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iTunes Match rescued my messy MP3 collection

Posted on 15 Nov 2012 at 09:21

Paul Ockenden reveals how iTunes Match helped bring order to his eclectic digital music collection

Although it isn’t intended for this purpose, the Match deduplication facility provides a neat way to organise a music collection: just throw all your tracks at the service from one machine (a Mac if you have one, or a "Hackintosh" running in a VM – iTunes runs like a three-legged dog on Windows), then install a clean copy of iTunes with a blank database onto another machine and download everything. Voila! The Match service has turned your horrible mess of files into a neat and tidy music collection.

There are a few gotchas, however. First, iTunes Match isn’t free – it costs £22 a year in the UK – but if you’re using it only as a clean-up tool, you could cancel after the first year. Second, any files matched (rather than uploaded) will arrive on your second machine as 256Kbits/sec AAC files rather than MP3s. They’re not DRM-protected, though, so you can easily revert to MP3s if you want to, although most modern music players will work fine with AAC files. Third, if you have a large music collection it will take several days to complete the match/upload/download process.

I’ve always hated iTunes, especially running on a PC – it’s slightly more tolerable on a speedy Mac

In addition, you may experience occasional problems with the matching process itself: in particular, I found several files that iTunes showed as "ineligible" once I’d turned on the iCloud Status column (it’s normally hidden, but you’ll find it in iTunes’ column chooser). On closer inspection it turned out that these were variable bit-rate MP3s that had somehow been flagged as 32Kbits/sec, probably because those tracks started with silence and so the encoder could drop the bit rate right down to save a few bytes; iTunes appears to look at the initial bit rate, and if it’s below 64Kbits/sec, rejects the whole file. The simple answer is to right-click the affected tracks and select "Create AAC version", then under Store select "Update iTunes Match", at which point the AAC files will either match or upload.

All in all, this is a long-winded way to clean up a music collection, but the results are worth it – on the second machine you’ll find you’ve downloaded a well-structured music collection with lots of cover art and track names. What’s more, many of your grotty, low bit-rate files will have been transformed into beautiful 256Kbits/sec copies.

I’ve always hated iTunes, especially running on a PC – it’s slightly more tolerable on a speedy Mac, but still seems to spend minutes at a time seemingly locked up before springing back to life again. I never thought I’d have anything good to say about it, but iTunes Match has changed all that.

Do keep an eye on its competitors, though: Amazon Cloud Player needs only a deduplicate function to bring itself into contention, especially since it’s based on 256Kbits/sec MP3 rather than AAC, and who knows what Google might add to its own cloud music player in the future.

There are exciting times ahead in the cloud music space, but right now Apple is winning.

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