iCloud & Metadata

[Icculus]

Who else is concerned that the Metadata you have in iTunes for Purchased/Ripped songs that you have spent countless hours making perfect, only for iCloud to mess it up? With the iCloud beta in effect for all the music you have purchased through iTunes I am sensing that the Metadata will always be iTunes metadata and not your own. There are probably hundreds of albums that "iTunes Match" wont recognize because the metadata has been changed too much. To me this seems like an easy fix, but alas I am no coder so I shouldn't say anything on that matter.

An example is I bought an album called 'Lyricist Loung' - Volume 1. Well its a LOT of different hip hop artists and so when I am going through my purchased songs on my iPad if I am going by artist I see 1 song by 20+ artists. Maybe I am just too anal about my music, but it really sucks to have my local library perfect and the cloud library to be, imo, jacked. It would just be nice to have your local metadata replicated to the cloud...just seems like an alias for the most part, maybe a little more complex.

Thoughts?

 

[JonHimself]

I have two thoughts on it... the first is that I will be very upset/feel like I wasted a LOT of time if it ends up over-writing my tags, the second is that it will be a huge relief/easy way to let go of what I've been doing.
I'm not sure how it started, but at some point I started putting the label in the comment section of all of my albums. I thought it would be neat to be able to search by Dine Alone Records, Merge, Vagrant, XL, etc and see artists on the same label... then I thought, why not the producer too... and then I thought, why not the recording studio?!! I would go through periods of days where I would rip through 10-20 albums adding in the information and finally finished last month (16,000 songs). I kept justifying it by saying, "If this is going to be my digital archive of music, why not have information like that readily available?". It's neat to be able to search by producer or see who recorded in the same studio, etc etc.
The downside is that whenever I got new music, I would let it sit there and because of what I'm blaming on OCD, it would bother me until I updated it... I will be sad to loose this information, but if iTunes Match ends up being REALLY good, then it will essentially force me to let go of obsessively adding information like that moving forward.

 

[Icculus]

I feel your pain of updating all that metadata, I am at almost 25,000 songs and its a big pain to add in all of that. I am very OCD about my iTunes library so regardless of what iCloud does I will continue to update the metadata as I see fit.

It would be nice to have iCloud just be a complete mirror of your current iTunes with playlists, play count, ratings, metadata. I just don't see how this couldn't be done...just enable home sharing via the wan? I guess I will be using StreamToMe (which has its own share of problems....playlist with folders, come on streamtome!), but at least the metadata is correct.

 

[kavika411]

It looks like this thread was started when we were only able to speculate about different aspects of iCloud. Now that iCloud is out, it appears - at least to my non-tech eye - that iCloud (and eventually iTunes Match) essentially kills off much of metadata. For example, I have spent an embarrassing amount of time getting the genres correct on my music. I would go so far as to give each song on a single album its own genre as necessary, and not ancillary genres for a song in the "comments" column.

Similarly, I have always utilized the "play count" and "date added" data for generating fresh playlists.

So, am I correct that when I grab a song from iCloud, the song is stripped of all of that information, similar to purchasing it for the first time?

Is the loss of a lot of this metadata a deal breaker for me? Of course not. Am I quite bummed? Sure.

Just interested in if anyone else pays attention to this. Thanks.