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Apple Begins Rolling Out iTunes Match With Audio Fingerprint to Apple Music Subscribers (loopinsight.com)
In May, Vellum's James shared an ordeal that many people were able to relate to. Apple Music had deleted music files from his computer. It's an issue that many of us have faced over the years. At the time, Apple noted that it didn't actually know what was causing this. But it appears, it has finally figured out the issue and patched it. Jim Dalrymple, reporting for The Loop: One of the biggest complaints about Apple Music over the past year was that it wouldn't properly match songs subscribers had in their existing iTunes libraries. That problem is being fixed by Apple. Apple has been quietly rolling out iTunes Match audio fingerprint to all Apple Music subscribers. Previously Apple was using a less accurate metadata version of iTunes Match on Apple Music, which wouldn't always match the correct version of a particular song. We've all seen the stories of a live version of a song being replaced by a studio version, etc. Using iTunes Match with audio fingerprint, those problems should be a thing of the past. If you had songs that were matched incorrectly using the metadata version of iTunes Match, the new version will rematch to the correct song. However, it will not delete any downloaded copies of songs you have in your library. This is a very good thing -- we don't want songs auto-deleting from our libraries.
You mean I could have cloned the CDDB database and downloaded every song in Apple's library by simply creating dummy files with the right headers and structs?
I disagree. DRM/licensing is at the core of this issue.
Back in the day: (1) download MP3. (2) Play MP3 on device with a whopping 128MB of storage, (3) Copy to new phone with 64GB of storage
Apple: "It Just Works."
Problem is, "it just works" actually means, and I'm quoting TFA here: "If you are a current iTunes Match subscriber and subscribe to Apple Music, you can let your Match subscription lapse when it comes up for renewal and still receive the same benefits. If you donâ(TM)t subscribe to Apple Music and still want the benefits of iTunes Match, hold on to your subscription."
I'm a pretty technical guy and I can't make head nor tail out of that sentence. Apple: It just werks?!? Then I look at my shitty Android phone. Then I look back at my desktop PC. And every bit of music I ripped from my own CDs (er, and some that I didn't rip from my own CDs) since 1997 is still there. Somehow we've gone from "copy files from a directory on a computer to a directory on something that looks like a USB drive" to, well, whatever the fuck the quoted paragraph from TFA means.
I have more storage on my phone than my 1997 employer's IT department had. They're static files. They do not need to be matched, deduplicated, mirrored in The Cloud(tm), they need to be copied and backed up. IT JUST WORKS.