iTunes Match UK - less than 20% items matched

I'm not sure if there's an averge metric, but in my own case I'm still at ~85% matched in general (USA user, btw). Generally my uploads are either 100% uploads for an album (as the album in question is OOP and thus not in iTunes, for example) ot I get those one-off uploads that many people are complaining about.

The only time I've had albums with like 50% upload rates (so far) have been with different masterings. I'll use The Beatles as an example -- the 1980's CD rips definitely have matching issues above the usual one-off errors, but the 2009 CD rips usually match 100% for me. So if you happen to have a lot of CD rips from albums that have been remastered once or twice since your CD purchase, this could be the issue you're having.

Also something to potentially consider is the different pressings between the US and UK. We don't know how iTunes is making their AAC files, but if it's a CD source and a US CD source specifically, there's a possibility that a UK CD rip might be different enough to go over their threshold. I've been posting to a vinyl thread here where we are convinced that the thresholds Apple is using currently to match seem way too high and could problaby be tweaked a little better. In our opinion, of course. 🙂

As for throttling, I don't believe iTunes has anything internal to reduce the bandwidth in use, but I suspect that there are third-party tools that might be able to do throttling at the application level.

Match rates seem to widely vary, I think how it was originally encoded makes a huge difference as Apple uses waveform matching. I have no doubt over time it will improve.

For now if all you care about is having access on your iOS device it doesn't really matter if it matched or not - in either case it available from the cloud.

Of course if you want the extras (non DRM 256 AAC fer instance) for the moment you're SOL!

Regards,

Shawn

iTunes Match do not upload or match the song lower than 100kbps in your library. To avoid this problem, select the music that is lower 100kbps on you iTunes library then convert to AAC format. After that, iTunes Match will upload or match your song.

Actually I think it's 96k but that's splitting hairs :-)

Regards ,

Shawn

The problem is one user may not give a jot about the exact edition or mastering whereas another user may care one **** of a lot. I have three different masters of a particular Robert Johnson compilation. iTunes Match has actually recognised that each is different... and it matters a great deal! And has successfully matched every track of every version. This is a good thing.

On the other hand, I, like many other have recent albums where the edition shouldn't matter a jot and it's omitted matching one track here and there for no apparent reason. This is a bad thing.

Maybe iTunes Match is erring on the side of caution. You can't please all the people all of the time!

roebeet wrote:

I've been posting to a vinyl thread here where we are convinced that the thresholds Apple is using currently to match seem way too high and could problaby be tweaked a little better. In our opinion, of course. 🙂

Are they still high now? Or have you noticed any changes?

There seemed to be a changed with the December iTunes upgrade, if memory serves. But it wasn't "better", just "different". I had a half-dozen songs that didn't match previously suddenly match, but i also had matched files that no longer matched if I retried. So I think they had tweaked something.

Cautiously optimistic that we might see a change coming after 3/7. 🙂

I hope there'll be some serious changes. Otherwise, iTunes Match scares me given the hours I've invested in my iTunes library.

Well, I've just run it for the first time on a 13,000 track iTunes library, and it's matched just 1,100!! Currently trying to upload the rest (which out here in the sticks would take the best part of a year, before which I'd have been turfed off my broadband)!

Have stopped and currently rescanning, see if it does any better the next time round... Bit scary if not.

:-/

Nope. I have now run it three times, and the third time it matched the exact same number as the second time. Slightly better than the first (which was less than 10%)... it's now up to exactly 25%.

But the stuff that won't match is all in the iTunes store. All stuff I've ripped from my CDs over the years.

Not sure what to do. Anyone else had this... and found a solution?