Apple Music Who uses iTunes Match still?

[davidg4781]

That's an interesting take on it. I might just drop Match and see if I can keep the few songs that aren't on Apple Music.

Not that it matters. I'm either listening to 90s Hits radio or a repeat of LL COOL J or Falco.

 

[JulianL]

How does the handling of tags differ - if at all - between Apple Music and iTunes Match?

I'm recounting this from memory because I let my 3 month free Apple Music trial lapse a while ago after what I remember as disappointing results but here's what (if I'm remembering correctly) I found with Apple Music....

My entire iTunes library is either ripped CDs or purchased downloads physically stored on my desktop PC and manually (via a USB cable) synced to my iPhone so that I also have all the files locally on my iPhone to listen to when out and about even if I have no internet connection or don't want to burn data and/or battery (assuming streaming takes more battery than playing a local file).

I have edited the metadata on all of the tracks stored on my PC to add artist and album sorting tags so for instance all David Bowie tracks have an ARTISTSORT tag of "Bowie, David" so that his stuff appears under "B" not "D" in the artist view and also ALBUMSORT tags of (for instance) "Bowie, David, 1971" for all tracks in the Hunky Dory album and "Bowie, David, 1977" for all tracks in the Low album so that in album view his albums are grouped together under "B" and within that group are sorted in ascending order of individual release date. (I'm quite fussy about the sorting/display order when browsing my library.)

The above has worked perfectly on my dual device direct PC to iPhone transfer setup because the wired iTunes sync carries across all of my ARTISTSORT and ALBUMSORT tags but when I had my Apple Music trial active and tried syncing my iPad to my music library via WiFi using whatever the automatic syncing protocol is in Apple Music all my custom sorting stopped working and (for instance) David Bowie started appearing under "D" not "B". I never verified it but I assume that's because the way Apple Music does the sync is by matching to the Apple versions of the master copies of my tracks stored on my PC and in the process doesn't carry across any extra metadata tags added by the user.

I'm wondering whether iTunes Match handles user-added tags any better than the basic Apple Music mechanism, i.e. whether it might fix my problem.

 

[Soondae]

Honestly I cannot answer your question as I stated earlier in this thread I gave up on Music Match (iTunes Match) years ago as I had very bad results with it.

I am just like you [Julian] in that I have my complete CDA collection ripped to my Music Library (over 200 CDA's) that I spent a lot of time editing the tracks and Album Art when necessary. I can tell you and others whom asked the question that my purchases from the iTunes store appear on all my devices my Mac included in the Library as they should, not the Music tab of the Application. I highly doubt Music Match will treat your manually edited tags different then the songs already in the Music or Match subscriptions. In fact from my past experience I would expect Match to overwrite your edits even on your Mac library.

I don't see any reason to tempt fate and go back to Match. When I used the free trials of Music, since I didn't download anything.... Just streamed, it left my personal library alone which is how it should. That's all the knowledge I have on the services. I have listened to free trials of Music numerous times with purchases of phones and AirPods, using the service has never interfered with my Library on my phone or Mac.

 

[WebHead]

I'm wondering whether iTunes Match handles user-added tags any better than the basic Apple Music mechanism, i.e. whether it might fix my problem.

Pretty sure it’s one in the same service; iTunes Match is just a free inclusion with AM (and they share the same user library - which is why I don’t add AM tracks to mine).

I too noticed my sorting metadata was overwritten and put it down to an AM update at some point. One day I’ll get around to reverting to sorting by surname.