Owning music is so ten years ago
August 2, 2012 9:01 AM Subscribe
iTunes match question: If I "match" 40 gigs of music off of my laptop, I know I can then download tracks to my iPhone whenever I want, but could I ever re-sync it back to another Mac? How about a PC? Do those tracks have DRM on them?
Long story short, my Macbook Pro is having some health issues, and rather than backup and restore 40 gigs of music that doesn't fit on my phone anyway, I'd rather just toss it up in the cloud somewhere, but I have concerns about getting it back from Apple at some point.
Long story short, my Macbook Pro is having some health issues, and rather than backup and restore 40 gigs of music that doesn't fit on my phone anyway, I'd rather just toss it up in the cloud somewhere, but I have concerns about getting it back from Apple at some point.
Response by poster: That's a relief. I lost an entire Saturday the last time I tried to get my iTunes library migrated from my mac to my PC and eventually I just threw up my hands and re-imported all of the tracks from scratch.
posted by Oktober at 9:15 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by Oktober at 9:15 AM on August 2, 2012
iTunes Match really makes it so easy it's a laugh. I have all of my music on my home computer and a smaller subset on my work computer, but I can download any track from the cloud at a moment's notice. The only quirk is occasionally I have to log out of and log back in to my iTunes account to get it to acknowledge that I am actually me, but that may be a factor of how locked down my work computer is.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:21 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by Rock Steady at 9:21 AM on August 2, 2012
Not only that, but it will all be high-quality 256 kbps AAC. Once I imported my library to Match, I backed it up to an external HD and deleted it so I could pull the usually-higher-quality files from Apple's servers. It really is a great deal for "legitimizing" and standardizing your music collection.
Just be wary of any tracks that aren't matched. If you delete the original library and they didn't get matched, they'll be lost.
posted by supercres at 9:26 AM on August 2, 2012
Just be wary of any tracks that aren't matched. If you delete the original library and they didn't get matched, they'll be lost.
posted by supercres at 9:26 AM on August 2, 2012
Response by poster: Knowing apple, I'm going to assume they're dumped in a "Not Matched" directory or somesuch.
posted by Oktober at 9:30 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by Oktober at 9:30 AM on August 2, 2012
I'm not 100% sure of how this works, as I'm not in front of my computer right now, but if you right-click the headers in iTunes you can turn on a "iCloud Status" column that will show you if it is matched or not with a little icon.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:36 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by Rock Steady at 9:36 AM on August 2, 2012
@supercrea
They do not have to be matched to be deleted, but do however need to have been uploaded to the service.
posted by travis08 at 10:53 AM on August 2, 2012
They do not have to be matched to be deleted, but do however need to have been uploaded to the service.
posted by travis08 at 10:53 AM on August 2, 2012
A warning... if you have a lot of Hip-Hop or other music with Explicit Lyrics you'll get back the Clean version. There are tedious workarounds (convert files to 256 AAC, download a hack that sets the tags to Explicit, remove from iTunes Match, re-add).
posted by togdon at 11:10 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by togdon at 11:10 AM on August 2, 2012
A song doesn't have to be matched to be added to iTunes match, but it does have to meet certain criteria (mostly being higher than 96kbps, I think). Songs that aren't matched are just uploaded and I believe transcoded to AAC.
posted by The Lamplighter at 11:18 AM on August 2, 2012
posted by The Lamplighter at 11:18 AM on August 2, 2012
A warning... if you have a lot of Hip-Hop or other music with Explicit Lyrics you'll get back the Clean version.
Doesn't seem to be the case for me -- I just checked with some ODB, and it downloaded just as filthy as ever...
posted by Rock Steady at 12:00 PM on August 2, 2012
Doesn't seem to be the case for me -- I just checked with some ODB, and it downloaded just as filthy as ever...
posted by Rock Steady at 12:00 PM on August 2, 2012
Right, sorry; I misspoke. Anything that's not matched will have to have time to upload, which takes longer than you'd expect. (I left it matching for days, but when I deleted the original files, there were still tracks missing. Fortunately, like I said, I had it backed up.)
posted by supercres at 2:48 PM on August 2, 2012
posted by supercres at 2:48 PM on August 2, 2012
This thread is closed to new comments.
Yes. Yes. No. I've specifically done all of those things. The only issue you might run into is the limit of 25,000 tracks.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:06 AM on August 2, 2012