Author Archives: Alan

Further limitation of iTunes Match which will hopefully undergo a rethink as Apple update and evolve the admittedly fledgeling service.  Users of iTunes and space-precious iDevices will probably be familiar with the handy setting of ‘convert higher bitrate songs to 128kbps’.  It allows for you to maximise the limited storage on your iPhone or iPod without compromising your local library.

Unfortunately a similar consideration isn’t made for iCloud – it would seem relatively easy to me for there to be a similar option; alas no.  Of course, there is also the option to modify your outlook with your iOS gizmo of choice – have a tighter ‘permanent’ selection of music and download/delete peripheral things as and when you require them (WiFi or 3G connection willing, of course).

I would, however, have preferred the best-of-both-worlds solution – even if it means relying on syncing to a local library to ‘get at’ lower bit-rates, but you can ‘top up’ from iCloud on the go, the ideal solution being that iCloud should offer the functionality AS WELL as being able to dual-manage via iTunes should you wish, after all, it’s less faff than downloading everything from the cloud when you’re sat next to your library stored locally.

It seems odd to me that on MacOS you can have whatever locally store files you like, but are not afforded the same privilege on an iOS platform.

Another buglet (actually, a considerable bug) I had noticed is on my iPhone if I shuffle a playlist occasionally tracks will skip without playing, and worse-still the ‘next’ track will play without advancing the artwork or details – so in effect playing the wrong song (or displaying the wrong information, depending on your point of view).  It would appear both these phenomena have been observed elsewhere and whilst not openly acknowledged by Apple are thought to be included in their list of things to resolve with their next release of updates.

I must admit that iTunes Match has proven rather below the usual standard of new experiences with an Apple product – difficult to enable (as previous posts will testify!), a little inflexible in options and, well, buggy!  The woes of the early-adopter, eh?  Maybe I should resist the urge to jump onto bandwagons until a few others feel the urge to chronicle the potential pitfalls as I have.

Sorry, I know, iTunes Match overkill, but CoverFlow is pretty – and it doesn’t seem to play quite right with iTunes Match yet.

A fairly trivial thing I noticed that doesn’t really have much use to anyone – but since I just had a quick Google to validate my findings it doesn’t seem widely mentioned.  The great thing, of course, about iTunes Match is that your whole library is there on your iDevice at least in a reference sense.

If there’s something you don’t have to hand, rather than impatiently wait for your next sync you can download it on the spot -and you can tell what those things are because there’s a handy download button next to ’em, right?

Unless you’re looking at coverflow.  I’ll be honest, I don’t generally use coverflow aside from either just casually admiring my beautiful artwork (see previous blog post – I already know I’m a hopeless case) or sometimes maybe if encouraging others of the wonders of the iPhone – because, let’s face it, it’s not the most practical view in the world, but it is the most tactile and pretty.

However, it makes it seems as though your whole library is literally at your fingertips without any need for data transfer, see the example below:

So, even though I know that of the tracks on the screen, only ‘Goin’ Down to Mexico’ is actually present on my iPhone, they’re all presented as available.  Should I tap on ‘Brown Sugar’ though, it will download and play as soon as there’s enough data to play with.  Which is fine if I want it to do that – if I didn’t, due to data allowances or similar, there’s no indication at all that it needs to go to iCloud to get that track for me.

Fair minor quibble, in truth, but a quibble nonetheless!  I promise to write about something other than iTunes Match in my next blog post.

I’m not sure how many people are as anal as me about their iTunes libraries – in particular, there is something that quakes me to my very core if I know some tracks don’t have album artwork.  Using my iPhone in the car as a music player I’ve been known to pull over to make a note of errant tracks to fix when I get home.  Probably a bit of OCD or something, who knows?

So imagine my horror when my painstakingly constructed library, once gone through iTunes Match (see earlier post for this particular pain!) arbitrarily seemed to select random albums for which it wouldn’t display the artwork on my iPad or iPhone – despite there clearly being artwork present in iTunes.  It didn’t seem to matter whether they were Matched or Uploaded tracks – and by god it was infuriating me.

It turns out it’s quite easy to fix – iTunes Match seems to play not-nicely with tracks where you’ve downloaded the Artwork.  Which probably demands a further explanation – your artwork is either stored locally on your computer when iTunes downloads it (you know, that hugely tempting ‘Get Artwork’ option that absolves you of responsibility?), or, your artwork can be embedded within your MP3/AAC/MP4/AIFF files – the benefit of which being the artwork goes with the file outside of iTunes.

During a traditional sync with an iOS device your artwork is synced to, irrespective of whether it’s embedded in the file or stored locally and indexed in iTunes.  So I never really gave it much thought, if I could get iTunes to do the hard work and find all my artwork for me then all the better.  This isn’t the case for iTunes Match – every missing album artwork issue was with those where artwork was downloaded rather than embedded.  I couldn’t say whether or not every downloaded piece of artwork failed – however – as there’s no obvious way to differentiate between the two without a lot of hassle.

However, if you have a few albums missing artwork then select a track – copy the artwork to your clipboard, select the whole album, option-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) and select ‘Clear Downloaded Artwork’ – you’ll see the preview pane revert to the dreaded no-artwork icon.  Now option-click (Mac) or right-click (Windows) over the artwork preview pane and choose ‘Paste’ – this will embed the artwork in the music files you have selected.

If you’ve got loads, and have a Mac, then check out this AppleScript – it will move through your library for you and for those tracks where the artwork is not embedded – it will go through the process for you.  I struggled to make it work on my whole library but it seems to work well on smaller selections.

Don’t expect an instant update on your iOS devices either – it seems to take an arbitrary amount of time for the changes to catch up through iCloud and make everything appear as it should.  Having just gone through the pain-in-the-arse process of scrolling through my iPad’s album view in the Music app to find the problem albums, I think I’ve finally sorted mine out.  It won’t make any tangible difference to how everything works, but it will at least momentarily silence the OCD demons that had been irked by this.

I now have the uncomfortable wait until that blessed moment when I tap on a music-symbol album and out again, to be greeted by the correct artwork being downloaded!

If anyone knows why the Artist view on iPad arbitrarily seems to not display artwork for some artists (even if they have only one album in your library) and will for others (who may have multiple albums or just one), then I’d be very interested to learn of any fixes!  I suspect it’s just something that might get addressed in the next iOS and/or iTunes updates.  Ho hum!

I was quite excited by iTunes Match.  A kind gift of iTunes vouchers from Cat’s parents and I invested – the idea of being able to ‘upgrade’ music matched with the iTunes database to 256kbps versions was appealing – as well as having a centralised store of my music in ‘The Cloud’ so to speak.

It’s not been exactly the kind of easy experience it might’ve been.  I expected some complications.  The legacy of me being eager to save space on devices in the past (including my old laptop) before I centralised my iTunes library was that most of my music, whilst quite well tagged, was encoded to a low bit-rate of just 112kbps.  This is fine for my non-audiophile ears and means I get more music on my iDevices – but the matching process had some issues with it.

Ostensibly the process occurs in three steps – although these steps can take literally days depending on the size of your library (and speed of Internet connection of course).  The first step analyses your music, the second attempts to match with music available in the iTunes store, the third will upload anything not present in the store along with artwork etc.  Given the amount of bootlegs and reasonably obscure music I have there was quite a lot of uploading to do.

After the first attempt around 20% of my library was match or uploaded – the rest was ‘waiting’ or ‘error’ – these seem to be interchangeable at times depending on the mood iTunes is in.  I tested a couple of albums by re-encoding them, using iTunes, to 256kbps AAC files and re-sending them to iTunes Match – it worked.  These examples matched where they’d failed before.  Leaving me with about 12,000 more songs I needed to ‘increase’ the bit-rate for to allow iTunes Match to consider playing with them.  That’s a lot of tracks.

I decided to get a bit brutal with my library – as I suspected, there’s a lot of stuff in there downloaded on a whim that I’ve not really listened to – so I managed to have a good prune.  Then selected all the unmatched/unuploaded songs in my Library and hit the ‘convert to AAC’ option in the menu.  Then waited.  A long time.  It took a little over a full day of churning through for my poor Macbook to get through this process, I decided to leave it to it and switch to my iPad for my computer needs for the duration – that way upon completion I could just tap delete. I checked the ‘remove from iCloud’ box, clicked delete files and then was left with a Library either matched, uploaded or 256kbps.

Then I contemplated how broken my playlists were now! Argh!

Anyway, now I selected all my new tracks and selected the option to add to iCloud, then from the Store option in the menu selected ‘Update iTunes Match’ – and now we wait.  This took ages too.  Proper ages.  Eventually it had matched a further 6,000 or so songs, and dutifully uploaded the remaining 4,000 without issue – so now my whole library is available in iTunes match.  After many hours of faffing, waiting and eventually rebuilding my playlists.

So, if you have low bit-rate files that won’t play with iTunes Match there’s a fairly simple process to go through:

• Convert them to 256kbps AAC files in iTunes (I deleted the originals, whether you do this is up to you!)
• Add them to iCloud in iTunes (cmd click whilst they’re selected in iTunes)
• Store Menu – Update iTunes Match

Such a simple list – such a long time it will take if your library is a fairly hefty size.  Upon picking up my iPad having been at the City Ground enduring Forest’s latest pathetic offering, it seems to be working how it should be – the tracks already on there are supplemented by things it could have on it at the push of a button.  I don’t like the music player app on the iPad as it is, and so far it doesn’t seem to happy with me just selecting ‘download all’ for a particular playlist.

My iPhone meanwhile, which has been out and about with me today of course, seems mightily confused about what it can and can’t do – I’ve decided to, having wiped the music from it before starting for a ‘clean start’ decided to disable Match on the device, sync the music back as it was before and then enable Match.  I think that’s for the best.

All in all, I’d say the process has mostly been a complete and utter ballache – however, my music is now either ‘matched’ with iTunes or backed up to their servers for those tracks that it couldn’t match – and future music I add to my library will undergo this process to, and that’s a good thing for sure, and for £21 a year – pretty bargainous really.  Once they iron out the niggles with iOS devices (I’m most perturbed about the album artwork situation for example!) then it will be excellent.  As is the norm for early adoption of such things though, there is teething trouble.

Hopefully amongst my waffle there’s been some useful nuggets for someone out there trying to get to grips with iTunes Match.