Does Apple Music Match work now?

[Markarian421]

When Apple Music first came out it included a version of iTunes Match, I don’t recall exactly what it was called, but the implementation was slightly different and it was way more prone to error than iTunes Match. I signed up for it and it completely wrecked and corrupted the iTunes libraries on my iOS devices as well as the iTunes library on my mac. (Which Apple said was impossible even though it happened to lots of us.) I remember listening to an “album” and hearing songs off two different albums plus some live recordings because Match couldn’t tell the difference, picked randomly, and deleted what it thought were duplicates. I restored my iTunes library from a backup and I’ve left Match off ever since.

My basic question is: if you have a lot of your own music from non-iTunes sources, does it work now? Have they fixed it? Or is it still a disaster for anything but iTunes purchases?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Depends on the material. I advise not matching any album that Apple Music already has. It'll still do what you describe.

 

[JackieInCo]

I would stay away from it and not match anything. To this day, I am still fixing and replacing missing tracks that iTunes Match deleted because it considered them duplicates even though they were on different albums. I also have tracks on albums that are the wrong track completely such as the song Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd is really some song that I've never heard of.

It's been almost a year since I cancelled iTunes Match and I'm still fixing the mess it created.

 

[Krayzkat]

There’s nothing worse than playing a song you love and some slowed down live version plays instead.

I just don’t understand how nobody at Apple realised you get different versions of songs (by same artist).

 

[4254126]

It was the main reason I turned my back on Apple Music in the beginning. It was literally a mess.

Now though it’s a whole other story. Matching combines tags and fingerprinting and I have never had mismatched songs. To clarify, I deleted my entire library when I resubscribed, started from scratch and always add from the Apple Music catalogue first, and only if something isn’t available I‘ll import from my library on an external HDD.

 

[AeroZ]

Matching working great here after they switched to the algorithm used by iTunes Match. Before that it was pretty horrific.