? IIRC, Google music transcodes FLAC down to a lossy mp3 either prior to or after uploading (not sure which). I'm wondering if Apple will take an ALAC down to 256kbps AAC or if they leave them alone.

I'm pretty sure its a misunderstood slashgear writer. From the way Apple made it out at the keynote, only music you have bought from the iTunes store will be downloadable, unless you pay the $25 for iTunes Match.
 
I'm pretty sure its a misunderstood slashgear writer. From the way Apple made it out at the keynote, only music you have bought from the iTunes store will be downloadable, unless you pay the $25 for iTunes Match.

I agree with you... up to a point--especially since I haven't seen it corroborated anywhere else (and I've been looking).

But two things give me a little optimism:

1. Streaming also wasn't mentioned at all during the keynote, but we now know Apple is going to allow it.

2. Both Google Music and Amazon Cloud Player have "upped the ante" so to speak, and currently offer the "digital locker" service for free. They don't match anything, but they do allow you to upload your entire library and stream it for free.

Believe me I know it's probably a long-shot... but just wanted to put it out there and see if anyone else had heard anything.
 
So its verified that you need an american visa? and not just an US itunes account?
 
So its verified that you need an american visa? and not just an US itunes account?
As stated above by another member, it asks for a legitimate US credit card during the process, even if you have efficient credit balance from iTunes gift cards. Have't tried it myself though, as the servers are down for good. But I'm afraid I won't be any luckier.
 
It hangs for me on the last 40 or so songs. Every time I restart the process... gradually gets closer.

 
Interestingly, songs started showing up on my phone even though iTunes Match on my computer is stuck at 15 songs to go and about to restart again.

Its hit or miss but I can stream and even download a lot of the songs. I'm finally getting a handle on how this is going to work and I'm really liking it. Although, I'm still curious on if there will be an easy way to preload some music on a phone and how you delete downloads from a device without messing with the music in the cloud.
 
Please consider the following:
5) As more and more ppl use the service chances increase that your songs might already be in the cloud.

2) If I have a title that is 128kpbs and it is not known by iTunes Match it gets uploaded. Maybe it will be reencoded to 256kpbs aac before being uploaded but this does not increase the quality of the title. I wonder if iTunes Match stores the original quality of the song somewhere in their database. So if someone else has the song at 512kpbs aac it should convert it down, reupload it and then upgrade my local copy aswell. I wonder if this is implemented.

Incorrect and no. Only songs that Apple currently sells (and aren't on labels that have opted out of iTunes Match) will be matched. This isn't like Grooveshark where everything is contributed by users.
 
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