Why are some famous cd's not matched

Were your CDs older copies or recent versions that have been remastered?

The matching appears to be using audio fingerprints and they might be sensitive to the particular version of the songs you have. The versions in the Apple store will likely be current remastered and the audio fingerprints might be slightly different and causing the songs to not match.

I have the AC/DC Back in Black not matching, but my copy is from Atlantic records and the version in the iTunes Store would have come from Sony. This is all just a guess and it would be nice if Apple could test this theory and let us know. They should know how their match algorithim works and could get both sets of fingerprints....

Masterings, probably in every single example you've mentioned. Aqualung, White Album, Legend, DSOTM have all been remastered at least once. And Greatest Hits themselves might have remastered tracks.

Basically if iTM only has one mastering and your CD is a different mastering, you might have matching issues. I've seen this myself with 80's Beatles CD's as iTM only has the 2009 remasters.

I'm not sure if Apple has this documented anywhere, but it would probably be in their best interest if they did (if only to reduce user calls). For whatever reason they have set their matching threshold high enough that mastering differences are causing these issues. Some of us suspect that they probably did this for a reason (maybe to satisfy the RIAA), but it's unknown if they will tweak those thresholds at a later date.

Popular CD's are actually affected more because there's a higher likelihood that those old CD's were remastered not only once, but sometimes multiple times. I have a few 80's semi-obscure CD's that match 100% only because the artist wasn't popular enough to warrant a remaster yet. 🙂

It is worth noting that Apple has little control over the music content, they post whatever the copyright owner sends them. If a band or the person who owns the sound recordings wants just the current masters available in the digital marketplace, that is the copyright owners choice. Apple can't affect that choice.

In some instances you can find a band that chooses to have two masterings available, look at Genesis and you'll find the 1994 remasters and the 2007 remasters available - I think this is rare. Also for the collectors out there, companies like Mobil Fidelity remaster albums, but they only get to license the physical CD, the electronic version will come from someone else, the owner likely.

It is amazing that any cloud/match service works at all considering all the variations and sources for a sound recording.

JKustak wrote:

It is worth noting that Apple has little control over the music content, they post whatever the copyright owner sends them. If a band or the person who owns the sound recordings wants just the current masters available in the digital marketplace, that is the copyright owners choice. Apple can't affect that choice.

True that it makes sense that a record company would only want one mastering available. But Apple still needs to be able to recognize other masterings for the purpose of matching. Whether that means having a little looser matching algorithm or having those other masterings in the match side of the database, they need to handle it properly.

All 226 Beatles songs from the 2009 remasters matched for me. It's the one full discography that I not only own, but attempted in iTM. SCITTBW, from my testing, is problematic on the original 80's CD only (I tested that as well). As for DSOTM, how many times has that been remastered? This is one of those albums that seems to get the remaster treatment every few years, so it doesn't surprise me that it would not match most of the time.

As for the adverts, of course it's going to be deceptive - it's an advertisement. I've actually read them over and it says "most of" or "probably", so there's that wiggle room in case someone complains. But I agree with you that masterings are never brought up and perhaps it should be (even as a footnote at the bottom - something like "there is no guarantee that your albums will match due to masterings, bitrate or other factors out of our control"). But I only can't see how having multiple masterings of these albums in the Cloud are going to be feasible for them - it may not even be allowed by the labels.

I've actuallly done some more tests with my own CD rips, and the general pattern I've seen so far is that music from the last decade or so, in general, matches quite well. But CD's from the 80's or early 90's have a significantly lower chance of matching - sometimes it's OOP so it would upload 100%, or there was one or more remasters where one or more tracks don't match anymore. But I still get a few recent CD's that have that one elusive uploaded track that makes no sense at all.

roebeet wrote:

But I only can't see how having multiple masterings of these albums in the Cloud are going to be feasible for them - it may not even be allowed by the labels.

They have two options, they can either update their database to handle alternate masterings, or they can loosen up the matching algorithm. I suspect they wouldn't even have to have all audio files masterings in their database since the difference is probably track length more often than not. They probably just need the audio to match to and just include the different track lengths from the other masterings.

Not improving the matching and blaming it on alternate masterings isn't going to fly, they need to do something to seriously improve it.