next »

[perkiset]

I ripped the majority of my older library years and years ago. When Napster came out years later I knew it was a limited proposition and took massive advantage.

Having listened to much of my music digitally for the last, say, 16 years, I really didn't realize how much I was putting up with in my old rips. I mean, I CERTAINLY dug the sound and quality of more recently put out stuff, but never really looked backwards because it would cost so much to replace.

Enter iTunes Match.

I am not embarrassed to say that I've gone all Napster on them. I have about 7K tunes left to do (have been after it for the last couple days), but essentially I'm replacing all my matched stuff with the 256 DRM-free models. DELIGHTFUL. For example: San Jacinto (Peter Gabriel) had artifacts all over it, was sampled too low and was generally horrible ... but it was DIGITAL man. Well, having gotten the 256 version I am amazed how much I put up with. Amazed.

Anyhoo - for $25/year to upgrade a vast portion of your library and still keep it DRM free is pretty smokin'. Grab it while it lasts mates. You never know when someone will go all Federal on your Napster behavior

[nutballs]

I apparently have about 25% "uniques" since they need to upload. holy shit is that a slow ass upload btw...
Then I will redownload them all, to get the 256. Though I might not even bother, and save the local storage. not sure yet. Especially since music is such a small part of our life for the a long time.

here is a horrible cheat btw...
there are sites out there that you can by music by the meg. get the shittiest quality version you can get. cost pennies. itunes match it. download the upgraded version.

Oh im sorry, did I say that out loud?

like it, buy it.

[perkiset]

I apparently have about 25% "uniques" since they need to upload. holy shit is that a slow ass upload btw...

NO LIE.

Then I will redownload them all, to get the 256. Though I might not even bother, and save the local storage. not sure yet. Especially since music is such a small part of our life for the a long time.

Making quick lists of artists/blocks that you want to download, then deleting them en masse and forcing the download is a little bit of a pain, but the chaos of lots of people doing it different ways and at difference cadences probably puts less hurt on the servers.

Oh im sorry, did I say that out loud?

   

[perkiset]

The biggest thing I notice is the tinkle and pop. Lots more cleanliness in the way highs and really strong pop & thump. I have some really strong studio monitors at my desk and it's almost like I've got a whole new library. Freakin' great.

[perkiset]

First and second Match/iCloud FAIL.

1) Songs downloaded from the cloud to an iPad are not easily removed from the pad (not deleted, just removed from Pad storage). My existing tunes were taking up about 25% of my available storage and I wanted to swap out for video. The only easy way I could figure it out was to turn off Match, which set up my old "Sync" settings on the Mac, then turn off Music Sync, which cleared out the music. Then turned Match back on so that I have access to the tunes but they aren't taking up any storage on moment one. Clunky.

2) Playlists are really fubarred. I use a lot of nested lists because playlists can't do combinations of And and Or at the same time. For example: A list that contains all Steely Dan, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (an Or list) then referenced in another And list: if In List "All Steely" AND rating >= 3 ... nested lists don't move to cloud. Nor do lists that have content of type other than music. OK, I get it: you can't have a playlist containing videos. But I have lists that have no discernible non-music content, yet they won't move to the cloud. Enough, in fact, that my best lists are unavailable.

So: I am reasonably pleased with Match because my library is getting a total upgrade. But iCloud is not entirely cool. Great on the 'pad where I don't normally keep music, not so much on the phone which I want lots music (I keep about 40G on it now). Great as a backup mechanism. Strong when purchasing. But it's got a ways to go to not feel Beta-y.