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iMatch. What is it good for?

T

Tulipone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 30, 2009
353
9
Huntingdon UK
I have just one iMac, no laptops or computers - two iPads that tend not to have music on and two iPhones that do. I also have an Apple TV and shortly wil have a B&W A7.

I'm not particularly bothered about the syncing of devices as they all get plugged into the iMac on a fairly frequent basis.

I understand that my music library is stored in the cloud and where quality is low, it is replaced with a higher bitrate version.

My first Question. How do I find out what the current quality is of my music?

Two. If I can find out how good/bad my current tracks are, what other benefits will iMatch offer me.

Three. Is it worth the money?

Grateful for your advice.
 
In iTunes you can select bitrate quality to be displayed along with the song name, artist name, etc. That will tell you the quality.

I initially used it to up the quality of songs I had *ahem* previously downloaded. Now I really only use it for one thing - I consider it an insurance policy against anything ever happening to my music. All backed up in one more place and easy to retrieve if anything happens to my local music. I think I have about 10,000 songs so for me it's worth $25 a year to know it's there.

Other people will have to comment on what they use it for but for me that's it.
 
Thanks for the replies - Match rather than iMatch noted.

Looking at my library of music, most is 128 rather than 256. Will Match update the main iTunes library with the higher bit rate? I'd much rather buy a subscription than rerip all the existing! I think it does, just not finding it clear.
 
Tulipone said:
Thanks for the replies - Match rather than iMatch noted.

Looking at my library of music, most is 128 rather than 256. Will Match update the main iTunes library with the higher bit rate? I'd much rather buy a subscription than rerip all the existing! I think it does, just not finding it clear.
Click to expand...

I'm waiting for teh day that Apple offer a subscription service. I think it would reduce piracy by a massive massive amount.
 
Tulipone said:
Thanks for the replies - Match rather than iMatch noted.

Looking at my library of music, most is 128 rather than 256. Will Match update the main iTunes library with the higher bit rate? I'd much rather buy a subscription than rerip all the existing! I think it does, just not finding it clear.
Click to expand...

It will up it to whatever it is if you were to buy the song from iTunes. I believe that's 256 but not positive.
 
kilcher said:
It will up it to whatever it is if you were to buy the song from iTunes. I believe that's 256 but not positive.
Click to expand...

Actually it seems it doesn't. Got on with it and paid the money to find that it updates in the cloud, but not on your library. As I don't really need sync between devices I asked and received a refund from Apple. Now sat with piles of CDs, deleting the old 128 imports and importing into Apple looseness.

Thanks for the help though.
 
balamw said:
Absloutely Nothin'.

Seriously. Even with one client you can still use iTunes Match to upgrade your music from 128 to 256, any track that was matched can be removed from your local library and re-downloaded at 256.

B
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how that occurs, certainly it didn't seem to be doing replacements. The problem may well have been that my stuff is so old there were no matches else I did something wrong. Either way, Apple credited and I have started to reimport everything!
 
Tulipone said:
I'm not sure how that occurs, certainly it didn't seem to be doing replacements.
Click to expand...

It won't replace on its own. You need to check the iTunes Match status (uploaded or matched), then (if matched). Remove the tracks form your iTunes library, then download again.

B
 
balamw said:
It won't replace on its own. You need to check the iTunes Match status (uploaded or matched), then (if matched). Remove the tracks form your iTunes library, then download again.

B
Click to expand...

I think that was the problem. It didn't find quite a large percentage.
 
some problems with iTunes Match, some successes with iTunes Match

I bought a David Bowie album on iTunes pre-order, downloaded it to my desktop Mac, then tried to OTA (over the air) download the 17 tracks of the album to my iPhone via Wi-Fi.

15 of the tracks refuse to download, "We're sorry but this track (+14 others) failed to download" [cancel] / [retry] (retry just gave the same message after a delay) That's annoying - but likely due to the 'newness' of the music?

I have successfully used iTunes Match when I bought a new Mac mini, I connected it to a gigabit ethernet at work and entirely populated its 45 days of iTunes Library from the Match cloud, sanitising goodness knows how many years of obscure napster tracks (or were they from my 'lost' CD's?)... I now have rather a lot of generic Track 16's and still many missing album covers on my Apple TVs
 
cyclotron451 said:
I bought a David Bowie album on iTunes pre-order, downloaded it to my desktop Mac, then tried to OTA (over the air) download the 17 tracks of the album to my iPhone via Wi-Fi.

15 of the tracks refuse to download, "We're sorry but this track (+14 others) failed to download" [cancel] / [retry] (retry just gave the same message after a delay) That's annoying - but likely due to the 'newness' of the music?
Click to expand...

Having the same issue with the Bowie album. It's frustrating because it's obvious Apple has the tracks. Sigh. Let's hope it works in the next day or two.
 
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