I've subbed for a few years but Itunes Match really has'nt improved, there is not enough managibility of your collection and too many albums are mismatched or appear multiple times or with no or incorrect artwork. And really Plex has made it not neccessary as I store all lossless music in Plex and can stream to anywhere in lossless not 256aac. Anyone else giving up on this apple service ?
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Not Renewing Itunes Match
- Thread starter Scarpad
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I'm not giving it up yet but I'm paid through August. I manage my libraries - the one I use iTM with has my classical and holiday music cropped out as they're in a separate library.
And I have a library with all of my music in lossless format separate, basically a lossless archive of my CDs that isn't synched with iTM.
And, I'm a member of Amazon Prime, to which my iTunes library is uploaded. No extra charge, and tons of extra free music to listen to.
At home, I listen to my music on my system and Grado cans. When I'm on the road, iTunes Match and Amazon Music keep me from going postal at the end of a nasty day. Having an old UL data plan on my VZW lines helps me get my music fix...
And I have a library with all of my music in lossless format separate, basically a lossless archive of my CDs that isn't synched with iTM.
And, I'm a member of Amazon Prime, to which my iTunes library is uploaded. No extra charge, and tons of extra free music to listen to.
At home, I listen to my music on my system and Grado cans. When I'm on the road, iTunes Match and Amazon Music keep me from going postal at the end of a nasty day. Having an old UL data plan on my VZW lines helps me get my music fix...
I need and want local storage. I can't count on being online always - i.e., on an airplane, or where there is crappy wireless coverage. So what I do is load songs from my Mac where they're locally stored to a iOS device, then turn on iTunes Match. That gives me the full collection when on WiFi, and when not on WiFi, I get a sub collection that contains my favorite stuff. Either way I'm not without my music, in any situation. I used to think iTunes Match wipes out locally stored songs but that's not the case. When I'm offline I still see them and can play them.
My subscription is up for renewal next week. I thought about it and decided to keep it. It works well enough and I have really gotten used to being able to access all my music anytime from different devices/computers without planning ahead or having to worry about syncing. I use both streaming and downloading depending on the situation. And even if some other services are less expensive or even free, the ~$2 per month it costs are not worth bothering with yet another library management system to me.
I gave up on it a while ago. Why? 0% of my music is matchable, AND I have over 25,000 songs anyway.
I probably won't renew it either. Over the last year or so, I've found myself gradually listening to Spotify more and more, to the extent that I rarely listen to my iTunes music collection at all now.
Apple have dragged their heels too long and missed the boat on this one.
Apple have dragged their heels too long and missed the boat on this one.
Not renewing either!
I am in my 2nd year of iTunes Match. But I have to say I really hate it.
I had high hopes for it for easily syncing between my 3 Macs and 2 iOS devices.
I have no interest in iTunes Radio (I use Pandora and that works nicely for me).
The syncing process has been nothing but a nightmare for the last 1.5 years. I don't even know where to begin.
Since I found out how to share my iTunes library between my Macs and do my iPad/iPhone syncing with my main machine (iMac) I have no headaches and no lost artwork.
I've almost wanted to completely dump iTunes itself, but for now it is tolerable. I really hope that Apple fixes the bugs, returns the SIDEBAR (OS X version), and just refines the interface. It has gotten to be such a bloated, confusing pig that I dread using it sometimes.
</end rant>
I am in my 2nd year of iTunes Match. But I have to say I really hate it.
I had high hopes for it for easily syncing between my 3 Macs and 2 iOS devices.
I have no interest in iTunes Radio (I use Pandora and that works nicely for me).
The syncing process has been nothing but a nightmare for the last 1.5 years. I don't even know where to begin.
- I have eclectic taste and my music library comes from mostly from CDs (and SACDs), some iTunes purchase and MP3s. Quite a bit of my library doesn't 'match'.
- I've had all kinds of issues with syncing not happening when I didn't have time to mess with it
- Lost artwork and metadata not carrying over
- EXTREMELY POOR audio quality of Apple's so-called 'upgraded' audio format. Especially on classical and jazz I can hear the artifacts and their versions are rubbish. Some of the transfers are just shoddy. Truncated tracks, audio clipping, skipping -- really? Even after re-downloading I realized that their version is just bad.
- When iTunes syncs to another device/computer it defaults to have you stream every time you listen to it rather than download it once. How stupid and wasteful. There is no easy way (that I've found) to force download all tracks. That's what I got the 128 GB iPhone for, not streaming!
- iTunes support has been worthless every time I've called about these issues. I got most of my answers from Tech forums and Apple user sites.
Since I found out how to share my iTunes library between my Macs and do my iPad/iPhone syncing with my main machine (iMac) I have no headaches and no lost artwork.
I've almost wanted to completely dump iTunes itself, but for now it is tolerable. I really hope that Apple fixes the bugs, returns the SIDEBAR (OS X version), and just refines the interface. It has gotten to be such a bloated, confusing pig that I dread using it sometimes.
</end rant>
I had iTunes Match when it first came out. Not to sync my stuff to the cloud and do what I want, but to "clean" my low bit rate tracks from my Wild West days, and to rid my self of DRM laden tracks. It did a good job for 80% of the files. Some matched, some didn't even though the tracks were in iTunes. Some albums would match except one song. Weird.
I cancelled after the first year. In 2013, I signed up again. It was still a mess, since one song off an album wouldn't match. This time I used it to download stuff from the cloud. It didn't work too well.
I'm using Google Music now for this since it's free and now let's you store more tracks, 2x that of iTunes.
I'm currently testing Play All Access, Spotify, and Rdio's premium services and I'll be picking one. I feel $9.99 is too much money though, but the student discounts let you in for $5. We'll see once my 30 day trials are up.
I'd consider Beats in the future, but Apple's track record for services are usually a disaster.
I cancelled after the first year. In 2013, I signed up again. It was still a mess, since one song off an album wouldn't match. This time I used it to download stuff from the cloud. It didn't work too well.
I'm using Google Music now for this since it's free and now let's you store more tracks, 2x that of iTunes.
I'm currently testing Play All Access, Spotify, and Rdio's premium services and I'll be picking one. I feel $9.99 is too much money though, but the student discounts let you in for $5. We'll see once my 30 day trials are up.
I'd consider Beats in the future, but Apple's track record for services are usually a disaster.
You can upload your own tracks (50k) for free without paying. The $9.99 gets you access to what you don't have.
It's actually very easy. Put all the songs you want to sync into a playlist in iTunes, then select that playlist on the phone and use the "download all" button.
Try calling Google support.
Really? I cannot gain access unless I enter a credit card to charge $9.95 in 30 days.
My subscription is set to auto-update tomorrow but I won't renew.
I joined two years ago to get better quality versions of some of my music and that has worked well enough, though not as well as I had hoped which surprises me because I don't have a very unusual or extreme music taste.
I have come to realise that I don't need the streaming/access everywhere functionality as I will only add to the iPhone or my notebook what I need for the moment. It's not that complicated to add and remove music. That said, I might consider Google Music's free service.
I joined two years ago to get better quality versions of some of my music and that has worked well enough, though not as well as I had hoped which surprises me because I don't have a very unusual or extreme music taste.
I have come to realise that I don't need the streaming/access everywhere functionality as I will only add to the iPhone or my notebook what I need for the moment. It's not that complicated to add and remove music. That said, I might consider Google Music's free service.