Matching digitized vinyl iTunes imports

I 100% agree about Apple's thresholds. I've actually used SoundHound to match songs via my tablet's mic in, with crapola radio and cassette dubs, and Soundhound matches at least 90% of the time with those (the only time it hasn't is if the tune is so obsure that there's no record of it at all in their database). So I bet there's definitely some wiggle room with their thresholds. But SoundHound isn't offering music downloads, it's just matching and nothing more - so they can set their thesholds very low.

But think about it from the other end. Someone with a lot of time on their hands could take recordings they've created from apps like Youtube, Spotify etc. and use them for matching. Apple is probably required by the RIAA to keep the threshold high enough to filter out these people. But it's likely affecting results for legitimate users as well - not just vinyl users, but even those with CD rips that might have some small defect that's throwing off the matching process.

My own "True Blue" vinyl rip results : 7 of 9 tracks matched (3 and 7 were uploaded). Stil very good but not 100% like in your case.

Great post!

If I have time today, I'll take one of my recent needledrops where I have the CD version as well, and see if I can tweak the rip to make the song match. Or, if it matches, what I can do to make it unmatch - i.e. chop off the silence, alter the pitch a little, or make the waveform clip. This will give me a better idea on what Apple is doing.

I have a lot of CD / vinyl dups as I've actually been slowly replacing my CD's with vinyl - I know, some may think this is foolish but I do prefer my vinyl a lot of the time. But it also means that I can do a match with both the vinyl and CD version of the same song.

Here you go -- one full test. Song is Glen Campbell's "Sing", taken off "Meet Glen Campbell" from 2008. I have the CD and the vinyl for this album, and since it's only three years old the masters are very similar (at least to my ear). The vinyl's dynamic range is just a tad better than the CD.

My vinyl rip is close to the same the same length as the CD, and the pitch is spot-on correct when comparing them together. The vinyl has a little more silence (a half second, perhaps) at the end, but the CD rip has a little extra silence at the beginning.

First off, I tried matching both songs as is (using a 16-bit AIFF master), and they both Matched. Again, I'm thinking the mastering itself is a large part of the process, here. So then I starting messing around with the vinyl song. Each test was on a pristine master file, btw:

1. Chopped off the first second of the song (which is a fade in). This turned it into an upload.

2. Chopped off the last second of the song (which has a fade out). It still matched.

3. Chopped off another second at the end of the song. It still matched.

4. Chopped off two more seconds at the end of the song. Still matched (still a little fade in left).

5. Chopped off another two seconds at the end of the song. It finally changed to an upload.

These tests are of interest. The beginning of the song seems to have more weight than the end of the song, at least in this case.

6. Added light and moderate clipping. Neither affected the matching process, interestingly enough.

7. Added heavy clipping (+10db), enough to alter the sound audibly. STILL matched, which was a big surprise to me. So I'm thinking clipping may not be a heavy factor here. I had to literally go to +75db before it stopped matching!

8. Pitch change, one note up (5%). It became an upload, so this is one I'd definitely watch out for. (I also tried 5% down with the same results) If your turntable is fairly old and the belt is worn, your pitch could be off - easy suggestion is to listen to your needledrop, and then the tune on Spotify (if you have it) to see if you can hear a pitch difference. My AT-LP120-USB has a quartz lock feature which is supposed to keep the pitch correct, tmk.

5% was pretty high for the pitch, but my old Philips turntable is actually that bad if you don't tweak it. And I used to have an old Onkyo belt TT that was also significantly off. But you don't really hear it unless you have another copy to compare it to.

You also brought up a good point that timing between attempts could be a factor - perhaps some of my matches are just "cached" because I'm trying them too fast, I don't know. But I might try an older LP next that doesn't match, and see if I can tweak the sound to make it match - ultimately that's the end goal so I'm thinking pitch and beginning of the track as important factors.

EDIT: Re-tried my True Blue tracks 3 and 7, trying to match up the beginning audio closer to my CD version - track 7 now matches, but track 3 still doesn't. But again it defintiely tells me that the beginning of the song needs to match up closely to what's in their database - add one or two seconds of extra silence, for example, and it won't match.

Just did another test - this time with an old LP, Nat King Cole's "Sings for Two in Love". I picked this one because I think it's the oldest LP I've needledropped - mono pressing with the Capitol rainbow label, probably an early 1960's pressing if not earlier.

I really expected it to fail to match at all. but I actually got 11 out of 12 matched! Only Track 7 (first track on Side 2) was uploaded. This was a 24/48 needledrop, sent through ClickRepair at 30 for declick, saved as 24/48 FLAC "masters" and then transcoded to 192 MP3 for the iTunes import. I wish I knew why that one track doesn't match, but this is a situation where I don't have a CD version to directly compare. Also wish I knew why the match success on this one was so high. 🙂

I am definitely all over the place with my music (it's one of the reasons why I have so much of it to deal with!). Bouncing between genres is actually a lot of fun - I might start my day with Nat King Cole, move over to The Pogues, then off to some Slayer and even Lady Gaga. It's all good. And I agree that old vinyl really was made well - it's amazing how well a 50 year old LP can play, as long as it was treated with care. I'm also a big fan of bee bop jazz like Monk/Mingus/Trane/Davis, but those are a little harder to buy in pristine condition. 🙂

And maybe genre does matter - I was thinking about that with Madonna since my True Blue had a high success rate too. I did attempt one classical LP so far (a Rubinstein LP I believe), but it didn't match at all. Genre / mastering / intro match / pitch, possibly all factors here.

You'd also be at home in the Steve Hoffman fourms - mainly a 60's / 70's rock audience, but a lot of earlier influences - Steve Hoffman actually did some Nat King Cole reamasters in the last few years, as I recall. I have the same username over there.

"Lady In Satin", being that you mentioned it, is the one album I have from Billy Holiday (CD, I believe). Still have a lot of old classical / vocal / jazz / gospel LP's to go through (some garage sales that I picked up on the cheap) - will likely take me years to go through them all but that's the way I like it. And yes, the newer bee bop stuff is usually a little easier to find - I grabbed a copy of "B*****s Brew" (Apple forum bleeped it out, not me) for fairly cheap recently, but most of his 50's stuff goes for a lot more. I usually just take the re-issue as my wallet can't afford those first pressings. 🙂

There was a recent thread in macrumors about the 25k song limit, and at least one person who couldn't understand how anyone could reach that. But once yoiu move into different genres like jazz, you could easier surpass 25k.

If the CSN vinyl is actually a different mix than whatever is in iTunes (and not just a different master) then there's a higher probability that the vinyl rip will be an upload and not a match - assuming that's what you're hoping for. The more different the waveform, then the more likelihood that you won't have a match.

Some older CD's have, imo, the SAME master as the vinyl - and I would argue that the possiblity of a match in those cases is much higher. Take a slightly obscure 80's band that had their vinyl and CD released at the same time and never had a remaster - the CD was likely cut from a master made for vinyl and thus the sound will be very similar outside of the actual format.

It's really hit and miss, from my experience. If you absolutely must have the tracks as uploads, seek out my other post on the matter. I've managed to force Beatles mono tracks to upload by either slight pitch or speed alterations, or by added silence at the beginning. Remixes might not even need this, or might need just a small alteration to push it over whatever threshold Apple is using. It is, unfortunately, a very time-consuming process if you have lot of matches you are trying to fix.

I also want to add that, if someone is looking specifically to do uploads because they prefer the sound of their vinyl needledrops, then iTM itself may not be the best solution for you right now versus something like Amazon Cloud Services or even Google Music. The latter two services only do uploads, and Amazon actually supports AAC files (Google only supports MP3's).

I've tested needledrop matches but most of the time I prefer uploads - the only exception for me being really scratched up vinyl where even a tool like ClickRepair can only fix so much. If iTM gets a "force upload" button in a future revision, that will fix a lot of problems for us Beatles Mono / needledropper types, but it doesn't exist yet and there's no guarantee that it ever will. As always, I would recommend contacting Apple and adding your voice - the more of us who ask for it, the more likely that they will add that functionality.

It's been discussed at length, but it's not looking at metatags, it's looking at waveforms. If you songs aren't matching and they are vinyl needledrops, there's something different about your tracks that the matching process does not like - maybe it's the pitch, maybe the speed of your TT's belt is off, or maybe you have too much (or too little) silence at the intro of the track, or maybe the master is just too different from whatever exists in iTunes. We don't know for sure, it's really still guesswork at this point.

Audacity has a bug in Windows where it will not record in 24-bit, even if you set it that way. It's allgedely due to DirectSound, but I believe there are workarounds. Linux/MacOS should not have this problem. Also, if your line-in doesn't support 24/96, you might think you're getting 96khz but in reality it's just dead space.

Here's a spectrogram of what I see with my GT40 recording (which does do 24/96 in):

-96db is the 16-bit limit. Notice the slow drop down, which I believe is the expected behavior. When I was doing with a line-in which did not support true 24/96, I would get spikes over 22khz, but it wasn't a slow drop like this. I believe those spikes were just noise and not actual musical data.

I also use the free and cross-platform tool called "Spek" to get a better picture of this. It will show the spikes better than you'd see in the Audacity spectrogram tool.

Wanted to post a small update to my vinyl matching - had a small breakthrough that some may find of interest.

I recently upgraded my stylus to a Nagaoka MP-110. I usually attempt a iTunes Match with every needle-drop I do, and I actually re-dropped an old probematic LP where I got a 4/9 Match, back in January. Interestingly, I just tried to re-Match with this new drop and I got a 6/9 this time. This new cart of mine has two specific differences from what I've used before -- first, it's generally quieter (less surface noise) and secondly it's a more "neutral" sound. In other words, it may sound more like what's in iTunes.

Just something to think about with your own needle-drops -- the closer you an get to the sound of the iTunes files, the more likely you'll get a Match, imho.

How do you know iTunes has matched a song? Is it just the sound quality or is there anoither indicator?

I was using Rhapsody (which I subscribe to) for the silence / pitch matching, but you could probably try Spotify for a "free" solution.

Silence before/after is definitely pretty key, from my experience -- I've definitely tweaked that not only for vinyl rips but also CD rips where I might get a match after I tweak it. I also use the iTunes track times as a guide - you want your vinyl track to get as close to that as possible.