iTunes Match

[ormie]

I've just subscribed to Apple's iTunes Match and I'd like to find tutorials on how to use it. I don't want to delete anything from iTunes before finding out how to administer my account as I don't want to lose any music etc if I make a mistake. I'm looking for tutorials, etc to help me. Any suggestions worth a look?

 

[brightjc@me.com]

iTunes Match

I've had iTunes Match since not long after it came out. If you just simply turn it on it will scan through your music and match (thus the name) your music with music in the iTunes Store. It will then upload any other music which isn't in the iTunes Store. Depending upon the size of your music library, (I have 5000ish songs) it could take quite a while. You can still use other functions (playing music, TV Show or looking at the store, etc) while this happens.
Once this is done you can if you need to re-download any/all of your music. You can also play any of your music on an iPad, iPhone, iPod, or AppleTV straight from the cloud as long as your device has an internet connection.
Good luck with it. It wouldn't do any harm to back up your iTunes library to an external drive first though but you should be fine in any case. iTunes Match won't delete any of your music.

 

[Lunfai]

Scan your library and it'll try and match the songs to their own itunes database. Once it confirms that all your songs are available in the cloud you can either keep all your local files or delete them. Ive just deleted them but you can put them on an external hard drive and free up a lot of space on your computer.

You can also enjoy all of your music in the cloud now. If you want to listen to music on your iphone without Internet connection, you can download them for offline listening.

 

[finario]

I've been using iTunes match since it came out and generally like it, but just a word of warning about deleting songs. I deleted several thousand songs with intent of re-downloading the higher bit rate version, but didn't download them immediately.

An issue developed with my iTunes library where iTunes Match updates would never complete/sync, and the deleted songs were greyed-out and I couldn't re-download. There are several threads out there on the issue: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4390963?start=30&tstart=0.

I was able to restore to a Time Machine backup of my iTunes library and recover most of the files, but evidently Apple is of little help in these kinds of situations, advising you to restore from CD backups, etc.

There's also an issue with iOS 7.1.1 (on a 4S, at least) where iTunes Match appears to be the cause of the phone filling up with 'Other' space automatically within a few hours, even after a complete reset. I have it turned off for now.

 

[ormie]

Ok. Thank you for the help. Appreciated.

 

[mic j]

I have been using it over a year now and and generally quite satisfied and agree with the other contributors comments.

The only thing I find really frustrating is once your library has been scanned, if you make any metadata changes (changes to cover art come to mind), Match will see the change and change it back to what was originally scanned. So far, the only way I have found to get around this is to edit the metadata with an external editor and save it. Delete the file from both iTunes and iCloud. Wait 24 hours (it can take some period of time for the iCloud serves to make it's changes). Add the edited file back into iTunes, then let Match do it's thing.

Quite a process just to update some metadata.

If anyone has a more streamline process for this, please let me know.

 

[AnorexicPig]

I have been using it over a year now and and generally quite satisfied and agree with the other contributors comments.

The only thing I find really frustrating is once your library has been scanned, if you make any metadata changes (changes to cover art come to mind), Match will see the change and change it back to what was originally scanned. So far, the only way I have found to get around this is to edit the metadata with an external editor and save it. Delete the file from both iTunes and iCloud. Wait 24 hours (it can take some period of time for the iCloud serves to make it's changes). Add the edited file back into iTunes, then let Match do it's thing.

Quite a process just to update some metadata.

If anyone has a more streamline process for this, please let me know.

Totally agreed, I was changing some album art for my songs, and they would revert back to the old ones again and again. As recommended by someone in apple discussion forums, I deleted my whole library, and iTunes Match, restored from TM backup, changed the covers and then turned on iTunes Match and re-did the whole scanning thing again.

Now it works fine, and other than this Metadata problem, iTunes match has been a huge boon for me, freeing up space on all my devices as well syncing all the new songs I add to every device.

 

[JPM42]

Totally agreed, I was changing some album art for my songs, and they would revert back to the old ones again and again. As recommended by someone in apple discussion forums, I deleted my whole library, and iTunes Match, restored from TM backup, changed the covers and then turned on iTunes Match and re-did the whole scanning thing again.

Now it works fine, and other than this Metadata problem, iTunes match has been a huge boon for me, freeing up space on all my devices as well syncing all the new songs I add to every device.

As someone who has also suffered from the artwork reversion problem, did resetting your iTunes library fix the problem? In other words, if you change the artwork, do the changes stick, without any workaround?

 

[AnorexicPig]

As someone who has also suffered from the artwork reversion problem, did resetting your iTunes library fix the problem? In other words, if you change the artwork, do the changes stick, without any workaround?

I fixed the problem by first deleting all my songs from my mac (which serves as the hub for iTunes Match), which led to all the songs from iTunes Match also being deleted (I chose the option when deleting songs-also remove from the cloud).

Before doing this, I turned off iTunes match on all my iOS devices. Then once I was 100% sure that my iTunes match was empty, I used my Time Machine backup to bring back my song library back in iTunes. Then I updated all the album art and meta data related stuff.

Once I was satisfied with my metadata and album art, I finally turned on iTunes Match and let it do it's matching and stuff again.

Once the process was complete, I turned on iTunes Match on all my devices.

The Songs showed up on my iphones and ipads, but album art was missing on most of the songs on iOS devices. So I restarted all the iPhones and iPads (my girlfriend also uses iTunes match connected to my account), and finally album art started updating once I went into Music>songs on the iOS devices, and weirdly I had to leave the music app at the songs tab on iOS devices for the album art to appear. If I went back to the home screen, the album art would stop updating.

Finally, after all this, it has been working flawlessly.

 

[whsbuss]

Just read thru this old thread and need a question answered. I am very OCD about my music. All my music in the iTunes library have all the metadata and cover art matched to what's in Apple's store. In fact, for music from other sources I have matched the metadata with Apple so that the correct one in their store matches my local stuff. For example, if a song is re-mastered in iTunes but I have an original version, I match the local metadata so it matches the original in iTunes store.

I'm considering iTunes match so I can relieve the sync'd music on my iPhone since space is a premium. All of my library is managed on my MBP with complete backup to my NAS and of course, Time Machine.

So if I subscribe using my MBP for the search/match will my local music still be in my MBP library? I assume after all is done, I would turn off syncing my iPhone music and playlists?

 

[brightjc@me.com]

Yes, your mac won't erase your music. It just notes what you have and uploads anything that isn't on iTunes

 

[whsbuss]

Yes, your mac won't erase your music. It just notes what you have and uploads anything that isn't on iTunes

Thanks for the response.