I went through the entire select-delete-download process for the ~4000 or so songs that Matched in my library. I broke the workload up into chunks, ranging from 50 to eight or nine hundred, depending on how long I was willing to let my broadband bandwidth get tied up (other downloading activities slow to a crawl when you're getting packets from the Apple data-hose).
Very, very few issues. It did hang up on one song the first day. And I encountered a weird issue after entering my iTunes password after a restart. But otherwise smooth as butter - although my library size has now ballooned from a relatively svelte 24gB to a ponderous 36gB.
Some observations:
- The only *obvious* improvement, so far, is that an annoying skip in an Edith Piaf song I'd bought from iTunes about three years ago is finally gone.
- Did I really rip thousands of songs at such a pathetically meager bitrate? What was I thinking? Oh, yes - back in 2002 people actually cared about using an extra megabyte or two of disk space.
- I also face a dilemma about what to do about the half dozen or so songs that iTunes Match has deemed "ineligible." Granted, some of them really deserve to go, unmourned, into the digital trash heap.
- I'm still thinking about the 500 or so songs that iTunes failed to match. I have a vague feeling of unease about these tracks. Its not like they sound bad. And I guess for at least three quarters of them I could dig out the CD's and rip the offending tracks at 256k. But it would be a big task, with little immediate payoff.
And its also not as if, should my computer crash or my house burn to the ground, I'd be without a good backup.
But mainly, I'm wondering about why some of the tracks that got Uploaded didn't get Matched. It seems strange, to me, that out of the twenty million or so tracks in the iTunes Store, it could match Vic Chesnutt's
Virginia, from his Ghetto Bells CD, but failed to match U2's
Sunday Bloody Sunday, ripped from a US-issued
War. I understand that the iTunes Store now only carries
War(Remastered) and
War(Deluxe Edition) [Remastered], but come on..
I also wonder about iTunes Match, and the promise of iCloud, and the way this is going to impact the bulk of consumers around the world.
I know the boards are full of whines and complaints from the audiophiles/digital packrats with their 60,000+ track iTunes libraries. But those people are the outliers. The 1/10th of 1%.
I think of the dozen or so people closest to me, and how many of them are going to participate, or even understand what iTunes Match is, or how it works.
Its going to be an interesting next four or five years in the digital world.
