[howzz1854]

i just learned about it. was wondering if anyone have hands on experience with it. 
 
what really intrigues me is the fact that you can renew your entire old mp3 library, that were low quality bit rate, with high quality AAC256 from the apple store library. i am just wondering how well does this work in practice. i mean theoretically, you should be able to renew them all, but are people running into matching issues where lots of songs are not being matched? i really rather not spend $25 and find out that half of my collection run into matching errors. 
 
i am just wondering what everyone's experiences with itunes match is before i take the plunge. 

 

[HammyTown]

I'm interested in iTunes Match as well.  What little I could find on it for reviews wasn't very recent and most what I read was negative.  Issues with getting albums mixed up and missing tracks.  What wasn't clear to me is if these technical issues could screw up your iTunes library saved locally or if the issues were just with other devices synching with the cloud.

 

[howzz1854]

form what i've read. i won't screw up your local files. if anything, if there's a mis-match. it'll only upload your mis-matched local file to the cloud server. but it'll never screw up your local files, unless you delete your local files manually, in which case, you can choose to download the 256kbs AAC version from their library online. which is what i was most interested in. 

 

[Oteil]

I will tell you from my experience, I think overall, it sucks. I have been using it for a year in a half and it has not improved one bit since I started using it. It is convenient to have every album that you own available to you but it just doesn't work that well. If I wasn't so invested with the Apple ecosystem I would use Amazon's cloud service. It works like it is supposed to every single time. Apple's system is very slow going. It screws up play counts, puts things in weird order sometimes and sometimes adds duplicates of songs. If you have a small library I am sure it works fine. I have a quite a large library and it is just a pain in the rear. I have it for emergency's but I have gone back to syncing manually. The one other thing that is quite annoying is particular cd's that I have that I like the mastering or sound quality, etc...... you can kiss getting this versions goodbye if you use Itunes Match, it matches to what Apple has so if you don't like what they have in their store you are stuck with it. This is why I manually sync, it is the only way I can get the cd version that I want everytime. One other thing, the speed at which music is download even from wireless is ridiculously slow compared to Amazon's cloud. There are so many things that it does not do well, YMMV though. I pay for it because it is cheap and sometimes I might need an album to play and that way I don't have to take my whole library every time, but don't count on it to work like you want it to every single time.

 

[howzz1854]

  I will tell you from my experience, I think overall, it sucks. I have been using it for a year in a half and it has not improved one bit since I started using it. It is convenient to have every album that you own available to you but it just doesn't work that well. If I wasn't so invested with the Apple ecosystem I would use Amazon's cloud service. It works like it is supposed to every single time. Apple's system is very slow going. It screws up play counts, puts things in weird order sometimes and sometimes adds duplicates of songs. If you have a small library I am sure it works fine. I have a quite a large library and it is just a pain in the rear. I have it for emergency's but I have gone back to syncing manually. The one other thing that is quite annoying is particular cd's that I have that I like the mastering or sound quality, etc...... you can kiss getting this versions goodbye if you use Itunes Match, it matches to what Apple has so if you don't like what they have in their store you are stuck with it. This is why I manually sync, it is the only way I can get the cd version that I want everytime. One other thing, the speed at which music is download even from wireless is ridiculously slow compared to Amazon's cloud. There are so many things that it does not do well, YMMV though. I pay for it because it is cheap and sometimes I might need an album to play and that way I don't have to take my whole library every time, but don't count on it to work like you want it to every single time.

 
 
is it able to recognize and match your library 100%? i am more concerned about the matching part. since my old library are full of low quality MP3's. it's the matching feature that's attractive to me. so would you say it matches your songs well? or is half of your library unrecognizable to the itunes library. 
 
thanks for your feedback. it's very helpful. 

 

[Oteil]

I would say that it matches pretty good. I wouldn't say a 100% but probably about 90 to 95%, but I think that has a lot to do with how big your library is. I think you will be pleased with it if you are trying to upgrade from a lower quality mp3. In that respect it does it job. It is sometimes slow at this though which is fairly normal. It sometimes gets stuck and you will have to restart it. Good luck! I think it may suit your needs

 

[howzz1854]

  I would say that it matches pretty good. I wouldn't say a 100% but probably about 90 to 95%, but I think that has a lot to do with how big your library is. I think you will be pleased with it if you are trying to upgrade from a lower quality mp3. In that respect it does it job. It is sometimes slow at this though which is fairly normal. It sometimes gets stuck and you will have to restart it. Good luck! I think it may suit your needs

 
interesting. thanks!

 

[Kiont]

Be careful while matching explicit songs, sometimes it will match the clean versions.