Beatles on iTunes Match, new stereo/mono issues Dec. 2012

You may as well convert from Apple Lossless, because I don't think it will upload in lossless anyway, right?

I'm not sure what is happening in your situation, but I can verify that following my procedure continues to work for me perfectly. And, as I mentioned, I have uploaded the Beatles mono catalog on two separate occasions without issue. You will never be able to trust Match to match a certain version of a song, as long as another version exists in the iTunes library.

I have heard from a few others who followed my procedure and got it to work. As far as having a song say "Uploaded" but play a different track, the only time I have had something like that happen is when it must've recognized my garbled track and thought it had the same sonic signature of a track I had previously uploaded. It will try to avoid uploading the same audio more than once. What I did to get around that issue was choose a different method of mangling the audio, and it worked perfectly the next time.

Hi mrsnork,

Glad you worked it out. As far as dbPoweramp and AAC, I remember having a little bit of trouble getting Nero AAC to load as well. What I usually do now is rip the disc to an image in EAC for archiving, and use Daemon Tools to load the CUE file to a virtual drive. Then iTunes sees it and can rip it (but I know the rip is secure). This also works well if I want to do any editing/EQ to the disc waveform. Of course I still use dbPoweramp to create my garbled AAC files.

One thing to keep in mind is that it seems using iTunes to rip is the ONLY way to get a proper gapless album. For instance, the first time I uploaded the mono Sgt. Pepper I used dbPoweramp or EAC to rip and convert. Then every track had a gap in it. I finally figured out that iTunes does not read the gap information from the headers of the file, so the only way it will work is if iTunes creates that information upon ripping and places it in the tag. Your original method of ripping the disc in iTunes and deleting the files before it tries to match them should work also. I use the EAC/Daemon Tools method so that I can get a secure rip and an archival lossless image at the same time.

A lot of people were trying to find a way to force uploads back when Match was introduced, so I hope they find my workaround before they give up. I simply don't see how there will ever be a way to ensure proper "matching" of certain mixes or masterings. So we will have to keep using a workaround unless Apple provides a "force upload" option (which they have no incentive to do, since it will only cost them money in storage space).

Anyway, I hope it continues to work for you!

Well, after finding more and more albums with mismatching issues (specifically songs from Megadeth's remixed and remastered catalog this time), I decided to give nick's idea a try. I was actually pretty excited that there was a fix, even though it's a chore to do since my library is 25k+ songs.

Unfortuntaely, dbPoweramp is only on Windows, and I'm on a Mac. Does anyone know an alternative that can do what I need it to do to reverse the songs? I don't care at all to pay for a program if it can do what I need.

Man, this is frustrating. Unfortuntately, I'm seriously looking into similar services at this point. My top two favorite albums of all time BOTH have mismatching issues that I can't get around. ARGH!

Hey, everyone, I have found an alternative to comfortably_nick's suggestion. I'm sure there are many like myself who are on a Mac, and therfore dbPoweramp isn't an option to pull off nick's trick.

I did find an alternative though that's working great: I found that can have sort-of a "hybrid" set up combining iTunes Match with uploading to the iPhone. I *think* that in iOS 5, when you turned on Match it would replace your catalog with the Match service. Anything you had loaded would be dumped. I could be wrong about that, but if memory serves me well, that's the way it worked.

Now, in iOS 6, what you have uploaded to your iPhone does NOT get dumped when you turn Match on. Through various testing, this is what I found, and this is how I'm able to upload remastered songs, etc. to the iPhone and still use iTunes Match for everything else that doesn't give me mismatching problems:

1. Turn iTunes Match OFF on the iPhone. This will allow your iPhone's music to be controlled by iTunes when you are syncing the iPhone. Be sure and tell iTunes to only sync albums, genres, artist, etc. that you want to upload, and not your entire library.

2. Go into your library on your computer (with the iPhone attached), and tell iTunes to sync to the iPhone whatever albums are giving you trouble. In the case of this thread, check the Beatles catalog. Obviously, this will work for any albums from any artist that you have loaded.

3. Sync the iPhone. iTunes will upload anything you have checked to the iPhone.

Here is the part I discovered by accident that has solved most of my problems:

4. Go back into the iPhone and turn the Match service back to ON, then let your iPhone load up all the Match information. It will display the iCloud icon on the screen and have a progress bar shown if you have the Music app launched.

That's it. Now, you have access to all of your music through Match, BUT anything that was previously synced to the phone will still be there, and will NOT be overwritten/dumped by Match. For example, now all your Beatles music that you uploaded will be there, but Music uses the files on your iPhone and doesn't stream what's "matched" on Apple's servers.

The main drawback is that anything you upload to the iPhone takes up HD space. That's a big drawback for me since I have the 16GB model, but it's worth it. I can play specific albums now and not have to put up with mismatching.

What's good though is that you can add albums/songs over time by simply repeating the process. If you find another album that mismatches, you can turn OFF the Match service on the phone, check off the additional album, sync, then turn Match back on, and you'll have a copy on your phone that plays properly.

……….

Until Apple wakes up and fixes the mismatching issue (whether by introducing a "force upload" or allowing users to chose what to match to), my suggestion or Nick's suggestion will have to do.

Hopefully this helps Mac users with the same problems I have.

Has anyone ever figured out how to solve this issue on a Mac? I'm willing to put in the work. Heck, at this point maybe it's worth doing it all through Boot Camp and being done with it. But I'm a bit unsure about how quickly the "switch" has to happen. How can this be done in a speedy manner when you're dealing with a huge library?

I don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test the procedure on there. On Windows, the "switch" has to happen within seconds (it seems). I don't think the size of the library has much to do with it, at least based on my experience. I've only ever done one album at a time, though. I don't know how well it would work if trying to do many files at one time.

It's quite possible that this workaround won't work on Mac. In that case it may be worth going the Boot Camp route or using a Windows machine just for the uploading.