iTunes Match

It's all about the equipment

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trev
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iTunes Match

#1 Post by trev » Mon Jun 06, 2011 8:50 pm

With Apple's announcement today, your entire iTunes music collection can live in the Cloud and be available to you anywhere. (details here: apple.com/icloud)

I think this is really exciting, but I have a few concerns:

If I have ripped, say, my Mosaic set of Ellington Small Groups to my iTunes library, is the Cloud then going to match it to a lesser (not-as-nicely remastered) version that lives in the iTunes store and then sync back that version to my other devices? Some of the iTunes early jazz and blues has woeful audio quality (poor remastering), despite its 256kb/s AAC format. I'd hate to accidentally give myself inferior copies.

Does this mean that all the F#@!wits that have got their music collections by torrenting mass files and exchanging collections (with DJ mates for example), can effectively launder (legitimize) their collections by washing them through the iTunes Match Cloud? Maybe it doesn't matter since they have already done the deed.

Thoughts?

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trev
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#2 Post by trev » Mon Nov 14, 2011 8:17 pm

For those of you interested in this service (which is currently rolling out in the US), here's a great FAQ: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.ph ... stcount=58

Fortunately it looks like it plays nice with us obsessive types and doesn't overwrite your high-quality remastered lossless limited-edition Lord-discography metadated dewey-decimal-system-catalogued hand-encoded-by-tibetan-monks versions.

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Mr Awesomer
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#3 Post by Mr Awesomer » Tue Nov 15, 2011 5:44 pm

Sounds promising. While I'm usually quick to jump on a major upgrade/change/entirely new feature, this is one I'll be waiting on.
Reuben Brown
Southern California

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#4 Post by dogpossum » Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:31 pm

trev wrote:Fortunately it looks like it plays nice with us obsessive types and doesn't overwrite your high-quality remastered lossless limited-edition Lord-discography metadated dewey-decimal-system-catalogued hand-encoded-by-tibetan-monks versions.

I have such a crush on you right now, Trev.

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trev
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#5 Post by trev » Sun Dec 18, 2011 7:20 pm

I've just signed up to the iTunes Match service and thought I'd report my findings as they relate to Jazz nerds.

The setup process is time consuming. It could be that they are oversubscribed since it only just launched, but the setup took two days for me. Fortunately it runs in the background. I currently have around 11,000 songs in my main collection, and it matched up 5,600 of them. It matched a lot of obscure stuff unexpectedly and didn't match what I thought was more common.

But it matches the track, not the album. So with my Mosaic sets for example, it matched almost half of the tracks, but if I download one of those tracks to my iPhone while I'm out and about, it will be the same track from some other album [but misleadingly labelled as being part of the Mosaic set] and not necessarily have the superior remastering. Hopefully they will add a "don't match/force upload" feature. Fortunately it doesn't overwrite your main collection, and it uses all your own metadata!

The best thing [and the main feature] is that I now have access to my entire iTunes collection (and ALL my playlists) from all my iOS devices.

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