iTunes Match chokes on older CDs that have been reissued

They really need to upgrade their matching software - either add the alternative times or when a match isn't found, look for alternatives that are within two or three seconds of the time.

Have the same problem with Abbey Road. 62/66 and 67/70 say 'WAITING" and have said that for days. My Mac only had 4000 of 11000 songs matched and has since been trying to upload the remaining songs to the cloud at the rate of 5 to 8 songs an hour. If nothing happens I believe I will have a long wait.

It's not entirely just the track times. iTunes Match also uses the waveform of the songs to do its matching. So the late 80's releases of the Beatles albums are never going to compeletely match because they are different masterings of those albums. There is a lot of discussion on the board about this. The Beatles albums currently on the iTunes Store are the 2009 stereo remasters, so any matches to tracks from the earlier CD releases, or even to tracks from the "In Mono" box set will be those tracks.

The same applies to The Anthology tracks and The Clash tracks you mention. You have different masterings from what is available in the store. That's why they don't all "match."

Chachi.us wrote:

Of course, differing track times will result in different waveforms, thus affecting waveform analysis.

Not necessarily. For example, the recent remasters issued by Pink Floyd are availble on the iTunes Store. I purchased them on CD and ripped them to my library. All but two tracks out of the 14 albums matched and many of the tracks do not match the times of the tracks in the iTunes store. So just because the time of a track isn't the same between your library and the store doesn't necessarily mean the track won't match.

Chachi.us wrote:

I think Apple should either account for older masters of popular albums and match them, or make it clear that these are not eligible for the service that we are paying for.

Since Apple doesn't have permission to to distribute these older CD issues (and frankly I wouldn't want them to since the transfer to CD was so poor) they can't really "account" for them, can they? A "force upload" feature would be an adequate solution to the problem, in my opinion. Becaue the tracks clearly are eligible for the service since they can be uploaded.

Chachi.us wrote:

If iTunes Match didn't recognize two of your Floyd tracks from the same remastering, then the situation is worse than I thought.

I know the engineering team knows about my tracks, so I'm confident they will get worked out eventually.

Chachi.us wrote:

I wouldn't want Apple to match the older masters with the same old versions, but rather match them to the newer masters.

The biggest problem I have with "force uploading" indivual tracks within an otherwise matched album? It breaks gapless transitions (Sgt. Pepper's/A Little Help From My Friends, Polythene Pam/Bathroom Window). I understand Pink Floyd uses gapless transitions quite a bit, too!

For me, I do not want my mono versions of The Beatles albums to be matched to the stereo masters, nor do I want my copies of The Capital Albums matched to any versions which are currently available on the iTunes Store. This is the type of situation in which a "forced upload" feature could come into play.

So for now, yes, it is a bit annoying that just those two Pink Floyd tracks didn't get matched but since the succes rate for my library is very high I can live with it. If there is no improvement over time, though, then I'll have to seriously reconsider re-upping my subscription.

I don't think it's realistic for one to expect Apple to provide us with remasters of older stuff. After all, the purpose of remastering was to offer for sale an alternative (and hopefully better, though not always) to the original.

Now that said, if some marketing genius wanted to give me a special discount on a remaster because My iTunes library confirms I've got the original, now that would be fine by me!

"Force upload" option is definitely the best solution, imo. I've sent Apple feedback and I suggest everyone who wants this option to do the same.

As for those of you who have old masters and really wanted them to be matched to remasters on iTunes, I wouldn't expect this to get any better. Maybe Apple will alter their thresholds down the road, or maybe they won't. Only time will tell.

I understand the force upload option a lot of people want because of their old cd's and such, but I'm very doubtful that apple will ever implement this. I hope they do, don't get me wrong, for the sake of A LOT of people that seem to have an issue with this. But as for my doubts are this.

1. A lot of people out of fear of apple messing with metadate(As we see from this forum that A lot of people are scared that it changes things) they will force upload their whole library and never even give apple the chance to match their library and find out that it doesn't mess with their metadata.

2. A lot of people will just upload their whole library instead of matching at all for whatever reason.

3. I don't think apple wants people clogging their servers and data centers with 25,000 uploads when they could have matched some of their libraries and only had to upload maybe a 5,000 or so.

Trust me I want a few more options and for those of you that want this option I'm for apple listening, I guess I'm afraid if they did this then they would impose a gigabyte limit instead of 25,000 track limit(Which would really hurt my library because I've burned and ripped a lot of audiobooks so that I could put them in match and access my stories from any device) If they do this I hope they have a way of controlling it so that people don't overabuse it and force upload 25,000 song libraries.

Then people would start complaining about upload speeds and how long it takes to get stuff uploaded.

I'm for bettering the match process and start letting matched songs not count towards your limit. That would be awesome. I really don't see why if the song matches that they have to count towards your limit if apple has it in its store and will not take up more data.

But that is just my opinion. Trust me if they implement the force download option I will not complain, just be anxious to see what people actually do with their libraries.

I may be wrong.

An option to be able to pick and choose what gets picked for itunes match would be great too. That way if somebody had a big library and wanted to pick and choose without creating a new library would be great in my opinion. And yes i've submitted feedback on this.

I think that there's a fair chance that Apple could implement a "force upload" option. Mainly because of their competition, which is Amazon (and, to a lesser extent, Google). They need to compete with them. Right now Amazon's $20 a year plan gives you 20GB of storage and unlimited music uploads. And yes, they support iTunes Matched AAC'sm with no transcoding. 🙂 Match is great, but if your mono Beatles tracks are getting matched with stereo versions, or your old CD rips are getitng a mix of old and new masters, then Amazon's "upload only" formula has some appeal. Granted, it will take a lot longer to upload music, but once it's done it's done. And 25k / 50k / 100k, Amazon doesn't seem to care, at least not yet.

Amazon's service also allows you to unchoose albums before you upload, and gives you the option to pause the process at any time. I like those features as well.

I do agree with you that it could be abused, if Apple added this upload option. But Apple has more money than GE - if Amazon can handle the load, why not Apple? If they want to win here, then they need to make their service the BEST service, and a force upload option for those of us who need it could go a long way. If not, they might be seeing a lot of non-renewals come late this year.

I agree. I want apple's service to be the Best. I haven't tried anything else and don't think I will(Just because everything I want in the cloud is there.) I'm getting everything I wanted out of this service right now. I just would like to see them get some of the other issues worked out before they worry about competing with other services.

Like the artwork issue. Yes there are work arounds, but come on this is ridiculous that you have to fuss with artwork to get it to show up on your device. Which I know you are mainly using for your computer cause you have an android.😮 But for me artwork is a big deal and I don't like have to play with my phone everytime something gets updated to get the artwork to show up.

They might figure out a way to get this stuff implemented but I think they need to get what they have right now working better before they start causing a bigger strain on their servers with massive amounts of uploads.

I don't really listen to much of the older stuff so I haven't run into much of the stuff your talking about, but none the less I want apple to be the best.

I just thought of something, maybe apple could give you an option that when you run match and you see that the song matches explicit and come out clean or matches to a new version and you want to keep the old that there would be an option to choose if you want the matched version or would like to upload your current version. A lot of people are complaining about the explicit clean stuff too. Don't have that problem either. That way if people could really see how much stuff matched and then if they wanted to not upload so much they could let the stuff match first and then choose. You never know. I'm sure there are problems with this too. But it's just an idea.

I like the idea of Match first / give the option of Upload later -- that's someting Apple could potentially code and that way it's really only used when absolutely necessary. They could only allow the "force upload" option on a track that's already Matchedm for example.

And agreed on the iOS issues, like Album Art. I don't use any iOS devices myself, but going on some of the posts here it's definitely something that needs some improvement.

Michael Allbritton wrote:

iTunes Match also uses the waveform of the songs to do its matching. So the late 80's releases of the Beatles albums are never going to compeletely match because they are different masterings of those albums.

They absolutely could get those to match, they just need to improve the way their software works. The difference in mastering isn't that great, it's not enough that a proper matching algorithm shouldn't be able to figure it out.

Obviously Apple isn't going to have every mastering on their servers and send those all out, but they should be able to match just about any mastering and send out the version they have on their servers. Beatles mono is a special case and they should be able to handle that as well - if they don't have the mono files those should all be uploaded.

Force upload would be a good option for wrong matches, but it doesn't seem like a good fix for albums with one or two unmatched songs - that's just something Apple needs to improve and fix on their end.

Mike Connelly wrote:

Force upload would be a good option for wrong matches, but it doesn't seem like a good fix for albums with one or two unmatched songs - that's just something Apple needs to improve and fix on their end.

I agree completely. I don't want to force upload an album with one unmatched track on it. I can live with that for now. But there are some albums that I want to upload instead of match. Case in point... I have a show that I downloaded from Live Phish that, surprisingly, matched to a show on the store (2003-07-29 in case anyone was wondering). But... the tracks are slightly different and two tracks that I have in my version of the show are not on the store and got uploaded. This is the type of thing I want a forced upload option for.

Of course, as someone pointed out over the weekend, there is a big possiblity for people to abuse a feature like that and just upload their entire libraries. Despite that I hope Apple does seriously consider this as an feature.