Do you qualify to use iTunes Match?

[r2shyyou]

While it's no secret that there is a 25,000 song "match" limit with iTunes Match, what I didn't realize until just recently is that the limit applies not only to how many songs iTunes Match will "match" but also to how many songs your library can contain in order to qualify to use iTunes Match.

Essentially, if your library has more than 25,000 songs in it, you will not be able to use iTunes Match to "match" even one single song.

Appalled by this inability to selectively choose 25,000 songs from my library to "match" to iTunes Match, I emailed new Apple CEO Tim Cook and received the following response from a member of his team:

Thank you for reaching out to us. Your feedback has been truly valuable. We are currently unable to accommodate libraries larger than 25,000 songs. We are continually working on improving the iTunes features. We appreciate your patience.

Dissapointing response, to say the least. I was hoping we'd be able to drag & drop selected songs over to iTunes Match much like you can do with playlists.

However, I understand this is a new service with likely many tweaks and improvements yet to be made, based on both internal and user feedback, so it looks like those of us with large music libraries will just have to wait a little longer to use the service...unless there is a relatively easy way to split into two one's library, with a portion of it housed locally on your machine and the rest of it housed on, say, an external hard drive. Anyone have any experience with this?

 

[GoCubsGo]

So you e-mailed Tim Cook and somehow thought all would be made right in your world on the spot? Interesting.

25k is a lot, I wonder how many people have that much or more. I don't think I do.

 

[S.B.G]

25,000 songs That's a lot of music.

I only have a fraction of that amount.

 

[Dwalls90]

I have a LOT and I still have just under 10K. I could never imagine having over double that amount for at least a few years away.

And I'm sure you own $25,000+ (probably more like $30,000!) worth of music legally owned?

 

[dukebound85]

I have a LOT and I still have just under 10K. I could never imagine having over double that amount for at least a few years away.

And I'm sure you own $25,000+ (probably more like $30,000!) worth of music legally owned?

why do you assume a dollar a song?

i buy used cds

 

[arkitect]

I don't know why people find 25K+ a lot of "songs" or tracks or suspicious.

I have 29,000+ in my iTunes library.

But then again I am 47 years old and have been collecting music since the early '70s…

Steve Jobs didn't invent music with the creation of iTunes… it's been around a while. Some of my tracks came from shellac 78s (ask your grandparents).

 

[Imola Ghost]

I have about 26k songs in my library. I'm currently re-encoding all of them to Apple Lossless using dbPoweramp.

I know people that have a lot more than the OP or myself. So yes, there a lot of people that have over 25k songs.

 

[CmdrLaForge]

Anyone knows if those matched songs that I didn't purchase through the iTunes Store will be downloaded to my Mac ?

 

[cluthz]

I have about 26k songs in my library. I'm currently re-encoding all of them to Apple Lossless using dbPoweramp.

I know people that have a lot more than the OP or myself. So yes, there a lot of people that have over 25k songs.

Are you re-encoding them from acc/mp3 files, or are you re-ripping them?
Re-encoding files does make the quality worse, even if you go from 64 kbps mp3 to lossless.


I also have 26960 files in my library, all legal, but I have many audiobooks which often contains over 100 files (total of 7014 files). I wonder if you could exclude those from match and get under the limit.

 

[TMRaven]

I wonder how up-front and blunt of a 3 word reply he would have received if Steve Jobs were still CEO and he personally replied.

And yeah, if you're not reripping, there's no magical way go transcode a lower bitrate song into lossless, all you're doing is wasting space.

 

[curtisinoc]

I was wondering about this also . . . . I have a library over 30,000 songs. Wanted to use iTunes Match, but guess I may be out of luck until future updates/improvements.

 

[jhwalker]

Same here . . .

I have about 44k tracks that were not purchased from iTunes (ripped from CDs, purchased from other services, etc.), so guess I won't be able to use Match at all

 

[adbe]

I have a LOT and I still have just under 10K. I could never imagine having over double that amount for at least a few years away.

Yes, but for families, sharing one iTunes account, the jump from 10K+ to 20K+ is instant.

And I'm sure you own $25,000+ (probably more like $30,000!) worth of music legally owned?

<sigh>

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but I have many audiobooks which often contains over 100 files (total of 7014 files). I wonder if you could exclude those from match and get under the limit.

I've got more than a few of those too. I'm debating just crunching them into one long audio track.

 

[Nermal]

Re-encoding files does make the quality worse, even if you go from 64 kbps mp3 to lossless.

Re-encoding between lossy formats will make the quality worse, but going to lossless will just make the file larger with no change in quality.

 

[msugarpants]

New itunes library

Make a new library by holding option while opening itunes. Then you can reimport...or share (not sure exactly how) from your other library. Note, you cannot have two libraries open at once...it may corrupt files. But I have 110,000 songs. Gonna pick out my 4 and 5 star tunes. Yes. you read that number correctly.

 

[tido2012]

Wow, I thought I had a lot of music (< 2k). I just got owned!

 

[Macs In LA]

92,000 Songs. iTunes Match won't work for me. Cr*p.

I have 92,000 songs. Years ago I had 7,000 CDs. I have purchased about 4,000 songs from iTunes and Amazon over the years. I work in Media and have an impressive classical collection on top of a pretty thorough pop/rock music selection from 1977 or so on.

I have no idea how I will parse this down to sub-25K non-iTunes songs before it launches.

No deletion, but of course I need to make a whole new iTunes Library for the Match to work.

What are the chances that Match will open up to more than the 25K limit?

 

[mactmaster]

I believe this is merely an arbitrary limitation due to the licensing deal Apple made with the record labels. It was likely a compromise on Apple side.

Apple will need to go back and make a new deal with the labels to enable larger libraries. Also, larger libraries will probably have a higher subscription fee.