attempt to "re-match" tracks

It's an interesting problem, and I think it's a lot more subtle and complicated than some people think. And from an engineering point of view, this is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

I have several versions of some albums, for example I have three versions of the Beatles catalog. If we take "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" I have the 1987 CD version, the 2009 stereo remaster, and the 2009 mono remaster. Rightly, iTunes Match should only "match" the 2009 stereo remaster version because that's the only version they have in the store. In my experience, ITM correctly matched all of the 2009 stereo tracks, and incorrectly matched a few tracks from the other two versions (in fact it matched MOST of the tracks from the 1987 CD version).

(Given that the mono version is my favorite for this album, I'm disappointed that it matched any of those tracks. Should I ever lose my copies it would replace them with the annoyingly inferior stereo mixes.)

I know a lot of folks only have the 1987 version CDs and they may be disappointed that it didn't match all the tracks, when rightfully it should have matched NONE of them.

//B

I'm in a very similar postion with my Beatles albums. I have the Mono mixes of most of the albums, which I bought in the boxed set, as well as the individual Stereo mixes of Yellow Submarine, Let It Be and Abbey Road. I want these Stereo mixes matched, but do not want the Mono mixes matched. Additionally I also have the two Capital Albums boxes of the U.S. releases, which I also do not want matched to anything in the store. For now, I'll just be patient because I know Apple will improve things. They always do; it's how they roll.

It's only a problem if you want it to be totally automatic - but matching the song by anything other than a hash value can't be totally automated with perfect success.

For songs like this, Apple can solve the problem with a 2-step process:

(1) analyze the song and decide whether it's confident that the song is *a version of* a track in the Store.

(2) find likely matches and give the user a chance to resolve them.

- Default (e.g. no user input) would be Upload.

- Alternatively, user can select "resolve matches with multiple results" and choose the version that works. apple will present a number of possible matches based on similarities (ID3 tags, song length in milliseconds, or whatever other factors). If the right version isn't offered, the user chooses "Upload This Version."

Apple already employs some version of #1. Next to each track there's a little link to that song in the music store. For many of my uploaded tracks, that link will bring me to the right song in the music store, even though Match doesn't find it.

Yes, they likely will solve it eventually. I've filed a detailed bug report so that should help.

//B

I think the best route Apple should take is offering the ability to match a song manually. Give a user the ability to search iTunes for the song/version they want/need and then tell it to match it with the selected item from iTunes.

Apple cannot allow people to match songs manually, as you suggest. Some people would take advantage and just match up all the songs they would like to have.

//B

They would still need to have some kind of comparison between the two tracks to verify similarity within some margin of tolerance. Otherwise people might maliciously use that as a way to get free tracks that they don't own from iTunes.

Mr. Backlin,

I don't think Apple can do that as there will be ways that people can "hack" and steal music that they don't own. I do agree they need to find a way to better fix the matching. I still believe they need to randomly scan the file at various points of a song to match it. If Shazam can do it, Apple can!! 🙂

Good point. So far SoundHound and Shazam are doing better at matching songs then what iTunes Match is doing. Lol.

I just noticed something. I can highlight an "uploaded" song and click on the little "Ping" button that shows up. It gives you an option to select the Title you have or Artist you have as a search term for the iTunes store. I'm thinking maybe they can build on that and add some kind of option to that would allow that path to manual re-match said song.

I still believe they need to randomly scan the file at various points of a song to match it.

Are shazam and soundhound accurate in terms of live versus studio versions, and clean/explicit?

I like the suggestion above about when there are multiple possible matches, asking the user to select the right one. Also, it could look at metadata as a secondary source of info and pick the version depending on whether the metadata has words like explicit, clean, live, remix, 2004 remaster, etc.

Well, I use SoundHound and I don't remember it being able to tell the difference but, I do have some "explicit" tracks in my library on my iMac and so I will play some later and test out SoundHound. However, something tells me the answer might be no or at least not very well.

Ok, so I found a temporary solution to "re-match" the songs.

First of all, what I noticed about most of the songs that iTunes didn't find a match was a slightly big difference in the song time, compared to the one in the iTunes Store. So I look for different versions, if you know what I mean...

So, now you have a different version and want to re-match. How to do that?

The way I found was to create another user in my Mac (or PC. or you can use another computer), opened iTunes and authorized that user to my iTunes Match account.

Now I have a new iTunes, with all my Library, but none of the songs is downloaded there.. They're all in the cloud. I can play them and download them (but I won't do that)

What I do next is delete the song I want to re-match from this new user, which means it will be deleted from iCloud, since it's not downloaded to that user.

Now I come back to my regular user and Library and update my iTunes Match. It will say that that song was deleted from iCloud, and ask if I want to delete it, keep it or send to iCloud again.

I click I want to keep it (and not send to iCloud again!!!!)

Now I go to the song location in Finder, and DELETE the file and empty the trash. Next, I try to play the song on iTunes, and it won't be possible, cause it won't locate the file, but it will give me the option to locate it. I locate it to that new version I found. Now it plays, I can fix all the tags accordingly to iTunes, etc.

So now, I have in my Library the song that will probably match to Itunes', with the same status of my old version (play counts, date added, last play, etc) and I can send it to iTunes Match again, and see if it works.

It's not ideal, very laborious and tiring, but it works!

Funny you mention "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", as that was the first song I used the Match on, and it Matched me to the album version, which was I believe "Album-Only" previously in the Store. It's curious.

I hope (and assume) Apple is working on this issue. My library contains 6,000+ songs. Several albums are 9 matched with 2 or 3 left behing as "Uploaded" and only at 128kbs as I originally ripped when that was the standard. Checking the Apple store the exact same albums are there with the missing tracks.