iOS 5 & iCloud |OT|

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iTunes match is kind of a mess. I've left things go since early yesterday and I've still got like 5,000 songs it seems to be refusing to upload. An absolutely massive chunk of my library just has "error" by it. And a massive chunk of those should really be able to be matched since they are on the store.
 
Marty Chinn said:
They are highly unreliable. I stopped using them because of that. It will probably work fine at your home though because it works better at houses cuz of their small size.

I figured this would work better in a suburb with more segmented properties/addresses than in a city setting.
 
Anyone have a Shazam alternative?

Here are my requirements:
- It works
- It's free
- It isn't fucking hideous and ad-filled like Shazam is now

Here are things that I don't care about:
- Lyrics
- BUY DIS SONG NOW
- Journal / scrobble your tagged songs
- Friends lists
- anything else not listed above
 
scorcho said:
a nice feature i appreciate about iTunes Match - it'll keep whatever tags you have set in your music files regardless of how it is on the iTunes Store. it makes downloading and replacing your low bitrate files much easier, though Apple will append your email info onto the track like they do for iTunes Store purchases.

also, ratings and play counts made on your iDevices sync back to the cloud so they appear on the desktop as well. in seconds, actually.


I was under the impression the songs that were matched would also match the artwork with iTunes, that's not the case which is a bummer



also, Apple needs to come up with with a solution for those who had 2/10 songs match and the rest uploaded from an album they ripped from retail CDs
 
Ken Masters said:
also, Apple needs to come up with with a solution for those who had 2/10 songs match and the rest uploaded from an album they ripped from retail CDs

Or a solution for the fact that it seems like 50% of my songs matched, then only 5% could upload. The remaining chunk of my music is sitting here with error messages.

And now I've found out last.fm doesn't seem to be scrobbling anything.

This is almost completely unusable to me, and I'm slightly angry about it...
 
Got iTunes Match up and running and so far it's great. This thing was the reason I got a 16gb 4S. Since I have so many games/apps I can now just grab the music I want and not have to worry about rotating music in and out of my 5gb of free space.

I did notice some of the matched music that I have no artwork for remains that way. Is there any way I can change that? Also if I rip a new cd, how do I get it to sync with iCloud manually so it's available on my other devices?
 
Zeth said:
Got iTunes Match up and running and so far it's great. This thing was the reason I got a 16gb 4S. Since I have so many games/apps I can now just grab the music I want and not have to worry about rotating music in and out of my 5gb of free space.

I did notice some of the matched music that I have no artwork for remains that way. Is there any way I can change that? Also if I rip a new cd, how do I get it to sync with iCloud manually so it's available on my other devices?


I'm also wondering if I were to buy a new CD and rip into iTunes, how would I get iTunes to match it without any issues
 
CrankyJay said:
Anyone try out the location based reminders yet?

I just made one for when I arrive at home to check my water meter. I hope it works. =)
Took me a while to work out how to correctly tell it I'm at home/work, but since I've done that it's been flawless for me.
 
Wish Maps had iCloud support. Now I basically have two sets of bookmarked places (iPod and iPad) and routes, and some that are in both devices but are named slightly differently.
 
iTunes match sounds interesting, and would be nice to use on my 16gb phone to stream my music, but I was just thinking about my data plan. Wouldn't streaming your music use up alot of your data? I'm surprised so many of you like this feature. Is there something I'm missing?
 
Kunohara said:
iTunes match sounds interesting, and would be nice to use on my 16gb phone to stream my music, but I was just thinking about my data plan. Wouldn't streaming your music use up alot of your data? I'm surprised so many of you like this feature. Is there something I'm missing?
Does it actually stream? I was under the impression that it just allows you to download that music from the cloud. Is there a proper Q&A that covers the nuts and bolts of the service? Need to find out if it's worth paying for when it eventually launches in the UK.
 
Kunohara said:
iTunes match sounds interesting, and would be nice to use on my 16gb phone to stream my music, but I was just thinking about my data plan. Wouldn't streaming your music use up alot of your data? I'm surprised so many of you like this feature. Is there something I'm missing?

Yeah, it'd use up a ton, but I'm still on unlimited. I wanted the feature because my iPod crapped out on me and I can't fit my entire library on my phone. I've been using rhapsody and some of my stuff that I synced, but it'd be nice to have all of my stuff available at any point.


Number45 said:
Does it actually stream? I was under the impression that it just allows you to download that music from the cloud. Is there a proper Q&A that covers the nuts and bolts of the service? Need to find out if it's worth paying for when it eventually launches in the UK.

It downloads, but you can listen streaming while it downloads. So if you want to listen to an album hit download all and then press on the first song and it'll play through everything. You can delete it afterwards. You might be able to skip that step of downloading all, though. Haven't tested that.
 
CrankyJay said:
I figured this would work better in a suburb with more segmented properties/addresses than in a city setting.

It works when the location is small because it's too precise on where you have to be for the notification to go off. If you tell it to remind you when you get to some place like school, or work, all bets are off because even though you are there, the GPS location might not think that's where it is or you went in the wrong entrance and never get close enough to where it thinks the location is. I tried to tell it to remind me to pick up some stuff at Target but it never went off because the location itself is too big for it. Really useless because of that. If they could open up the radius or allow you to define the radius, then it could work.
 
RDreamer said:
Yeah, it'd use up a ton, but I'm still on unlimited. I wanted the feature because my iPod crapped out on me and I can't fit my entire library on my phone. I've been using rhapsody and some of my stuff that I synced, but it'd be nice to have all of my stuff available at any point.




It downloads, but you can listen streaming while it downloads. So if you want to listen to an album hit download all and then press on the first song and it'll play through everything. You can delete it afterwards. You might be able to skip that step of downloading all, though. Haven't tested that.

That is really unfortunate. I have 2GB split between 3 people, and I am always afraid of using up my data so quickly. But being able to access my library without using up memory on my phone is really nice.

Stupid Canadian data plans.
 
Marty Chinn said:
It works when the location is small because it's too precise on where you have to be for the notification to go off. If you tell it to remind you when you get to some place like school, or work, all bets are off because even though you are there, the GPS location might not think that's where it is or you went in the wrong entrance and never get close enough to where it thinks the location is. I tried to tell it to remind me to pick up some stuff at Target but it never went off because the location itself is too big for it. Really useless because of that. If they could open up the radius or allow you to define the radius, then it could work.

Ah, that's a letdown. I figured one of my primary uses would be to remind me to pick up certain things when I get to a grocery store.
 
Kunohara said:
That is really unfortunate. I have 2GB split between 3 people, and I am always afraid of using up my data so quickly. But being able to access my library without using up memory on my phone is really nice.

Stupid Canadian data plans.

US data plans are going that way too. If I ever give up unlimited I can't go back, and I'd be kind of screwed and angry. Even with a lot of streaming I'm not an extreme user, but I think I still break 2GB once in a while.
 
CrankyJay said:
Ah, that's a letdown. I figured one of my primary uses would be to remind me to pick up certain things when I get to a grocery store.

It worked once at one grocery store, once at home, but failed for me at another grocery store, Target, the mall, and a hospital. The hospital one was the last straw since that was an important reminder. It's neat in concept, and I'm sure it works great for some, but the funny thing is it's the precision that makes it unreliable.
 
So I plan on quitting all of my gmails and go strictly iCloud Mail. Should I be aware of anything? Is there a way to transfer all of my mails?
 
Ok so I'm not sure iTunes Match is going to work for me.

I download the stern show to listen to every day and those files are about 300MB each-I have them in a playlist. But now that iTunes Match is enabled on my phone, I can't sync music to it-it relies soley on iCloud-but files over 200MB don't go to iCloud-so what...I just am unable to listen to those files now? I disabled iTunes Match on my iPhone, and when I plugged it back into my mac to sync, I don't even have the option to choose playlists to sync because it only lets you sync voice memos now.

WTF??
 
Ken Masters said:
I'm also wondering if I were to buy a new CD and rip into iTunes, how would I get iTunes to match it without any issues
as soon as you import the CD into iTunes it'll put the music in queue to be checked with iTunes Match. in a few minutes you'll see the ITM icon activate and your songs should be on the cloud in seconds if it's matched

MDavis360 said:
Ok so I'm not sure iTunes Match is going to work for me.

I download the stern show to listen to every day and those files are about 300MB each-I have them in a playlist. But now that iTunes Match is enabled on my phone, I can't sync music to it-it relies soley on iCloud-but files over 200MB don't go to iCloud-so what...I just am unable to listen to those files now? I disabled iTunes Match on my iPhone, and when I plugged it back into my mac to sync, I don't even have the option to choose playlists to sync because it only lets you sync voice memos now.

WTF??
why are you recording the show at such a high bitrate? you should be able to get away with a 64kbps mono encoding for talk shows like that.
 
scorcho said:
as soon as you import the CD into iTunes it'll put the music in queue to be checked with iTunes Match. in a few minutes you'll see the ITM icon activate and your songs should be on the cloud in seconds if it's matched


why are you recording the show at such a high bitrate? you should be able to get away with a 64kbps mono encoding for talk shows like that.

I don't record it-I download it. And the shows are generally around 3-4 hours long so the file is pretty big. Regardless I don't understand why I can't just sync what I like, and then whatever is not synced appears as a cloud icon for me to download.
 
MDavis360 said:
I don't record it-I download it. And the shows are generally around 3-4 hours long so the file is pretty big. Regardless I don't understand why I can't just sync what I like, and then whatever is not synced appears as a cloud icon for me to download.
you should transcode it, then. you won't notice much of a loss in fidelity and you'll cut the file size in half by using 64kbps. i used to do that when i downloaded opie and anthony shows years ago. that should put you under the 200MB file upload limit.

alternatively, you can use Dropbox, which will actually stream the file to your phone instead of downloading it. in that case, you're limited to 2GB of storage.

if you're on Mac you can use XLD to make this easy. on windows, i suggest LameXP.
 
MDavis360 said:
I download the stern show to listen to every day and those files are about 300MB each-I have them in a playlist. But now that iTunes Match is enabled on my phone, I can't sync music to it-it relies soley on iCloud-but files over 200MB don't go to iCloud-so what...I just am unable to listen to those files now?

You could always chop them up or lower the bitrate in Audacity. Not really a quick solution, but I doubt Apple will relax on the filesize restrictions any time soon.


I've been messing around with Audacity and trying to get some of the irritating lone tracks that won't match with the full album. I was able to get a song off the Beatles White Album, "Wild Honey Pie" to match after cutting off the last few seconds. The iTunes version says 52s but the version I imported off my CD is over 1m. The last few seconds aren't even part of the song but some short guitar riff interlude. Anyway I cut it to 53s and it matched fine.

I also messed around with a Radiohead track I had already matched. I loaded the m4a into Audacity, did some quick edits; reversed it, changed the pitch, copy/pasted in a 5 second chunk from one part to another, and none of the edits would match. If I simply imported the m4a and exported as an mp3 with no editing, the mp3 would match fine.
 
Anastacio said:
So I plan on quitting all of my gmails and go strictly iCloud Mail. Should I be aware of anything? Is there a way to transfer all of my mails?
Last time I tried this I found the push mail to be very slow in comparison to Gmail, but that was soon after the 4s launch - maybe it's settled down? I'd be curious to know actually, because I'd like to move over as well (managed to get firstname.surname@me.com, which I didn't get at Gmail. :().

It's also very sparse in terms of functionality in the web interface, which may or may not suit.
 
dyls said:
Create the following smart playlist to see all of your files that aren't 256kbps AAC. Option-click on the + to get the multiple conditions.

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/9733/playlist.png


I backed up all my uploaded files to another drive and deleted them from both my iTunes library and iCloud. I'll wait until tomorrow to avoid any caching issues and then try to re-add them to the library and hopefully attempt to rematch them.
Did you have any luck with this? I tried deleting and re-adding some of my unmatched songs, but no luck. It sucks, some of the songs for CDs I own do not match, but other songs on the CD do. I even tried importing me CD again and no luck.

Also is there any way to delete songs from iTunes from the smart playlist? It is annoying having to go into the music selection to delete them.
 
scorcho said:
you should transcode it, then. you won't notice much of a loss in fidelity and you'll cut the file size in half by using 64kbps. i used to do that when i downloaded opie and anthony shows years ago. that should put you under the 200MB file upload limit.

alternatively, you can use Dropbox, which will actually stream the file to your phone instead of downloading it. in that case, you're limited to 2GB of storage.

if you're on Mac you can use XLD to make this easy. on windows, i suggest LameXP.

XLD, huh? I'll give it a shot! Thanks!
 
Marty Chinn said:
It worked once at one grocery store, once at home, but failed for me at another grocery store, Target, the mall, and a hospital. The hospital one was the last straw since that was an important reminder. It's neat in concept, and I'm sure it works great for some, but the funny thing is it's the precision that makes it unreliable.

Parked my car in the garage and it didn't go off, but as soon as I stepped out it went off. At least I got reminded to get my task done.
 
scorcho said:
as soon as you import the CD into iTunes it'll put the music in queue to be checked with iTunes Match. in a few minutes you'll see the ITM icon activate and your songs should be on the cloud in seconds if it's matched


.

unfortunately that's a big issue
 
Ken Masters said:
unfortunately that's a big issue
are you on a Mac or Windows? if your CDs are scratched, you'll need to use a secure ripping utility like XLD or Exact Audio Copy to guarantee a bit-perfect-rip. when i re-ripped my Pavement CDs i encoded them to 96kbps and iTunes matched them to the 256kbps AAC files quickly. then i deleted the files i encoded and downloaded them.

it should work then.
 
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to whether iTunes can see your phone via Wi-Fi, or vice versa… 2/3 times it can't find it, for no good reason altogether. It usually works after i reboot iTunes, the iPhone, or the PC itself. I really hope they fix this. Right now I still keep an iPod charger plugged into the PC because I frequently have to give up and hard sync it :/

It's funny because the "Remote" app never seems to have a problem finding my iTunes library...
 
scorcho said:
are you on a Mac or Windows? if your CDs are scratched, you'll need to use a secure ripping utility like XLD or Exact Audio Copy to guarantee a bit-perfect-rip. when i re-ripped my Pavement CDs i encoded them to 96kbps and iTunes matched them to the 256kbps AAC files quickly. then i deleted the files i encoded and downloaded them.

it should work then.


I'm on mac. My CDs are still in good shape and are read by iTunes. I'll try what you said.


What do you suggest I do for songs that were uploaded that should have been matched? Is deleting them completely the only option for it being matched?
 
Anyone else getting a weird sound glitch in conjunction with notifications on their iPhone 4? If I am listening to music when a notification comes in, the music fades in and out a few times abruptly before the notification sound occurs. It's weird.
 
New iTunes update.... for once in my life I really am hoping for bug fixes instead of features :P
 
Number45 said:
Last time I tried this I found the push mail to be very slow in comparison to Gmail, but that was soon after the 4s launch - maybe it's settled down? I'd be curious to know actually, because I'd like to move over as well (managed to get firstname.surname@me.com, which I didn't get at Gmail. :().

It's also very sparse in terms of functionality in the web interface, which may or may not suit.
Would be interesting to hear from someone who has Apple mail now yeah.
I don't need much functionality, just being able to send mail, quote and maybe flag them is enough. =)


BocoDragon said:
New iTunes update.... for once in my life I really am hoping for bug fixes instead of features :P
Just installed the update. I don't understand why they say, that iTunes Match is a new feature, when I'm in a country which don't have iTunes Match...
 
Recently Upgraded my iPod touch 3g to iOS5 and am having a problem with the new remote feature.

Every time I use it I can only use it for a few seconds before my network loses it's internet connection and I have to reboot my whole router/modem combo. It's unusable and messes up the internet for the whole house.

Help!?
 
I recently replaced my iPhone 4 with an iPhone 4s. I put the 4 on eBay and sold it and I want to make sure I cleared it of all my personal stuff (Apple id, credit card, etc). I went into settings and did the complete wipe option where it loads for a minute then goes to the screen you get when you have a new phone (welcome screen in different languages). Is all my data gone? Do I need to take out my sim too?
 
Anastacio said:
Just installed the update. I don't understand why they say, that iTunes Match is a new feature, when I'm in a country which don't have iTunes Match...
Yeah, my country doesn't even have iTunes in the Cloud yet. Which means, I'm continously hesitant to buying stuff on iTunes since I still can't redownload it.
 
Majine said:
Yeah, my country doesn't even have iTunes in the Cloud yet. Which means, I'm continously hesitant to buying stuff on iTunes since I still can't redownload it.
I thought you could re download from iTunes as many times as you want?
 
MadraptorMan said:
Anyone else getting a weird sound glitch in conjunction with notifications on their iPhone 4? If I am listening to music when a notification comes in, the music fades in and out a few times abruptly before the notification sound occurs. It's weird.
Weird. It's suppose lower the volume before the notification, and go back to normal afterwards.
 
Eaten By A Grue said:
Did you have any luck with this? I tried deleting and re-adding some of my unmatched songs, but no luck. It sucks, some of the songs for CDs I own do not match, but other songs on the CD do. I even tried importing me CD again and no luck.

Also is there any way to delete songs from iTunes from the smart playlist? It is annoying having to go into the music selection to delete them.
Nope. I waited a good 15 hours before re-adding the songs to my library and attempting to match them. It appeared to at least be trying but then they all came back as uploaded without having to upload. I also notice that when I make changes in my library and update iTunes match, the old data will actually change my fixes back. : / I had some tracks from the same album listed as two separate albums (the parenthetical subtitle was different) and I made the fix and chose "update iTunes match". Ten minutes later it was back to two separate albums. Lame. I did notice that some changes I made yesterday were in place today, so again it may be a delay, but it's annoying either way. And the cover art issue is just killing me.

I still think the service was worth it for me solely for the 1000 or so tracks I upgraded, but I'm thinking of turning it off for a whole until they fix all the issues.
 
oddly enough, you're able to stream iTunes Match songs on the PC without the song being saved, but not so on iOS devices where storage is more limited.

works great for when i take my laptop on the road sans portable HDD, but that's a curious distinction. i had to delete a couple of gigs of music i 'streamed' to my iPad 2 because i was running out of space on the device.
 
scorcho said:
works great for when i take my laptop on the road sans portable HDD, but that's a curious distinction. i had to delete a couple of gigs of music i 'streamed' to my iPad 2 because i was running out of space on the device.

if i match the music on my iMac will my macbook pro stream or download the music?
 
scorcho said:
oddly enough, you're able to stream iTunes Match songs on the PC without the song being saved, but not so on iOS devices where storage is more limited.

works great for when i take my laptop on the road sans portable HDD, but that's a curious distinction. i had to delete a couple of gigs of music i 'streamed' to my iPad 2 because i was running out of space on the device.
Apparently it smartly deletes songs that you haven't listened to in a while to clear space. But they really need to allow a cap set by the user. That way you could allow say 8 gigs to be filled with music, and as soon as it got past that point it would begin deleting unused tracks.

So around midnight last night match suddenly started working much more smoothly. Any changes I made on my Mac were shown on my iPhone within seconds. Still some weird issues with cover art, but nowhere near as bad as before. And it still wants to keep multiple copies of albums on my iPhone. I found that I had situations where a few tracks from an album would be set as part of a compilation, which created a second album on my iPhone. When I fixed it on my mac, the correct album would have all the tracks on it, but the other album just wouldn't disappear.
 
andymcc said:
if i match the music on my iMac will my macbook pro stream or download the music?
if you double click on the song it'll stream, but there will be a cache in your home>library>cache>itunes directory. i've already created an applescript that runs at login to delete that file whenever i reboot.

dyls said:
Apparently it smartly deletes songs that you haven't listened to in a while to clear space. But they really need to allow a cap set by the user. That way you could allow say 8 gigs to be filled with music, and as soon as it got past that point it would begin deleting unused tracks.
oh? i'll keep that in mind the next time i'm out with the device. when i deleted the streamed songs off the iPad using my MBP and iTunes, it subsequently also deleted the cloud access to the songs on my iPad. it still worked on my other devices, just not the iPad. took an hour before i fixed it.
 
I added a couple albums to my iTunes yesterday. One was automatically matched fine but the other has not been matched and has the status of "waiting." I can see the album on my phone but all the songs are greyed out.

Anyone know whats going on or how I can get it to match/upload to iTunes match?
 
I added a couple albums to my iTunes yesterday. One was automatically matched fine but the other has not been matched and has the status of "waiting." I can see the album on my phone but all the songs are greyed out.

Anyone know whats going on or how I can get it to match/upload to iTunes match?

Additionally, once a non-matched song has been uploaded, can you get it to match eventually? I know iTunes has a lot of these originally unmatched songs in their library, but for some odd reason, it's just never recognized and eventually uploaded when I wasn't paying attention.
 
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