There’s a reason why I own so many Apple products and there’s a reason why the iPod and iPhone halo effect has been a catalyst for success in the last decade. The logic is that once a customer buys an iPod, the chances that they’ll buy other Apple products is high. When faced with a choice between an iPad or other tablet, the iPod user will most likely buy iPad because of the trust they have in Apple’s simple offerings. “It just works” is something I utter to people asking about iOS versus Android. Android works but there’s just something missing and I generally recommend iOS. The decision to purchase iTunes Match falls under this umbrella of trust and simplicity toward products from Apple. Apple didn’t break my trust this week but they certainly shot a hole right through the middle. I’ve never felt as much remorse toward a product from Apple as I do with iTunes Match. I feel pretty sad and angry about this. Let’s review iTunes Match and I’ll do my best to remain level-headed throughout the review. Let’s dive in.
In this blog post authored in June, I had this to say about iTunes Match:
iTunes Match is HUGE for those of us who have loads of music. iTunes Match is capped at 25,000 songs and I’m 3,000 short of that number and I’ll be signing up at $29 per year because it’s amazing. Actually, let’s take a step back and dive deeper into iTunes in the cloud. If you bought a song via iTunes, you can access that song anywhere. You install iTunes on your work PC and you can download every single song you’ve bought with one click to iTunes. Pretty amazing. If you didn’t buy the song via iTunes and got it from CDs or another method, Apple will scan your library in a few minutes and try to match it to a song that they have in their database of 18 million songs. If matched, they’ll keep a record of that and allow you access to those songs via any iOS device you sign into or up to 10 devices like a work computer. Of note, 10 devices means computers and iOS devices. They’re all on equal footing here. Any song that is in your library that Apple does not have in their data store will be uploaded to Apple’s servers and it is my understanding that Apple will not charge you extra to store those tracks (as long as the number doesn’t exceed 25,000 tracks). Remember, Apple is very confident that their catalog of 18 million songs will match well with most of the music in our libraries. It won’t always but this kicks Google’s and Amazon’s asses. They ask you to upload all of your songs to their service and 20,000 songs on Amazon’s servers will cost you roughly $200 a year to store. Apple just matches your songs to ones they already have and delivers those to you if you request them at $29 per year.iTunes in the cloud is free for songs you bought from Apple and you only pay if you want to send up the other songs you didn’t get via Apple and you’ll never pay more than $29. An added benefit of this is that when you download those songs to your work computer or iOS device, iTunes will send you the 256kbps AAC version of the tune so if you have Beastie Boys’ Album from the 90s that you imported into Windows Media Player at 64 kbps and then you threw the CD away, Apple is allowing you to get the upconverted version of that as a part of iTunes Match.
Nothing has changed since then. iTunes Match is still exactly what I wrote above. However, the real-world experience does not measure up to what Apple has offered us. The offering is the same but there are some hiccups that can be easily fixed if Apple chooses to. Some need to be fixed whether Apple chooses to or not. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t refund money to customers who bought a product via the iTunes Store and that’s exactly how iTunes Match is paid for. My $25 is gone forever and all I can do is choose not to renew next year.
The Good of iTunes Match is exactly what I quoted above. That’s all that is good about iTunes Match. It’s a lot of good. Your music, anywhere if you bought it on iTunes or stole it from Bittorrent and Apple up converts your crappy tracks to 256kbps tracks at no cost and these tracks you get to keep after you cancel Match. Heck, those songs can even be emailed over to a friend who can drop them right into iTunes and they play no problem. They’re DRM-Free. If you have a lot of old music at 128kbps, get iTunes Match, delete your old tracks and download the new ones then cancel. For that, it’s a great deal. That’s all great and you can access those songs on any computer or iOS device. Not a bad deal for $29. Let’s move on to The Bad.
1. Apple is right that setting up iTunes Match is far easier than setting up Google Music or Amazon Music services. Those services ask that you upload every track in your library which can take weeks in order to have them available via the cloud. Apple’s solution is different. They have 18 million songs available on iTunes so, during the matching process, Apple tries to match tracks in your library with ones they have in the cloud. This effectively takes your setup time and decreases it in a big way. The 1-2 minutes per song upload time you had before becomes 0 seconds per song assuming Apple has it on file. If you listen to popular music, iTunes Match could take seconds to get going. However, I have 21,000 songs. For me, setting up iTunes Match took 28 hours from start to finish. I’m lucky for two reasons. The first is that I have a 50 megabit Comcast Business connection and can upload very very fast. The second thing is I have an iMac home server that’s online 24/7. If this was Adam last year or, if I was like almost everyone else, I’d only have one computer and that would be a laptop and I’d need to eventually take the laptop to work with me or share it with a family member and that upload would be restarted about 5 times before all of the tracks finally made their way up to the cloud. I was able to leave my iMac on for almost 2 days but many customers don’t have that option. This effectively takes a 1 day process and turns it into a full week of uploads. If iTunes Match gets stuck, you have to restart the process which is happening to a lot of people. Apple’s offering may be better than the competition but it’s not great. It’s far from great and that’s unacceptable.
2. Only 60% of my iTunes Library was “Matched” Meaning Apple had my song in their database. 10% of my tracks were “Purchased” Meaning I had already bought them on iTunes so their auto-matched. The rest had two statuses. “Uploaded” and “Error”. The Uploaded status is great and means my song is on their servers and accessible by any of my devices. The Error status is bad. It means a few different things. One is that the file type is incompatible, the second is that the file is missing from my computer and can’t be uploaded and the third reason is that the file is corrupt. I played all of these files and they played fine. I opened them in Finder and made sure I could copy them around and that worked fine. For some reason 3,000 songs could not be uploaded to iTunes. This is HUGE and insanely frustrating. Basically, 15% of my songs are not accessible via iTunes Match so I’m confused and a bit upset. I did find a fix to this issue published just hours ago by Macworld.com. The fix is that I convert all of those tracks to AIFF format which will take another 10 hours and then I convert them back to AAC and then re-submit them to iTunes Match. iTunes should Match / Upload those tracks and then I can delete them from my computer and download the 256kbps iTunes versions. The risk I run here is a BIG ONE and something Macworld.com doesn’t note. (Below via Wikipedia)
The key drawback of transcoding in lossy formats is decreased quality. Compression artifacts are cumulative, so transcoding causes a progressive loss of quality with each successive generation, known as digital generation loss. For this reason, transcoding is generally discouraged unless unavoidable.
It is better to retain a copy in a lossless format (such as TTA, FLAC or WavPack for sound), and then encode directly from the lossless source file to the lossy formats required. For image and digital audio editing, one is advised to capture or save images in a raw or uncompressed format and edit (a copy of) that version, only converting to lossy formats for distribution.
If the track is only uploaded to iTunes and not matched, then I won’t be getting the high quality 256kbps track from Apple’s Music Store servers. Instead, I’ll be getting the track I uploaded when I delete my local file and download the one from Apple. Not only is that a waste of time but by forcing my music to go to AIFF and then back to AAC, I’m losing a small or large amount of quality. I am extremely serious about audio quality and I don’t want to risk losing quality just so I can have a track on iTunes Match which will make it portable.
However, the final aspect of iTunes Match is forcing me to reconsider my decision to NOT bow to Apple’s demands and convert (2x) my tracks. Keep in mind, the tracks work perfectly fine on my iTunes installation now and Apple is the one saying that they have an error so I’m losing quality just to appease Apple and not really get any other benefit other than making them portable.
3. The loss of USB syncing of my iPhone is a deal breaker. I enabled iTunes Match on my iOS Devices (iPhone 4S and iPad) before setting up Match on my home iMac. The first thing Apple did is remove all songs previously synced via iTunes to my devices. Every track was deleted. The problem is, for the rest of the day and for the next 2 days while iTunes Match was being setup on my iMac at home, I didn’t have access to any of my songs on my iPhone or iPad. I was forced to use Spotify and Pandora. Sure, this is my fault but there should have been fair warning that you setup Match on your primary computer first. I wasn’t told this and it’s not written anywhere else. This itself is pretty lame. Tonight, I finally was setup on iTunes Match. Sure, 20%+ of my songs were too large to upload (200 megabyte max per track), had errors (which are unexplainable as the tracks play just fine in iTunes), were duplicates (which is crap because what iTunes considered duplicates were live versions of studio tracks I had from bands like Dashboard Confessional and the song titles were very specific with “LIVE” written beside the track name) or were the wrong format (Apple Lossless and AIFF) but, for the most part, my library is now on iTunes Match (17K out of 21,500K songs). Of note, if I ever hit 25,000 songs, I can no longer use iTunes Match. Apple caps the service at 25K songs…sorry, I’m getting side tracked.
Anyway, now that iTunes Match is technically setup on my iMac, it was time to finally sync music back to my iPad and iPhone. The iPad usually has 50 gigabytes of music and the iPhone has about 30 gigabytes. I sync another 15 gigabytes of music via Spotify to my iPhone in addition to the iTunes tracks. I plugged both devices into iTunes and observed that I can’t sync my music via iTunes. All music is now forever managed via iCloud which means a few things.
- All of the custom music sync settings in iTunes that I sculpt and modify weekly is moot. The option to sync specific playlists, certain artists and specific genres was just thrown away forever. Those settings are now gone and the Music tab within iTunes for my devices now just has a setting to sync “Voice Memos”. Why this is under Music, I have no idea.
- The ability to sync “Genius Mixes” is gone forever. I LOVED genius mixes. I don’t know every artist I have in the 21,000 songs and picking one artist is always a challenge. So, my default when getting in the car is just to pick “Adult Contemporary” and, out of the 4,000+ songs on my iPhone that are in that genre, it was just start playing songs at random and this was really really nice. I want to run to techno but don’t know what to pick, just tap on “Techno” and I’m good. iTunes Match doesn’t support Genius Mixes. Those are now gone forever.
- All of the songs that weren’t uploaded to iTunes Match (too long, corrupt, whatever) have no way to get on my iPhone. Forever, I won’t have access to those tracks that didn’t go into iCloud until I bite my lips and transcode those tracks twice just to appease Apple and I really am not sure if that will fix all of the tracks. My favorite BT album won’t go to iTunes Match. I have no idea why and I don’t want to transcode it to get that album. I’m stuck. I should just burn a CD of it. There, NOW IT’S FREAKING PORTABLE!
- Apple is forcing me to curate my iPhone’s music via Wi-Fi on each device. So, I’m going to spend tonight downloading all 75 playlists one-by-one to my iPhone and then going through and downloading a few of my favorite artists and genres and then I’ll had to do the same thing again on my iPad tomorrow.
- “Download All” is a feature at the bottom of each track list on iOS. So, if I open my playlist for Bright Eyes, I have to flick about 5 times to scroll through all 250 songs to finally be able to tap “Download All”. Imagine doing that 200 times before you finally get all of the tracks and playlists you want.
- Eventually, I’m going to get a call from Comcast. I just uploaded thousands of songs to Apple and now I’m going to download all of those songs again. My cap is pretty low with Comcast. I can imagine I’m going to hit it.
- The next time my iPhone OS craps out and I’m forced to do a system restore, guess what I’ll have to do? We’re going to repeat step 4 and 5 all over again flicking through hundreds of lists just to get my songs back and, once again, maxing out my WiFi network for days and days to do that.
These songs are in iTunes. They’re on my hard drive and my iPhone is connected to my iMac via a USB cable that’s 10 times faster than my Internet connection. Why Apple can’t just let me sync the songs via iTunes and then sync / stream songs I want later at another time? I am going to spend 4 hours on my iPad and iPhone manually picking every song that I want and then waiting for days for those tracks to download when, just yesterday I could easily just hop on iTunes, dock the iOS device and click one button, “Sync”. It’s been that easy since 2001 on the original iPod. Making a customer pay you to spend hours manually downloading songs they already own may be the single most counter-productive thing I’ve experienced on a personal computer.
I don’t want to disable iTunes Match on my iOS devices. That’s what people have recommended that I do. The thing is, I actually LOVE that every song I own (once I resolve the 3,000 tracks that have errors and split up all of the 2+ hour DJ sets so they meet Apple’s maximum length threshold for a track) is available to stream or download anywhere in the world that I have a cellular connection. It’s a terrific and very freeing feeling to have that sort of connectivity integrated into my Music app on the iPhone. It’s the reason why I’m so happy about iTunes Match. I can go to work, open iTunes on my PC and play my latest songs that are on my home iMac without any crazy configuration or remote desktop connection. It’s simply amazing. If I disable iTunes Match on my iOS devices, I’ll get back the beautiful and amazing functionality of one-click sync of all of my favorite tracks (even Genius Playlists) and I want to so badly to go back to that route. However, I just can’t do it. I got iTunes Match so I could have my tracks anywhere and if that means spending a few days twice a year year manually downloading my songs to a restored or brand new iOS device, I’m gonna deal with it.
As much as Apple has pissed me off with that non-USB support for iTunes Match enabled devices, I’m going to stick it out. Apple, why do you want to hurt me so much? In the interim, I’m going to open a bottle of wine and get to downloading. Sorry Comcast, I’m just trying to get a few songs onto my iPhone. Please direct all complaints to Apple if I go over my monthly data cap.
I give iTunes Match a big F for “Fail”. I hope these issues are resolved. It’s only $25 but I’ve never had an Apple product make me so angry every time I think about it. Sorry for the long post, I just feel very strong about this one. (PS: I won’t’ be proofreading this one. I have to go setup my iPhone).