Uploaded iTunes Match Songs Inaccessible for Some Users

[milo]

Is this a new issue? It's hard to tell since Match has had so many bugs since it was first released, with little or no improvement over those months.

I just wonder why MR is reporting on this now, I thought it was newsworthy from the beginning that Match had so many problems but it seems like when it was released most websites just regurgitated the Apple press releases about it instead of how it was actually working. Really, this has been by far one of the buggiest things Apple has released in a while (although the music app for iPad on iOS 5 gives it some competition).

To put shortly, no, but anything that's sold in the iTunes Music store in your country will pretty much be matched.

Not even close. Even with things sold in the music store most people are lucky to get more than 60-80 percent matched. Apple's marketing makes it sound like virtually everything in the store will be matched but the software isn't anywhere close to that good yet, it has lots and lots of things in the store that upload instead of matching. Track length is one factor but there's much more to it than that.

And to make matters worse, there are a very high number of albums where all tracks match except for one or two. It's basically a crapshoot what will match and what won't, I'd have fairly low expectations.

 

[Lareson]

The issue about iCloud not downloading uploaded songs in iTunes happened just within the past couple days. It's hasn't even been an issue since the first beta until now. I know it's still a bit buggy in certain areas, but it's heck of a lot better than it was during the betas. Also remember the whole MobileMe debacle? That didn't' even work for a majority of the time after it's release. There was a reason Steve blew a gasket at the MM team after the release, but look what it turned into, iCloud. I'm sure he would have done the same thing with the iTunes Match team.

Of the 2873 songs in my library, 1666 are matched or I have previously purchased them. The rest of the songs are all uploaded because a very large majority of them are either not sold in iTunes or are not available in the US store. From what I've noticed, only about 5 songs (and that's a high estimate) are not matched because of time issues. I've had to clean up the metadata on some to match the songs in the store, but other than that, my library has pretty much been upgraded from what it was. Just the fact that it replaced a bunch of 128-160kbs MP3s that I had with the store quality copies made the $25 a year worth it for me. The only issue that I'm running up against is something I previously said, it matching songs that I don't want it to match. Beatles in Mono is a good example of it doing that.

It just varies too, whether or not you got the music from an actual CD or online somewhere, especially if the CD you have is an older copy and since that release, they've done a remaster re-release. The Beatles CDs from before 2009 are an example of it not working properly because the songs are physically different than the remastered versions. Also since it looks at the sound file and the metadata, if the song has the wrong metadata, it'll heighten the chances of it not matching.

For those who are still iffy about iTunes Match, there's really no disadvantage of it besides the $2.08 a month. Just try it and see how it works for you. Just make sure to double-check the metadata to make sure it matches to whatever it is in the Store. (Seems like I'm one of the few people that like it and is hardly having any issues with iTunes Match besides the ones I listed. I think this is working like it's suppose to. Also it has to sort through millions of songs to match it, so just think of that.)

 

[milo]

Also since it looks at the sound file and the metadata

Nobody has found any evidence that it looks at metadata at all. People have tested files with no tags and completely wrong tags and had the same matching results as proper tags. So far it looks like matching comes completely from the waveform.