Apple Music and ITunes Matchi

In principle Apple Music acts as a super set of the features of iTunes Match, so you don't need to pay for both services. You should keep at least one offline copy of all of your own media in case of accidental deletions and to be ready should you decide to cancel Apple Music too.

tt2

I was actually just facing this issue for the second time. The first time I was asking apple support I was not able to get a good answer at all. So I left it at the two subscriptions.

But now I don't see why I should pay twice for the same service.

Here (Subscribe to iTunes Match - Apple Support) it states that as a Apple Music subscriber you have the same features as iTunes Match and you don't need iTunes Match anymore (unless Apple TV 2nd/3rd gen ba bla).

But just to be sure I was asking support again, and they still seemed not to know what exactly would happen to all the songs in my library if I cancel my subscription to iTunes Match.

Clearly there are songs that are "Matched" and some that are "Uploaded". The ones with "Apple Music" Status won't change, of course, as they are DRM protected.

But the others should not change their status either, nor should they become DRMed.

So I took the step and cancelled my subscription.

After some testing I found that of my 20.000 songs in total, there were some with status "Uploaded" that suddenly would not import into iMovie anymore. iMovie is my way of testing if a track has DRM.

And suddenly iMovie says that those tracks are DRM protected.

But those were tracks that I imported from CD for example. Some of them don't even exist in the iTunes Store.

But now comes the oddest part: iTunes won't play these songs anymore. I set up a new user and signed into iTunes. So there were no local songs to start with.

I tried playing the affected songs. They would not stream, and if I had them downloaded they were just being skipped.

I tried QuickTIme Player 10 and it doesn't open the tracks either. BUT QuickTime 7 does. Plays them perfectly. As well as VLC and the command line player "afplay". And also, the songs are playing on any iOS device. Streaming and after download. But again, when I import them into iMovie, I get the DRM error.

Something went clearly wrong here and my case is finally being escalated to the support engineers at apple.