Using Match to replace lower quality or DRM music??
I read several web articles that were identical in that they outlined a process to replace lower quality or DRM music with DRM-free AAC (or mpa?) files. This was intriguing in that I have a lot of mp3 files and older DRM-protected files that I'd sure like to clean up. In short, they all said:
- Subscribe to Match
- Create smart playlist to find files in your library that are matched or purchased with a quality lower than 256 Kbps, i.e. it is upgradable.
- Delete these files, making sure to not to select the box that removes the songs from iCloud (to only remove the local, lower quality sound files).
After paying the $25 last night I learned that this isn't an option. When I select delete I only get the option to either delete the file or remove the download. As a test I selected to remove two old mp3 songs (after making copies outside my iTunes library) to see if they would then show as a download...they did not. So I re-imported them back into my library.
Next idea was to use my wife's account on my Mac (her version of iTunes is set as a separate authorized user) and turn match on so I could then download the songs into her library and then copy them over to mine (overwriting the ones I want to replace). Tedious but I think it would work (except I've no clue which songs to copy...I'm afraid if I overwrite a purchased song with a downloaded matched song I could screw things up). Her music library now shows my 2000+ songs (OK, so I have a small library 🙂) as downloadable (except the two I deleted and reimported...they were there but grayed out? Ideas?) but it appears I have to download each one at a time (i.e. no way to select them all and download with one click). Any ideas upon this one?
One of the web sites I mentioned is here:
https://crunchedd.com/20548/drm-free-music-using-itunes-match/
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)