After the first year of test usage, what functions of iTunes Match make sense for me?

iTunes Match: The First Year

Since one year I now have my iTunes match subscription (without automatic prologation).

My onriginal and primary intent was to "legalize" my somewhat grown collection of single MP3 songs.

I also wanted to try iTunes match and gather experience, which functionality might be useful for me for the next years (switching from "Test Mode" to "Production Mode").

iTunes Match: Experience with Functionality

• Legalize old MP3 Collections: Works good
• Purchase some "missing" songs for my collection: Yes I did this a few times (iTunes Store)
• "Upgrade" MP3 songs from my CD collection to AAC digital quality: works good
• "Upgrade" MP3 songs from Vinyl records to digital quality: did work only for a very few number of songs
• Backup: Apples iCloud as a safe backup for my songs (5000 songs, 25 GB): This is a very valuable Funktion, since it's a near real time remote backup i.e. in Apple's "iCloud" (precondition: you must use iTunes as your song library!)
• Remote access to iCloud: see below

iTunes: Access to Songs in iCloud

Remote Access: When I'm away from home, I have easily access to my songs with Apple mobile devices like iPhone and iPad.

For my mobile notebook computer (Windows 7) I decided not to make a local copy of all of my song files (5000 songs, 25 GB), but to try a connection via the internet to my iCloud. This was not so easy. The documentation for this sceario is difficult and sometimes wrong. Apple repeatedly ignores Windows Notebooks when talking about "mobile devides" - focussing on iPhone and iPad only....

What worked for me is:

1. Installing iTunes latest version on my mobile Windows 7 notebook.
2. Connected iTunes to the Apple Store: This made available my purchased songs (quite a few) but not all the other songs I have in iCoud
3. Only after I activated "Turn On iTunes Match" in iTunes (Menue: Store > iTunes Match) I could see all my songs in iTunes on my mobile Windows notebook. iTunes did not ask for an extra subscription of iTUnes Match, but automatically used my exisiting iTunes Match account.
4. This is not "Steaming Audio". the songs from iCloud are effectrively downloaded and replay starts early (AAC and MP3 ?)

iCloud Control Panel for Windows

I also installed iCloud Control Panel 2.1.1 for Windows on my mobile notebook, but am not sure, if this was necessary for the access to the songs in iCloud - since Apple only talks about "Fotostreams", "Favorites" and "Outlook" - what I realy do not need in the Cloud.

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Vinyl LPs digitized and uploaded to iTunes Match

I already have converted all my od Vinyl LP records to MP3 - his has been done by a service from the german AWO.

Problems with these MP3 audio files:

• They are proberly named, but they do not have MP3 tags
• The quality is sometimes not that good

The idea is to put them into my iTunes Library and go through the process of iTunes Match in order to replace most of them without costs by high quality AAC audio files from the iTunes Store.

In order to do this an gain al the advantages from iTunes Match two things are necessary:

• Put these old MP3 files in exactly the folder structure that I use for my iTunes, as the eventually replaced and better AAV files will be downloaded from the cloud into that folder structure i.e. Folder "Artist" --> Folder "Album" --> Audio file (with filename = song title)
• Create ID3 tags with "Artist", "Album" and "Title", as iTunes Match will use these when downloadin from the cload and iTunes Match will not use the tags contained in their AAC audio files (take special care if "Album Artist" ist used)

Creating ID3 Tags with MP3Tag

After I have put my MP3 audio files into folders by Arstist and sub-folders by Album, it's easy to create the ID3 tags with the excellent software tool MP3Tag:

• Navigate to a album folder
• select all files in that folder
• enter artist name and album name once for all the songs and save.
• Click "Convert" in the menu bar and choose "Filename - Tag" with a "Format String" of "%skip% %title%"

 

Copy the MP3 files to my local iTunes Library

xxxx

iCloudStatus =

• Waiting,
• Uploaded
• Matched
• Duplicate

KInd = .....

• Matched AAC Audio File
• MPEG Audio File
• .....

 

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Independent Mangement of my Playlists

How I organize my songs and playlists

My Playlists (Audio) are in part very valuable for me and I want to keep them for long time periods (10 years and more).

Therefore I decided years ago to keep my playlists independently from any music player software (Winamp, iTunes, Songbird) in separate M3U files.

All my songs I keep in a single folder with sub-folders by artist - and sometimes by album as well. That "Song Folder" resides on a NAS storage (QNAP).

My M3U playlists are placed in the root of my "Song Filder". In order to by able to easily move the "Song Folder" to some new place when the neccessity arises over time, I use relative paths within my M3U playlists.

Over time I did use different music playing software. At the moment I use iTunes. So that player software must have the ability to import M3U playlists, as iTunes does (Menu: File - Library - Import Playlist...)

Checking and Fixing of my Playlists

Playlist Creator 3.6.2

When I for some reason started to rearrange the file structure of my songs (did that last time because of iTunes Match), some songs in my M3U playlists pointed to non existing files - aka "broken links".

In the past I used "Playlist Creator 3.6.2" to fix this. With this wonderfull piece of software I can open such a M3U playlist and Playlist Creator immediately displays the playlist with the "broken" song entries marked in red. Great!

I then used to go into my file explorer and look there for the new place where that "lost sheep" may be (reasons could be I have moved the song into a sub-folder or I have changed the spelling of the song's filename or....).. Once I have found the song file, I easily could move that from the file editor into the playlist by drag and drop.

So far so good.

Problem with Playlist Creator was: it does not support audio files in Apples m4a format - meaning I could not drag-and-drop such files into playlists. But I now have more and more such files from Apples wonderful iTunes Match service that I started to use in 2012.

listFix()

Searching the internet for a tool simmilar to Playlist Creator, but able to use m4a files within playlists, I found listFix()

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/listfix/index.php?title=Main_Page

listFix solves my original problem (support of m4a files) and adds an additional benefit:: When I right click on a "bronken link" song in a playlist, the menue offers a "Find Closest Matches". ListFix() then searches the entire Musik Folder and offers a little list of songs with equal or simmilar file names / file paths...I can click on my choice and voila, my playlist is fixed.

Further Thoughts

So I finally found a solution to fix "dis-order" in my playlists. But wouldn't it be much better just to avoid such a "dis-oder"?

The root cause of this kind of problem is my choice of M3U playlists for long-time storage. In M3U playlists the physical path and file name is stored. If that path/file name ever changes in the future, I have to repair it, very often in multiple places, since one song often appears in more than one playlist.

Idea: Use a database oriented software as a Media Library (song library) , were a can rename song files or move song files into other folders within that Software, in order to allow that software to keep track of my changes and to reflect them automatically in all impacted playlists. Leaving the ultimate possibility to export such "managed playlists" to static M3U playlists at whish - may be for long-time archiving.

When time permits, I will look at: (my short list) for such a database feature::

• iTunes
• CoolPlayer
• Foobar2000
• MediaMonkey ------------------ My second try --- work in progress
• Helium Music Manager: ----- My fist try ------- looks quite good for my purpose
• Musik Cube

Helium Music Manager

• Backend is a a SQLite database
• Yes, m4a files can be dragged and dropped on playlists
• Yes, I can import my existing M3U playlists
• Yes, I can export my Helium playlists again to independent M3U playlists
• Yes, I can rename music files within Helium and Helium updates all affected playlists accordingly

MediaMonkey

• Backend is a SQLite database
• .... tests next weekend....

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