attempt to "re-match" tracks

As far as whether people who bought it for a year only, that's an interesting question as part of the success of the service is longevity. If, for example, Apple loses 50% of their client base after Year One, that could have a devastating impact. Will it even break even to keep it running?

I know I'm definitely on the fence for various reasons. Mainly because of competition like Amazon that costs less, has been more reliable for me (consistent upload speeds so far), doesn't mess with my metatags at all and even keeps the files themselves pristine, and also has Android and Linux support. Unless Apple really impresses me with some upgrades this year, my chances of renewing are probably not very high.

KeithJenner wrote:

EDIT: Sorry, just an edit to say that I was probably wong when I said that I think the match process is very good. Actually, I think that it is too loose, which is resulting in a number of mismatches (mono's v stereo, explicit v clean etc). Personally, I would rather it was tightened up, but that would cause fewer matches of different masters. That would be good for those of us who aren't bothered about upgrading, as it would reduce volume differences and odd transitions. It does show that this is a very difficult one to please everyone with though.

I was just going to chime in and also say I think, in some cases, the matching is too loose. The favorite example of us all is The Beatles in Mono boxed set. Really, none of those mono remasters should match to the stereo remasters in the store. And the Capital Albums boxes from '04 and '06 shouldn't match at all, in my opinion.

It's my opinion that the record companies wouldn't try to force Apple to prevent matching, since if that were the case I don't think I would have gotten complete matches on many Albums, which is the case for me. For example, my copy of The Police's Message in a Box from 1993 (no less) matched 100%. The same for the 1999 remastered box set of Janis Joplin's albums. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that idea is something even the record labels would try. It is simply not in their best interests, much less Apple's, to intentionally cripple the service.

So, Mike, I'll gently disagree with you that the matching is buggy. I actually think it is quite good. It can be improved, but what software can't? There are other aspects of the service, though, that I will say are quite buggy and really hope Apple improves them very, very soon.

You are quite a good example roebeet, because you did mainly subscribe to upgrade I believe.

How relevant would matching performance be to your decision to renew? As I see it, if it is improved in the next year you will rematch and get the upgrades. I don't see any reason why that would then cause you to renew (unless they improve matching just at the point of your renewal I suppose).

To get you to renew they need to improve general performance now, and I imagine there are other improvements that would be more important than matching performance.

Would that be right?

KeithJenner wrote:

From your quote above, Steve Jobs said:

"Matched songs upgraded to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free"

In reality what happens:

Matched songs are upgraded to 256kbps AAC DRM-free.

Well sure. I was just responding to the comments saying Apple never promoted this service for upgrading, when obviously they did.

Some bloke on the internet said that you could upgrade complete albums to 256 kbps AAC DRM-free by signing up to iTunes Match.

Well obviously the assumption you'd make is that a service that is supposed to match material available in the store would generally match full albums. Would anyone have even imagined they'd release something that would match all but a track or two of an album in so many cases? Seems like something something apple shouldn't have to "promise" - if they release a paid service that falls within reasonable expectations.

If the service failed to match any track starting with a vowel, people wouldn't be happy about it, regardless of "apple never promised it would do that!"

Steve Jobs said matched music can be upgraded.

Steve Jobs said that music found in the iTunes store would be matched (sure he didn't say "all" but he talked about material in the store matching and material not in the store getting uploaded).

It's not about "some bloke", it's the logical conclusion you'd draw from the official comments of the head of the company.

But that one track is very important. The fact that it doesn't match generally suggests that there is a fairly significant difference, often it is track length. People who care enough to spend money on upgrading to remasters are unlikely to be happy to take that instead. There is a massive difference between the surrent situation regarding the Beatles remasters and a full match and upgrade.

I don't think it suggests anything beyond the matching software not working very well. Track length is not a significant difference (especially differences of a second or two, and generally the music itself is the same length and it's just a different amount of silence at the end of the track). If the remastering really made a big difference, it's likely the whole album would have failed to match, if most of it does that suggests that the difference is relatively minimal and they just need to tweak their matching algorithm.

If match uses waveforms to (and the general consensus is that it does) then the fact that it is failing to match different masters is an indication that it is working well.

Sometimes different masters are matched, sometimes not. Sometimes the same master is matched, sometimes not. "Failing to match different masters" is only a good thing if that's their goal, and we have no info either way nor any evidence based on what is matched and what isn't. Waveforms are going to be slightly different just from different people using different encoders and settings, there will be cases where a different mastering isn't a much bigger difference than that.

Just because it doesn't work the way you want it to doesn't mean it is buggy. Perhaps it is just not supposed to work the way you want it to.

Nope, there are a number of things that definitely are bugs. You wouldn't call matching a wrong version (and no way for the user to fix it or listen to the proper version) a bug? You wouldn't call "limit playlist to 25" and it contains 1000 songs a bug? No way those are intended behaviour, those are absolutely bugs.

just that it would involve a lot of extra work to get different masters working matching. If I am right then they won't put that work in, if I'm wrong then perhaps they will.

This is a complicated software service, it's going to involve lots of work to get ANY of it working. But the things that will get different masters to work are likely most of the same things that will get it to work better in general. And even if it's a lot of extra work, this is the service that Apple has decided to release to the public, and they have a responsibility to get it working as well as they can. If optimizing it is going to be a lot of work, then they need to do that extra work, or they should have had the foresight to see the work required before they released it.

Overall I don't think it's a question of making the matching process tighter or looser overall, it should be possible to have fewer mismatches AND more correct matches. Particularly in the case of things like mono/stereo or explicit/clean - those are special cases and they should be able to recognize them and apply a "tighter" analysis in those cases while letting it be "looser" in cases where the analysis determines there's just one likely match (particularly when the only reason for a failed match is the time being off by a second or two, and cases where an entire album is matched and the remaining tracks have files that would match with a slightly looser criteria).

Really, we're having a discussion about whether or not Apple should improve something that has room for improvement or not?

Mike Connelly wrote:

It's not about "some bloke", it's the logical conclusion you'd draw from the official comments of the head of the company.

You are again missing my point. I am not disagreeing that many of the comments made by Apple, and the logical conclusions that you would draw from them are probably misleading. That is a fundamental part of advertising.

My point is that, just because you can argue that it was misleading doesn't mean that they will actually do anything about it, just the same as most other companies don't do anything about any misleading comments in their adverts.

As for bugs, I obviously wasn't talking about playlists and things like that. That's why I refered specifically to the match process. There are loads of bugs in iTunes match as a whole, many of which are arguably much more significant than some tracks being uploaded rather than matched.

Of course services should be improved if they can be. However, I think that there is a good chance that Apple would be stopped from forcing different masters to match by the record companies. IF I am correct in that then this isn't something that has room for improvement. If I'm wrong then expect to see the improvement.

Assuming Apple doesn't make any significant upgrades this year, I think the main thing I have to consider to keep the service another year would be how many digital albums I actually plan to buy, and if the $25 fee "pays for itself" for another year.

Example: Say I prefer 256kps AAC over 256kps MP3, which I actually do. And say I plan on purchasing at least five digital albums next year (which is likely). If I think I can get those for $5 on sale at Amazon, and I buy at least five of them, then having iTM to "upgrade" them to 256kps AAC would basically allow me to break even with iTM for another year, as far as Matching ($5 savings versus $10 on iTunes directly, x5 = my $25 fee). This also assumes that they Match 100%, but most new releases seem to, at least from my experience. And any more than five is gravy.

I actually didn't pay for the first year of Amazon Cloud Services as they had a deal at the time, but come late this summer that will be $20 and I also have to think about whether or not that's worth keeping, as well.

But, if Apple adds a "force upload" to make it more in line with Amazon and keeping some albums (like the Beatles in Mono) consistent, that would also go a long way. I'd also love to see Android support, but I doubt that will ever happen. Not a deal breaker however - I could always use the "free-for-now" Google Music for that, if I needed to, and just dump Amazon. I'll decide on a plan, when the renewals come up.

Michael Allbritton wrote:

I was just going to chime in and also say I think, in some cases, the matching is too loose. The favorite example of us all is The Beatles in Mono boxed set. Really, none of those mono remasters should match to the stereo remasters in the store.

And that's a case where they should be able to fix those albums without having to change the results for other albums. For those they simply need to look and see if the files are stereo or mono, which is one of the absolute easiest things for a computer to analyze. Problem solved for those without breaking the results for other albums.

So, Mike, I'll gently disagree with you that the matching is buggy.

Actually I was talking about the service overall, not just the matching. With so many issues overall I just don't think there's reason to give the benefit of the doubt and make the assumption that failed matches are intentional. And as you say, the matching can be improved, which is what I'm talking about.

Mike Connelly wrote:

I just don't think there's reason to give the benefit of the doubt and make the assumption that failed matches are intentional.

But I have not seen anyone say that the failed matches are intentional. In fact people have constantly said that they don't believe that it is intentional.

About Apple's promises, I don't really know for sure - but they definitely sugar-coated the process a bit, imo. Combine that with a support infrastructure that still not up-to-speed two+ months after release, and it's a bad mix. When I call about my Beatles in Mono tracks getting Matched to stereo versions for example, that's something that they should at least have in a knowledge base by now - it's the Beatles, for cryin' out loud.

I think they should have made the Matching process a litle more descriptive with at least a notation that masterings and encoding preferences may play a part in how many songs are Matched. All a L2 rep needs to do is read this forum for a week or so and will see repeatedly the expectation versus the reality. Also I know that there are iOS integration issues, just because of what I've read here.

This isn't some penny-ante Android company - it's Apple. They have more money than GE, so when I see things like this I really don't give them too much leeway here. They need to get their support infrastructure fixed ASAP so that way they can answer questions consistently and know when their servers are slow and it there's an outage. And they need to add more development to fix the known bugs we've all told them about, too - it's a subscription service so the time-factor is a critical component.

KeithJenner wrote:

I think that there is a good chance that Apple would be stopped from forcing different masters to match by the record companies.

If Apple caused different masters to not match at the request of record companies, wouldn't those failed matches be intentional?

But nobody has suggested that they have done that.

roebeet wrote:

They need to get their support infrastructure fixed ASAP so that way they can answer questions consistently and know when their servers are slow and it there's an outage.

Absolutely.

Mike Connelly wrote:

KeithJenner wrote:

I think that there is a good chance that Apple would be stopped from forcing different masters to match by the record companies.

If Apple caused different masters to not match at the request of record companies, wouldn't those failed matches be intentional?

I honestly don't know if the failed Matches are intentional. But using the Beatles again, you'd think that if the 80's CD's Match failures were intentional, then they'd just try to make them fail 100% if they could. Why only one failure on Abbey Road, for example? And one that actually breaks the "flow" of the album, too. That probably causes more anger than if it uploaded 100%.

I'm thinking that, with 20 million songs, if they broke anything intentionally it would be such a small percentage to be negligible.

Did you not see the quote of what you wrote earlier?

Which quote?