Will itunes match attempt to re-match tracks which were not matched in the first go-round and ended up being uploaded? For example, on Abbey Road it matched all tracks except for She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. Now I have almost the full album at 256, and one track at 128. Not ideal.
itunes match-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
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.
So you think there's a good chance that Apple would be stopped from forcing different masters to match by the record companies...but somehow stopping those matches wouldn't be intentional?
I believe that there is a good chance that Apple would be stopped from FORCING A MATCH.
However, what I said is that nobody has suggested that CURRENT FAILED MATCHES ARE INTENTIONAL.
They are two totally different things.
I will have one final go at explaining.
We believe that matching is done my waveform analysis. This waveform analysis will determine between different versions of a song and currently in some cases different masters are getting matched, as are different mixes or live versions occasionally.
This is because the matching process has some leeway in it.
In order to get different masters to more consistently match there are, as I see it, two options. They could further loosen the matching process, which would result in more mismatches of other tracks. For that reason I don't believe that there is much room to go down that route.
The other option is to introduce some sort of user intervention. Either the user telling iTunes what version they have, or Apple getting iTunes to recognise various different masters and match to the one in the store.
I believe that it is possible that Apple would be stopped from going down that route by the record companies. I also doubt whether Apple would want to dedicate the resources to it.
I absolutely do not think that current non matches are anything other than the matching process recognising that the two versions are in fact different. I have seen no evidence of intentionally stopping matches.
Thanks for the clarification, I missed that that comment was about the user forcing a match.
I don't agree that an improvement to the matching process would have to be a "loosening" that would necessarily increase the number of wrong matches. I think it's possible for Apple to decrease the number of wrong matches and switch more songs from uploaded to matched. It seems like the vast majority of wrong matches are things like clean/explicit or different language versions, basically alternate versions of the same recording where it's often the same length and much of the recording is absolutely identical (which especially poses a problem if the matching software is only looking at a few seconds of the recording, such as the beginning). Match just needs to recognize files like that and treat them as special cases and analyze them differently. If a file has one likely match but it doesn't quite meet the current criteria and is uploaded, it's probably safe to apply the "looser" standards and match it to that one possibility (especially when in many cases the only cause for failing a match is song length, there are a number of examples of users manually editing file length then getting a match). If a file has multiple possible matches, it's probably a song that has multiple versions of the same recording and needs to be analyzed by the "tighter" algorithm.
They could also apply a looser standard in cases where the vast majority of an album is matched and there are one or two tracks that would fail a tighter match but pass a looser one - it would be rare for those last two tracks that potentially would complete the album to not complete the album. Heck, they could even add a user preference "only match tracks when entire album is matched". And while it's probably unlikely they'd allow users to choose a different match, adding an option to switch from a matched version to an upload would help the problem of wrong matches.
Even without changing the algorithms themselves they should be able to be made aware of situations where most of an album matches and make exceptions by hand. Thousands of people have run the software on Abbey Road so they should be able to know that while thousands have matched the entire album, thousands of other people have matched all tracks but one, and they should be able to have the software bring that to their attention so they can manually fix it. Although I would think in most cases that would be unnecessary and an algorithm tweak would handle it instead.
And dare I say it, they could start looking at metadata (particularly the explicit tag or that word in other tags) as a sanity check, if nothing more than if the tags don't match what the waveform turns up, run it again with a more detailed analysis.
KeithJenner wrote:
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).
For me, I will not renew unless I have the ability to mark some albums as "Match Album Only." What this would do is match either all tracks of an album or upload all tracks but not this broken in-between of 8 out of 10 matched wtih 2 uploaded. I have no problem if all of the tracks are uploaded--that works fine for me because nearly all of my tracks are ripped from CDs that I still have in my possesion.
What I can't tolerate is when only some tracks of an album are matched and the rest uploaded. Now I have inconsistent volume for example. This is highly annoying when listening to albums.
Either Apple has to improve their match so that albums don't get only some matches or a way for me to control the process. I don't need anything that would annoy the recording industry, just enough control to fix my few dozen problem albums with one or two tracks uploaded vs matched.
You may well be right with some of those solutions,and perhaps we will see some changes.
However, and I'm sorry to bring this back up again, it still brings us round to the starting point again, and whether the agreement between Apple and the record companies allows such intervention to force a match between different masters.
The possibilities that you have mentioned all basically take tracks which don't match on current performance and force them to match to the remasters.
If there is nothing to stop Apple from doing this then we may well see some changes. However, if they can't do so then we won't.
We could go round in circles all day, so shall we just leave it here. 🙂
Jim Bailey wrote:
For me, I will not renew unless I have the ability to mark some albums as "Match Album Only." What this would do is match either all tracks of an album or upload all tracks but not this broken in-between of 8 out of 10 matched wtih 2 uploaded. I have no problem if all of the tracks are uploaded--that works fine for me because nearly all of my tracks are ripped from CDs that I still have in my possesion.
This is an excellent idea. Have you left feedback with Apple?
I agree totally with you about partial matches, which is why I would prefer a tighter matching process to avoid the volume issues etc that you mention. I like the idea of a force upload option, but this suggestion has a number of benefits over that as far as I can see.
roebeet wrote:
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.
Agreed!
KeithJenner wrote:
Jim Bailey wrote:
For me, I will not renew unless I have the ability to mark some albums as "Match Album Only." What this would do is match either all tracks of an album or upload all tracks but not this broken in-between of 8 out of 10 matched wtih 2 uploaded. I have no problem if all of the tracks are uploaded--that works fine for me because nearly all of my tracks are ripped from CDs that I still have in my possesion.
This is an excellent idea. Have you left feedback with Apple?
I agree totally with you about partial matches, which is why I would prefer a tighter matching process to avoid the volume issues etc that you mention. I like the idea of a force upload option, but this suggestion has a number of benefits over that as far as I can see.
I actually like this idea better than a "Force Upload" button, and it doesn't even benefit someone like me. But I think it would benefit Apple overall - it basically fixes concept albums / live albums / mono albums that Match might "break" with only a partial Match. It's a good balance between speed to upload and consistency, imo.
EDIT: Here's the problem though - Apple isn't looking at these albums as albums, but only as songs. So unless they scanned metadata to bundle the albums together, the best that they could do is make this a manual change on the user's side.
Yes, the big problem that I always saw with forced uploads from Apples point of view is that it introduces the possibility of people forcing everything. I would have been tempted to do that if it was an option and my upload speeds were a bit better.
This solution does away with that possibility, although we know from experience that it would cause a lot more uploads generally. I'd say that it would have caused a good few thousand extra uploads for me.
I'm sure many of you already have seen this but I think it's significant to our topic. Before I go on I think it's worth mentioning again although Apple claims not to follow discussion groups the mere fact this one is already on page 13 it has probably has drawn their attention.
Second, miraculously this topic of orphan/uploaded tracks has stayed on target and not drifted off into other areas as often happens in discussion groups.
I repeat again, this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread but just to show Apple is working on a similar problem. So maybe there's hope for us!
The topic I'm referring to is mismatched "explicit" versus "clean" songs. I just thought those of you following this thread would see some encouragement knowing they are working on fine-tuning the performance of the match process.
No potty-mouth lyrics for iTunes Match | Media Maverick - CNET News
As per the few reps I've talked to, they do not look at these posts - it's designed as community driven, although moderators will come in and remove posts / threads that violate the TOS. They've all mentioned putting in a feedback forum as the best way to be heard (which I've done, myself). EDIT: That doesn't mean that these posts aren't important. But given the grumbling here from the last rollout, and subequent slowness, versus the lack of information of any slowness up to L2's on the phone makes me wonder if this particular board is being monitored by Apple's Operations team in any way.
But thanks for the link - a c|NET article is pretty important since it means that it's being reported from a large and visible tech news organization.
No, the folks we talk to on the phone if we call Apple do not read these forums. But Apple does monitor them even though they do not actively participate.
That is very good news, Pete. Thank you!
The question is, as usual, would Apple automatically "re-match" the sanitized tracks once they fix this problem?
Actually, after reading the story you linked to, and the one after that and the one after that . . .
I think the relevant information is here.
Not that I doubt what's being said, but too bad we don't have the actual e-mail the person got from the unnamed Apple engineer. I'm sure we'd all love to read it!
KeithJenner wrote:
it still brings us round to the starting point again, and whether the agreement between Apple and the record companies allows such intervention to force a match between different masters.
The only way Apple would be limited would be if they agreed to a contract that specified that their matching couldn't be very good, as opposed to Apple doing their best to match as many songs as accurately as possible.
Personally, I find the notion of Apple agreeing to a contract that forced them to cripple their software and forced them to give bad results, to be flat out preposterous.
I doubt there's anything in Apple's matching software designed to intentionally avoid remasters, especially since in many cases they are matching to older masters and in most cases the difference in sound from a remaster is slight enough that they probably couldn't get the software to accept the latest mastering and reject earlier ones if they wanted to. I don't think having different masters makes much of a difference at all (beyond probably just track lengths, which they should probably be "looser" on in most cases anyway), it's just a case of the matching software not working well enough and needing improvement. If users have songs in the store they want them matched, most of the time they don't know what mastering they have and they don't care, and likely Apple doesn't care and wants to match as often as they can too.
Or if Apple really does have a contractual obligation to make an effort to only match the newest masterings and reject earlier ones, they should include that in the public info, I'd consider that a crippling of the software and I'd want to have that info before forking over my money.
attempt to "re-match" tracks
