How to upgrade protected AAC files to iTunes Plus (DRM-free)?

keithos27 wrote:

As a second question, can I hide the tracks that are "purchased" but I deleted from my library (i.e. the songs I moved to an external HDD but iTunes Match made show up again in my library)?

Yes, you can. You'll need to go to your purchase history in the iTunes Store, find the music that is not currently on the internal HDD by clicking the "not in my library" button. Also, switch to viewing by Albums then you can hover your mouse over the album cover and click the "x" to hide it in your purchase history. Once you've done this you may need to quit and restart iTunes for the tracks to be removed from the library.

keithos27 wrote:

I don't know how to sort on two fields within the library "Songs" view but I do know how to make a smart playlist (and have criteria to show what I want... in this case iCloud Status is Matched and then sort the colum on Kind is "proteced aac". That yielded me 456 tracks which I show as eligible for being upgraded (by deleteing, redownloading).

So my question is how do I in one step do just that?

You can't do it in just one step, but it's not real complicated. When viewing your playlist in song view click the column you want to sort on. In this case, say, Kind. This will reorder the playlist based on the Kind of song file it is (purchased, protected, matched, etc.). Then select the first track you want to delete, scroll down and shift-click to select the last track. This will select all the tracks in between. You can then type Option-delete on the keyboard to remove the tracks from the library. Don't select the option to remove the track from the cloud but you can safely move the tracks to the Trash. Do download more than one track at a time use the same method above to select more than one contiguous track, right-click and choose "download."

First sort on the Kind column, then on the iCloud Status column. It's not perfect, but it will get you close and you ought to be able to shift-click to select contiguous tracks, although you may need to skip some.

You can also narrow the criteria of the Smart Playlist further to only show you Protected tracks that are Matched.

I have almost exact same problem: 10,777 songs (9370 AAC, 958 protected AAC, 449 purchased AAC). It seems I've missed out on the .30 upgrade option! Match only seems to work with "purchased" songs...? I've burned and imported a few, but it has been tedious managing info such as track numbers and artwork. 958 to go.....

This was the easiest way. You still have to change the way you want the file imported before you load them back onto ITunes or other music player. They have to be imported a MP3s. Change your settings to 'Create an MP3 version' before you import off the disc. Once you have gone into ITunes settings and changed how tracks are imported, any song you have in your library can be changed without much trouble. Right click, click 'create MP3 version' and you will have 2 copies of the song. You can delete the audio protected file after you check and make sure the MP3 works fine. Clock on edit, go to preferences, then import settings. Choose MP3 encoder and set it at higher quality. You should be able to right click the song and take it from there.