Apple iTunes Match - Anyone Use?

[edro]

$25/year to sync your entire music library to the cloud.
It converts (and/or verifies) all of your MP3s, regardless of quality or origin, to Apple's high quality format.
You can then stream or download to any iDevice.

I have ~90gb of music. It would be nice to not have to store that on multiple devices (as backup) and to have it on all devices.

$25/year seems pretty cheap to legitimize my collection...

Thoughts?

 

[Imp]

Buy me a few USB keys and I'll "Ctrl+C" and "Ctrl+V" for you for $25/stick.

 

[AMDZen]

My question would be on all of the stuff I have that iTunes wouldn't have. I probably have tons of music that iTunes wouldn't be able to identify. So would I upload everything and then it would tell me what it can't "sync"?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Drawback: it only gives you 25GB of storage for things that it can't identify and duplicate from the iTMS.

Otherwise, I am a happy user.

 

[xanis]

I have it. In general, I think it's pretty worthwhile. I don't have an enormous music collection (maybe 5,000 songs or so) so I won't ever hit their 25GB cap for additional uploads. It's nice having my music sync across all of my devices without any effort.

The only really issues I have are when I use it on my iPhone, but those are more due to shitty cell service than anything.

 

[D1gger]

I did it and it worked for me. I know have access to my collection on 5 devices.

 

[edro]

What happens when you stop your subscription?
Does your 25gb of stored data disappear?

 

[tynopik]

wait, isn't this what mp3.com got sued and lost a 50 gazillion dollar judgment for?

 

[Gooberlx2]

Works great for me. I use it everyday to stream my entire collection to work.

After syncing, use smart playlists to filter for the low quality-matched tracks. Then delete and download/replace with the better quality iTunes versions.

HOWEVER, be careful that they actually matched the explicit version of a track if that's applicable. While I retained all my 320kbps mp3 tracks at the house, I've found via streaming at woth that the iTunes track is matched to the clean version of a song. Some albums are mixed in this regard.

25GB storage for unmatched/uploaded tracks, but of my ~100GB collection, only like 6GB of tracks had to be uploaded. You'll probably be fine if your tracks are well tagged and reasonable quality (i.e. not so warbled/shitty as to fail matching via acoustic fingerprint).

 

[Ns1]

I use it and love it, keeps my iDevices/music collection in sync w/o any type of manual effort from me. Allows me to keep < 500mb of music on my phone at any given time while having access to my full music library.

Of course, I'm also grand fathered on unlimited data so IDGAF how much bandwidth I use.

 

[Gooberlx2]

What happens when you stop your subscription?
Does your 25gb of stored data disappear?

All your copies of the tracks on your computer are fine. Your 25GB cloud space disappears. I definitely don't recommend not storing copies of your tracks on a drive somewhere.

 

[Gooberlx2]

wait, isn't this what mp3.com got sued and lost a 50 gazillion dollar judgment for?

I believe mp3.com failed to work out deals with the record companies first.

 

[cronos]

This is a great way to launder your mp3 collection

I'm mildly interested in doing this, especially after Amazon screwed everyone up with their pathetic new version of Amazon MP3.

 

[Ns1]

This is a great way to launder your mp3 collection

yep.

 

[AMDZen]

Well. I was going to jump on it and take part in this and it seems you cannot take part in Match if you have more than 25,000 songs.

I have 39,000+ including all of the stuff I download in regards to electronic music.

Essential Mixes since the 90's, Kiss100 John Digweed sets, etc

So I'm going to try and trim it up with stuff that would be on the iTunes library any way and try and get it to 25,000 songs.

Just FYI for anyone else that might want to do this.

BS if you ask me

 

[lxskllr]

This is a great way to launder your mp3 collection

I'm mildly interested in doing this, especially after Amazon screwed everyone up with their pathetic new version of Amazon MP3.

Why would you need to launder your collection? Buy/build a server somewhere, and stream your own music. As a bonus, you have a server to do other useful things with.

 

[Ns1]

Why would you need to launder your collection? Buy/build a server somewhere, and stream your own music. As a bonus, you have a server to do other useful things with.

dl at 128k, launder to 256k

 

[lxskllr]

dl at 128k, launder to 256k

Hmm... Maybe. I'd just torrent better copies. I seldom rip CDs anymore. I can get a good torrent faster than I can dig my CD out, and rip it; especially since I'd have to hook up my optical drives :^D

Bending rules to be quasilegal is kind of disingenuous. Either you're right, or you're wrong. Jumping through hoops doesn't change the core truth.

 

[Ns1]

Hmm... Maybe. I'd just torrent better copies. I seldom rip CDs anymore. I can get a good torrent faster than I can dig my CD out, and rip it; especially since I'd have to hook up my optical drives :^D

You COULD do that...or you can let iTunes just do it's thing

 

[lxskllr]

I might switch to the Opus codec. It's superior to just about everything else, and has a wider useful range. It's also libre. I think it's gonna take off due to better sound, with lower latency, as well as being free software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(codec)

 

[Crono]

I might switch to the Opus codec. It's superior to just about everything else, and has a wider useful range. It's also libre. I think it's gonna take off due to better sound, with lower latency, as well as being free software.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(codec)

Interesting, I haven't heard of it before, not surprising considering how new it is. I'll bet it's good considering it's being developed by Xiph (makers of Vorbis, FLAC, and Speex).

 

[AMDZen]

Why would you need to launder your collection? Buy/build a server somewhere, and stream your own music. As a bonus, you have a server to do other useful things with.

How would I stream music from my own server to my iphone?

 

[Skeeedunt]

I had a hell of a time with matching errors when I was trying it many months back. Every other album would have at least one track that wouldn't match, and half the time it wouldn't even let me upload it due to some unknown or undecipherable error. These were all fairly normal CDs ripped at reasonable bitrates. I even tried re-ripping through iTunes and got the same results.

Seemed like no one else had any trouble though, at least not to that extent. I tried the various troubleshooting online (re-re-convert to AAC, re-upload etc) but it all just turned into a hassle and I lost interest. Will need to try with the latest iTunes and see if I have better luck.

 

[IronWing]

I'm kinda disappointed. I thought maybe iTunes Match would be a musical taste based dating service. "Here are pics of the twenty folks who most closely share your taste in music!"

 

[Centauri]

I signed up a few months ago, and yes it was an amazing deal for all of the laundering I did. I'd been getting FLACs for a while, but even that became less fool proof as running spectral tests on the FLACs revealed that a lot of stuff floating around is MPEG/lossy sourced.

Match allowed me to legitimize my collection somewhat and guarantee that all tracks were sourced directly from a master of some sort.

A few albums wouldn't match on every song, but the vast majority of them did. The ones that wouldn't I didn't bother matching at all; I like uniformity.