That Not So Fresh Feeling

Back in December, I wrote up a bit about what using iTunes Match was like out of the gate.

There were some gotchas that were a bit vexing at the time:

• Album Art Syncing
• Smart Playlists With “Limits” Not Working on iOS devices
• Play Counts Not Updating Reliably
• No Genius Playlists on iOS devices

Let’s take these one one by one

Album Art Syncing

If you’re using multiple Macs (or, presumably, a Mac and a PC), this is now about as flawless as it gets. The syncing of songs from one computer to another seems to be nearly perfect. If I update album art on one machine, it now seems to be on the rest within a reasonable amount of time. There was a period of time where that wasn’t true, where random songs would be missing artwork when streaming them, but that’s just not the case now. If a song has artwork on one machine, it does on every other one. So, one check in the positive column!

However, that’s not the case for iOS devices. Now, for a lot of songs, your album artwork will be there. Particularly for songs you play a lot, your iOS device of choice (I’m going to go with iPhone) will download and cache the data. But, if you’re playing a playlist or have your Music app on shuffle, you’re going to find that a whole bunch of songs don’t have album art. The iPhone will go get the album art when you play the song (so the next time it will have album art), but even that seems flaky, as the length of time that the art gets cached seems inconsistent at best.

It does look like (and I should stress that this just seems different to me, it might not be a change) that the Music app will now try to cache artwork ahead of time. In other words, if you’ve got a playlist, it’ll go grab the artwork for the next 5 songs or so, so that they’ll be there. I think it does this, smartly, in an attempt to always be ahead of you, so you’ll never see the ugly no artwork icon.

But it just doesn’t work that well, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s just unreliable. I’ve seen enough times where I’ll just get a few songs into a playlist and all of a sudden I’ll hit a few songs with no artwork, then a batch with artwork, etc. It just seems to hit or miss.

More importantly, the caching seems to render the Music app nearly inoperable. I’m not sure if it’s cases where it doesn’t have a network connection, or if it has a weak one, or something else entirely, but when it starts downloading artwork for a larger playlist, you might not be able to use the UI for 15-30 seconds.

Very un-Apple like.

Given that, nightly, the iPhone uploads a backup of itself, is there any reason that, during the same window, it couldn’t download all of the artwork you need for your music? My library (about 8000 songs, all in the cloud, 90% with artwork) has about 500MB of artwork. Explain why the iPhone couldn’t grab that over wifi when it’s plugged in charging at night.

Baffling.

Not-So-Smart Playlists

The “limit” feature that works so well in iTunes on the desktop simply doesn’t work on iOS devices.

Well … that’s not actually true. Those options used to work, pre-Match. They just don’t work now. You’ll see people online bitching about playlists having too many songs, or inconsistent songs. This is why.

Your playlist that limits to your 25 most recent songs? It’ll probably just have every song you have in it.

Still not fixed. Presumably, this would only be fixed with an iOS update (it must be part of the Music app itself), but you’d think that Apple could set the cloud side of iTunes Match to simply sync over the actual contents of your “50 Best Songs” playlist, as a temporary work around.

No such luck.

There’s another smart playlist feature that still doesn’t work with iTunes Match on iOS devices, due to …

Play Counts Not Syncing

This is actually broader than play counts, it is really all meta data. And, like album art, it works perfectly on the desktop. I’ve now got this great system where I can crank through unrated music while I’m working, and when I get home, anything I’ve rated highly is already in my four- and five-star playlists. It’s really, really nice.

But it doesn’t work for iOS devices. At all. Or, almost at all.

Sometimes, the first track in a playlist that you listen to on an iOS device will update it’s play count. Not it’s last played date. Just the play count. And only sometimes. And only the first song. Bizarre.

This obviously contributes to the smart playlist problem. If you’ve got a “Radio” playlist like I do (where it’ll play songs that haven’t been played in a while), these just don’t work. Until I listen to those songs on a desktop, they will haunt me in the Radio playlist, showing up over and over again, even though I’ve heard them 50 times.

No Genius Playlists on iOS Devices

Nope, still don’t work.

So, where do we stand?

Well, if you’re a desktop user with multiple computers, iTunes Match is flawless. It really is. Stuff. Just. Works. It’s very Apple-like, which is something you couldn’t say 8 weeks ago.

Actually, there’s still one problem with the desktop experience …

The iTunes Match error messages suck. Flat out suck. When you hit a song that they can’t handle, you don’t get a good explanation why, and in the worst case, sometimes Match will sit there and churn for as long as you’ll let it. In my case, that was until my iMac crashed (because I hadn’t noticed it had been going for a day or so).

I do believe, though, that this is the exception. That most folks with your average iTunes setup are going to be just fine.

Back to our regularly scheduled summary …

So, as I was saying, if you’re a desktop user (a laptop and an iMac, or a couple of laptops, or a Mac and a PC), iTunes Match is everything it is supposed to be when you bought it.

If you’re an iOS user, there are still some problems, and I don’t expect these problems will be resolved until we get a new build of iOS (5.1?). They’re not necessarily load or cloud issues; they seem to be fundamental application issues that need to be resolved.

And I’m optimistic that these will get resolved. Some of them (the metadata syncing) just seem like bugs, not fundamentally unfixable issues. There’s nothing on the list that jumps out as challenging engineering (other than the scale).

Even with the stuff that works intermittently, or not at all, iTunes Match is still worth it, even just as a backup of your music, a way to play music on your Apple TV without having to keep a computer on, and a way to get higher quality versions of the crappy music you ripped in 1998.

Or maybe you don’t need a higher quality version of “… Baby One More Time”. To each their own. I suppose.

Image borrowed from Apple

I’ve spent the last few weeks getting iTunes Match up and running across all of my machines that support it. This includes a couple of different laptops with iTunes Libraries, an iPhone, iPad, and a couple of Apple TVs. For 80% of the population, I’m guessing the basic iTunes Match service will work splendidly. They’ll turn it on, feel better that they’ve got all this music up in the cloud, and love that they can pull down all their music on their phone without plugging it in over USB.

However, if you’ve got more than 5 or 6 GB of music, or keep your iTunes metadata clean, or are familiar at all with smart playlists, you’re probably going to bump your head a time or two.

If you read through this, you may avoid those unsightly welts on your noggin’. Sadly, I didn’t.

Getting Music into iTunes Match

Again, for most folks, you’ll just turn it on, let iTunes Match chug for a while, and then you’ll be done. That while might be an hour or two, but start it before you go to bed, and when you wake up, you’ll be all cloudly.

The rest of you are likely going to run into a couple of things uploading your music. The first thing you’re giong to do is turn on the “iCloud Status” column in iTunes (right-click on the columns at the top of your iTunes). The second thing to do is make an “iCloud Errors” smart playlist so you can triage any of those songs.

What we’re basically doing is looking for all the songs that are in our library that didn’t get matched or uploaded (or weren’t already purchased from iTunes). This playlist is going to basically show you two types of errors:

1. Errors
2. Ineligible

The first thing you’re going to do is select all, right-click, and choose “Add to iCloud”. iCloud, often, just messes up the first time through and it’ll upload or match a bunch of tracks the second time. Once you’ve done that, you need to deal with these tracks individually.

Let’s deal with the Ineligible tracks first.

Ineligble Tracks

These, by and large, will be tracks that fall below iTunes Match’s standards. Usually they’ll be tracks you ripped a long time ago and are below 128kb (bit rate) or will have been ripped at a variable rate and didn’t require much (often vocal or quiet tracks end up at a low bit rate). Fixing these is simple: right-click on them, choose “Convert to MP3” (or AAC, whatever your iTunes is set to), and let it go. Your iTunes will make a copy of your track (metadata included), at a bitrate high enough for iTunes Match to be happy.

Occasionally, you’ll find iTunes Match needs a bit more coaxing, which involves turning your track into an AIFF track and then back to mp3. Macworld covers that process in detail, so I won’t repeat it here. I only had to do that twice out of ~9k songs.

Error Tracks

If you find a bunch of tracks marked as “Error”, in my experience, just retrying the “Add to iCloud” option fixed them. For a handful of other tracks, the issue was that the mp3 is corrupt and iTunes Match couldn’t read the song to match it. Your best bet is to re-rip that music, because surely you ripped that music off your own CDs and didn’t steal it from Napster or someone else’s collection, right?

One more hiccup …

I ran into a case where Purchased music that was definitely on my machine stopped working. I have no idea why or how, but it did. It was the most recent album I’d bought via iTunes. All of a sudden—my guess is that I ended up with a contention between the songs downloaded to my computer and to my iPad—iTunes lost the metadata and couldn’t play the music.

The solution was one of the major features of iTunes Match. I deleted the songs, and then re-downloaded them. Problem solved.

iTunes Metadata & Libraries

iTunes Match does a reasonably good job of managing metadata. It doesn’t replace any of it, so if you’re hoping that you’ll take all of your crappily tagged music and have iTunes replace it with much better data, you’re going to be disappointed.

However, if you’ve done a reasonably good job of keeping your iTunes library tagged, iTunes Match allows you to merge all of your iTunes libraries into one big library in the cloud. Doing that is insanely easy.

1. Turn on iTunes Match on your first library
2. Let it do its thing
3. Turn on iTunes Match on your second librar
4. Let it do its thing
5. Rinse and repeat for each library

There are some gotchas that pop up when managing your now merged libraries in the cloud.

• If you enabled iTunes Match on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV), Album Art doesn’t show up on a song until you play it. I’m sure some engineer at Apple thought that was a great idea, and it is a good way to ensure you’re not keeping a bunch of extra art on your device. But it sucks in real life, especially if you’re someone who tries to keep your album art up-to-date on your music. Hopefully, Apple comes up with a better solution.

• Smart playlists that rely on other playlists simply don’t sync. You can probably rebuild those playlists using nested playlist logic (option-click on that little plus icon), to create a playlist like this:

My “Radio” playlist

• Smart playlists that rely on the “Limit” feature simply don’t work on iOS devices. They ignore the limit. This is, by far, one of the most infuriating things about iTunes Match. I have a ton of playlists that rely on that feature. Your “Top 50 songs” playlist that is limited to the top 50 most played tracks, or your “Best Rated Songs” limited by tracks you’ve most recently added are both not going to work. Or, more accurately, they simply ignore the limit, which probably destroys the value of that playlist.
  • I’m guessing that this is because the iOS device doesn’t have the iTunes Library or the necessary database to make those limits work. This seems reasonably easy to fix (store that data in some sort of binary file and sync it out periodically).

• No Genius playlists on iOS devices. You can still create them on your Mac/PC, and then click the “Save Playlist” button. This playlist will then sync out to your devices. I’m assuming, once again, that this is because the Genius database is no longer getting synced to your phone. Apple should fix this. Genius is awesome.

• Playing songs on another device seems to only update the play count for the first song. This is just a weird bug.

Is it worth it?

In the end, is it worth it to move to iTunes Match? So far, for me, I think so. I no longer have to manage multiple iTunes libraries the way I was before, which probably saves me an hour or so a week. When I’m at work on my Macbook, I can listen to music that isn’t locally on my machine. If I ever run out of space, I’ll just blow up a bunch of my music, but still be able to listen to it as long as I have an internet connection.

The fact that I no longer need to have my media server turned on just to serve up music to the Apple TV is going to save me more in electricity than iTunes Match costs per year.

One day, when I get bored, I can go through and replace all of my old bad rips with pristine iTunes copies. That’s kind of nifty too, and probably worth the $25 by itself.

The broken smart playlists and Genius on iOS devices is a bummer, and in some cases, so un-Apple-like that I wonder how the hell it got out the door. Then I remember that probably 5% of iTunes users have ever created a smart playlist or used Genius and it makes a bit more sense.

In 6 months, if we’re still complaining about poorly matched songs, broken playlists, and all that fun stuff, I certainly won’t be happy. But, we’re still talking about $25/year, which to me feels worth it just for having a backup of all my music off-site, and the reduced electricity use in my house from not having to keep a media server turned on.

Your mileage may vary, of course.