When the iTunes music store first opened, the big revolution was you could buy digital music for reasonable prices. If you didn’t want to buy a whole album, you could get the song you wanted for 99 cents (now $1.29 seems like the usual price). I own most of the albums I want on CD, though I would pick stuff up by downloading things from various not entirely legal sources, but with a reasonable legal option I wound up buying hundreds of songs from iTunes. The problem was they were in a secured format that only my copy of iTunes and my Apple devices could play (they have the file extension .m4p). One way to get around that was iTunes would let you burn a CD (not just a data CD, but a real CD that you could play in any CD player) with whatever songs you wanted, so I could put 10-15 songs on a CD and then make unprotected MP3’s from that CD. I had about 12 iTunes CD’s of songs. Amazon got into the game years later and would let you download unsecured MP3 files, which was nice and I started buying songs from them for the most part. But Apple worked it out with the music companies to also allow unprotected downloads, but instead of MP3, Apple had to use a different format, AAC (file extension .m4a), which naturally they said was better, except harder to deal with if you wanted to rewrite the information tags in the song or something. I think they also generally let you convert your m4a files to mp3 files if you wanted from within iTunes. In iTunes you could rip CDs into mp3 or m4a format, but I tended to use my own ripping tools, though those seem to have been disappearing. I ripped all of my CDs to a mp3 data rate (quality) of 160 kbps, compressing the size of a song by 90% compared to the data on the CD (at the time 128 kbps was sort of the default standard and 256 kbps was the maximum, and I didn’t want giant files either, so I picked something in between). I resisted variable bit rate encoding thinking it was more complicated, but that is probably the way to go. Not too long after ripping all of my CD’s, I realized my computer would insert stutter at the end of the song, so I had to re-rip all of my CDs, but it seems like some of those old stuttering songs are still around. And that worked for many, many years, through Archos, iPods, Palms, laptops, and android phones. When I got my Mazda3 with a 6 CD changer that could play mp3s, I filled up 6 CD-R discs with 10 to 15 albums each and could take most of my albums with me. I never changed those CDs and sold the car 12 years later with the CDs still in there.
Nowadays most people stream music, maybe paying a monthly fee to listen to any music they want. Your music goes with you on the internet over your phone or whatever. I still like owning my music and curating my collection, but as storage capacities have dramatically increased along with processing abilities, you don’t really need to worry about compressing stuff as much. At the same time, I sort of worry that some of my CDs may have degraded over time and I don’t want to re-rip them all unless I really have to (edit: I don’t think any of my CD’s have degraded except the ones that disappeared).
In 2011, Apple introduced a service called iTunes Match, which would go through all of your iTunes music collection on your hard drive, and make that music available to all of your Apple devices like your iPhone. Rather than upload your actual music, they would try to “match” your music if possible. If you had Hotel California in your collection like millions of people do, Apple would just make their copy of Hotel California available to you rather than have millions of copies in people’s accounts. And Apple made it a good copy, using a bitrate of 256 kbps, but still not in MP3 format (m4a) which in this case can be downloaded without protection. Once you stop paying the $25 per year for iTunes Match, your devices won’t be able to stream that music, but if you downloaded the matched copies, you could keep them and keep playing them. And most devices, even my new car and Android phone, seem to be able to play these m4a files. If necessary, I can edit the tags without iTunes using a program called MP3 Tag. This seemed like a way to get high quality electronic versions of my music without re-ripping old CDs, worrying about scratches or data loss. Apple limits you to about 1,000 albums to keep you from getting everything. But I only have about 200 or 300 CDs (and really only listen to about 100 or so probably). I was also hoping it would be possible to download unprotected versions of the songs I had bought in protected format years ago (without Match, some old protected purchases are available unprotected, but some are still protected).
iTunes Match is $24.99 a year and is intended as a subscription service. Just a week or so ago, I got a free 4-month subscription to Apple Music which is Apple’s streaming service for music you don’t own. That is kind of neat because many of my old albums have been remastered or reissued as deluxe versions with extra songs. Not realizing what I was doing, I added a bunch of those kinds of albums to my iTunes account, knowing that when I cancel Apple Music in four months, those would go away. It isn’t that Apple Music isn’t compatible with iTunes Match, but by adding protected songs that I don’t own to my library, I complicated things for myself a little, so I wound up deleting those from my library.
Apple says once you get iTunes Match it can take “a while” for it to index all of your music and either match its own copies of songs on its server or, if no match is found, upload copies of my mp3 files to my cloud. That way all of my music is on the cloud, either as an uploaded file or a matched file. I waited for this to start happening, figuring it would take days, but it was over in no time (an hour?). I think maybe it had uploaded stuff to my iCloud before and never gotten rid of it even though I don’t use iCloud.
There is a way where you can delete all of your songs that have matches from your iTunes library and then, when they are gone (still saved somewhere on your hard drive, just not indexed by iTunes) you can downloaded the match files that Apple has. The other way to do it is use a different computer without all of those songs and start downloading matches only. The critical field in the iTunes song grid is “iCloud status” and “Kind” and you will also want to look at the iCloud icon for the song (which tells you if the song is local or on the cloud only).
I started looking through my songs and there were a lot of matches, maybe two thirds, but it wasn’t consistent. An album might have 10 matches and 2 uploads (if no match, it uploads my mp3). A handful of albums were perfect, but some had no matches. Also, some of my purchased protected music was still protected, though some of it was unprotected. I don’t think iTunes Match did anything regarding the purchased songs: I could have redownloaded those purchases as unprotected without iTunes Match. Some of the protected songs I had burned to CD and then ripped into mp3 files had matches, but not always. Some of it may have depended on the tags I used when I ripped the songs. For albums, I usually blank out the composer and try to keep things simple, like for the album Legend by Bob Marley and the Wailers, I had the artist as just Bob Marley (and only one song matched). Apple doesn’t offer any insight on how they match songs. If the exact same song appears on a different album (like Greatest Hits), would it match with that song? One thing I liked is that even if a song matched, it was still going to use my tags the way I had done them originally and not Apple’s tags.
I started ripping some of the albums that didn’t match very well to see if a new rip via iTunes would help. I thought I would do lossless rips in case my CDs were ever damaged. This helped substantially, but there were still a lot of songs not being matched. However, one thing I noticed is that the lossless files (which are giant, about 8 times larger than an mp3, but still 60% of the size of the wav files on CD) aren’t on the iCloud. Instead if I download one of those files, it is actually a 256kbps m4a file, just like the matched files. So this is kind of nice. I didn’t like having some files on the same album being high quality m4a files and others being lesser quality mp3 files, but if I re-ripped everything to lossless, then the matches and the uploaded files would all be the same format and quality anyway (no mp3’s)
Eventually I re-ripped all of my CD’s to lossless. In so doing, it seems that none of my CD’s have rotted or degraded over the last 20 years, though a couple have gone missing. So on my computer where I did the ripping, I have lossless files of everything. Then on the cloud, I have either matches or uploads, both very high quality m4a files. Then on my second computer I can download all of that to my hard drive and have a set of folders with high quality m4a files. I bought a 64 GB flash drive and copied everything from the hard drive and plugged this into my car, so now in my car I have my entire library.
There are two remaining problems. One is I’m not sure what to do with classical music. I generally don’t use the Composer tag on regular music or album artist. With classical music, the artist is usually the performer (e.g. Vienna Philharmonic) and they play something by Mozart. But sometimes a classical CD will have multiple pieces or multiple composers. And I don’t really care who is playing, so I would rather just file Mozart under the artist Mozart and leave out the part about the performers. But I also don’t want it all mixed in with my other music necessarily, so I could make the artist Classical and have it in one place. I did this with Opera music where the artist is Opera and an album might be “Mozart – The Magic Flute.” So I haven’t ripped most of my classical CDs yet.