Does iTunes Match actually match your music to an item in the store?

DakotaTimber wrote:

I am an old **** and I recorded a lot of my vinyl albums to MP3 back around 2000 when my turntable started to fail. Being the music came from vinyl there is some background noise like pops, hisses and scratches. Plus the turntable was failing by not maintaining 33 1/3 rpms. If I purchase iTunes Match, will it match my existing old stuff with stuff in the iTunes Store or will it simply store my old stuff into the cloud? If it matches how do I download the clean version of my song to my computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad?

Dakota Timber,

iTunes Match does attempt to match the tracks in your library to tracks that are available in the store. It uses a combination of tag data, song length, and audio fingerprinting.

With vinyl rips,its success rate will not necessarily be very good. Amiga Steve reports that in his case it was able to match 6 tracks out of 16 albums. He didn't say how many tracks there were, but assuming about 10 per album, that is about a 3% success rate.

For any track that it cannot match, it does indeed "store [your] old stuff into the cloud."

You will see a little icon for the tracks that matched. You may also see new icons for songs that are ineligible to match, etc.

For songs that match, you can get the matched song by deleting your current track and then downloading the matched copy.

Dakota,

Go into View > View Options, and enable the "iCloud Status" column. That is the one that will tell you if it matched. (It is different from the iCloud Download column that your picture shows you have already enabled.)

DakotaTimber wrote:

Thanks, I matched 589 songs and uploaded 975. That's 46.6% with some from CD, Just eye balling it, I am guess thats better than 33% and that made it $25 well spent. Thank You!

Well done! Enjoy the music!