How can I upgrade protected iTunes songs to iTunes Plus without iTunes Match?

Hi, Gail - thanks for your reply. 🙂 I actually performed the steps in that article before I opened my Support query, but unfortunately what I found was that what got downloaded from the iTunes Store after I deleted the original from my library was the exact same file that I had previously. It was a 128 kbps protected AAC audio file just like what I had deleted. Based on that (and on what I read in the top half of the article), I think it will only download an iTunes Plus version of the file using this technique if you are a subscriber of iTunes Match.

Many thanks, Limnos and Gail. 🙂 I'm disappointed that Apple doesn't offer another method to upgrade. I upgraded many of my songs at the time it was offered originally, but since I had well over 1200 purchased songs, it was financially impractical for me to upgrade all of them over the time period it was offered, even at 30 cents a song.

As for the interest in upgrading now, it's partially to remove the protection and partially to get the better quality sound that the 256 Kbps iTunes Plus songs offers. I could burn the songs to CD, it's true, but since I still have about 1000 songs that are protected, burning roughly 20 at a time is a little impractical, and of course, as you mentioned, you lose sound quality when you reimport the songs from the CD.

And as for why I don't want to use iTunes Match, I don't want to do that because, as I understand it, when you utilize it (and when I upgrade the protected songs to iTunes Plus), you lose the metadata that you might have set in your files when you replace them with Apple's. Is that correct, or is that a misconception on my part? I've spent a LOT of time curating my library and getting the metadata for my songs set the way I want it, and many of my smart playlists take advantage of those settings, and if possible I don't want to have to redo it. With an overall library of over 8000 tracks, that would be a real headache. 😉

Any other thoughts or suggestions about what I might be able to do to remedy this situation? Thanks in advance for any advice you might be able to provide.

Thanks for the advice, Ed. For me, though, I'll pass on the subscription. Updating the metadata is just too big a bullet to bite. 😉 I spent many, many hundreds of hours over the course of an entire decade of iTunes/iPod/iPhone use getting it perfected, and I don't want to go through that again for all my songs because I simply want to upgrade the quality for one-eighth of my collection. I'll explore alternatives - perhaps re-purchasing the same protected songs again from another album (why Apple also doesn't allow me to repurchase a song at full price from the same album I purchased the protected song from so I can get the iTunes Plus version is a mystery to me) or purchasing an MP3 from Amazon.

Ed,

You're correct about the cost in dollars, but I'm more worried about the cost in time. If I understand Match correctly, it will try to match all of my library (not just the protected tracks) with Apple equivalents, and so for the other ~7000 or so non-protected tracks in my library I will also have to correct the metadata for them and the time to do that will be tremendous. If I replace the protected tracks via newly purchased-copies, I can replace them at my pace (and at a rate my pocketbook can sustain) and I only have to replace the metadata for those tracks, not the rest. I can see the advantages of iTunes Match, but I don't think it's a good fit for me. I do appreciate the feedback, though. 🙂

Ahhh... so perhaps I misunderstood what the Match service is doing. So when you do your initial signup it simply finds a match for all your tracks (or as many as it can) and makes them available for you to replace in your library? And it doesn't touch anything in your library until you delete the file in your library and download the match from the cloud? If both of those questions are answered with a "Yes", then iTunes Match definitely sounds like a better way to go.

Thanks, Ed!