If you ever want to try again for some reason, the extra magic word are “from my library”.
“Hey google, play Pink Floyd’s the Wall from my library.”
That usually works to keep it from yelling at you. Usually…
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I got random results where it would work sometimes and others not. Also I found it annoying when say playing the album it would randomize the tracks and a lot of things I was playing random doesn’t work. In the case of The Wall especially not good on random. What’s weird is the inconsistent results on my phone vs a home device. Google play music would also drive me batty as it would shove radio results first everywhere on the interface. For years I had a love hate relationship with the service and given they are going to close it down at this point it seemed a better move to just ditch it for something home-grown.
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I have always maintained a master folder that itunes doesn’t know about with all my music in mp3 format, organized in a folder structure and mp3 tags that I control manually.
This paid off in dividends when I bought dropbox service for my hard drive. Now I just use cloudplayer app. Itunes or whatever they call it these days is completely out of the picture.
If you transcoded from AAC to Mp3 then one lossy audio format got converted it to another lossy format. You basically just hosed its audio quality. Lossy formats eliminate audio information. You did it twice in a row.
I am just really old school. I used to buy music from Apple, but then I figured out AAC is basically useless outside of iTunes, so I gave that up. All my music is MP3 now, mostly 320 Kbps, plus a FLAC copy if I had a high-res download or CD as a source. I can put it on as many devices as I want, although that’s manual sync. It is not going to go “poof” and vanish. I guess a lot of people, maybe most people, use streaming services now, but if you ever stop paying, you stop having access, and I actually have some music the services don’t have.
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Apple is an abusive spouse.
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Articles like this make me kinda glad to be old and still in the habit of buying cds to play on my totally non-smart old living room stereo. Progress, my ass.
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Or as I like to say, laundering illegally downloaded MP3s.
That being said, I don’t use iTunes Match as a backup service, I use it so I can listen to my entire music library from anywhere. My computer is always the source of truth.
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Friends: Why do you own so many CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays when you could just get digital copies?
Me:
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Seconded. Though I do a lot of library raids and rip those to MP3.
If I had a nice file server I would probably use FLAC but for now it is what it is.
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Let’s see:
Used Apple product? Check.
Used Apple service? Check.
Got screwed? Double Check.
Yep, works as expected.
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I was pretty excited by the concept of the Apple music locker service when announced, as it was just a locker at first. Then they added the match service, which went through my collection and decimated it. Many songs of mine ended up being just white noise. Many got wrong metadata, so it was a totally wrong song. And of course, they replaced my higher-res versions of songs with their lower-rez, lower quality versions.
But what the absolute worst part was? You couldn’t manage the locker version. It was stuck there forever as Apple decided. Too bad if every album you have has a white-noise song in it. You can’t even wipe it and start over. The best you get is to cancel the service, and sometime down the road, Apple may get rid of it. Certainly not within the first few months.
I’ve been pretty happy with Vox’s music locker service. Its not always the most speedy queuing up something, but it doesn’t do any of those things. It just stores your music for playback in the format you put them up in.
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All my music, ripped to flac, living on a 3 Tb drive attached to my router (with multiple backups), catalogued and played by Volumio running on a Raspberry Pi with a HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro hat. Audio nirvana, with not an Apple product in sight. Roll-yer-own RULES. I would never go back to using iTunes.
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Most people have little clue about technology, so they do things that sound reasonable to them, but are more akin to a cargo cult.
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Foobar2000 FTW! I wasn’t aware they have a Mac version that runs on Catalina.
FWIW I found that Bilss is very helpful for making sure all incoming stuff is properly tagged. It runs on all platforms, including my Synology NAS.
And if you’re not yet on Catalina, Mp3Tag for MacOS is free and amazing (after a learning curve).
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Agreed. Simply back up the AAC files. There’s no point in transcoding a lossy source file (mp3, aac) into a lossless destination format (flac, wav, alac). The original lossy signal will simply be preserved in a much larger file. Furthermore, transcoding one lossless format into another will actually DEGRADE the quality of the original file. If you want high quality tracks, buy from 7digital or hdtracks.com or rip your own CDs to a lossless format.
Non-Apple user here, but this is precisely why I don’t trust the cloud clown.
All of my music, whether ripped from CD, downloaded, or recorded live, lives on my home file server, and backups get made. I’ve set up a makefile that can re-encode all my FLACs as Opus files (taking advantage of 8 cores/16 threads, thank you AMD), which go onto a laptop and a MicroSD for my phone. Foobar2000 on Android handles the music collection on the phone.
If changes get made or I add music, the makefile will only re-encode files that need it.
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I think that should be, “one lossy format into another” - transcoding ALAC to FLAC remains lossless.
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Well, yes, but this doesn’t address the original intent of the Match service: to make your own home library available anywhere, on any device.
That said, I wouldn’t touch iTunes with YOUR 11-foot pole.
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There’s quite a few services for high-quality music. Tidal, for example, allows download of FLAC copies of the masters for many albums/tracks (IF you have the right membership, that is). They’re not just a streaming service. AFAIK, FLAC files have no built-in DRM to nuke them later =).
