macOS Music Plays old "matched" or "uploaded" cloud copies instead of Apple Lossless.

[RGPphotog]

When playing Apple Music playlists — Lists created by Apple, not me — my Mac will source the songs in their playlists from my decades-old cd rips in my library instead of Apple's Lossless versions. Seems logical. What doesn't seem logical is when Music choses to play "matched" or "uploaded" non-lossless copies I don't have downloaded to this specific Mac.

My kingdom for a "prefer lossless format, always" checkbox that works as told, but how in blazes do I stop music from playing my old rips that are NOT even downloaded to my device? Deleting my entire library is not really my idea of a solution. Nor is turning off library sync.



What a mess. I have playlists of my own, sure wish I could find an easy button to magically convert all the songs contained in them into lossless; or at least an option to force lossless playback over local/matched/uploaded - this has to be a possible thing to program into Music.app and would 95% satisfy me. I'm sure I'm not outlier here.

The only option I see, seems to be Nuke it from Orbit. Which would be terrible.

(Note: Atmos just sounds worse in my 2.1 AVR setup. Don't want those versions)

 

[MacAndMic]

The only solution I have found is to delete the song from your library which will delete your uploaded or matched version and then add it back to your library from Apple Music.

 

[RGPphotog]

[valley girl voice] ugh. the worst.

 

[RGPphotog]

When you do that, and delete a song from library, it also screws up your playlists. Too much damn work to fix them all.

 

[normal]

Hi
Did you ever find a solution? I'm having the same problem at the moment. My iPhone plays lossless perfectly and my macbook only plays aac for anything I'd originally uploaded via iTunes Match.

 

[BrianBaughn]

With the lossless option it seems Apple has created another reason not to use matching on songs that they already have available for streaming on the service.

After I subscribed to Apple Music years back I discovered, like many others did, that playing my matched albums would often result in a wrong version of a song being streamed here and there. So…I deleted my matched songs and started over with my playlists.

 

[RGPphotog]

no solution found. I have songs that just don't play when streaming from Apple TV. And I do notice when my old crappy mp3 are being played instead of versions from Apple's Music library.

On the hopeful side, It seems the latest betas of Monterey show work happening on Music's backend. We shall see if things resolve themselves.

 

[normal]

I contacted Apple Support who escalated it to some senior technical guy who's looking into this.

The problem I have for both Mac and iPhone is that I have a big music library of about 17,000 tracks. If I try and play / stream any track which exists in my library then I will just get AAC. If I play / stream a song which I don't own in my library, then it will play hi-res lossless.
We also tried removing songs off my iPhone, checking setting etc.
I'll report back if I find out anything useful.

 

[normal]

A quick update. Apple support came back to me and told me that if I rip CDs and then use iTunes match, then I can only get AAC on all other devices whether I stream or download.
I demonstrated how this isn't correct. I can play an album I ripped on my PC where some tracks are AAC and others are lossless. The really bizzare bit is if you close the app and reopen, sometimes different songs on the same album become AAC or lossless. Really weird!
To give Apple credit, they really seem to be trying hard to resolve this.