I used iTunes Match to create high quality compressed versions of my newly ripped lossless files for all of my CDs, but I also have a bunch of individual songs I have downloaded or bought over the years, mostly from iTunes, but some from Amazon and some from other sources. iTunes likes to store those songs by Artist and Album, but I like to stick all my singles together with the artist tagged as “Single,” the Album left blank, and the song titles something like “Eagles – Desperado”, then all my singles are in one folder and one place when browsing, without the list of artists being cluttered by all of the different singles artists in addition to the artists whose CDs I own, not to mention all of the albums that show in the list with only one song on them. Instead all the listed albums are full. One thing I didn’t realize at first was I had never “authorized” my computer to play and burn my purchased files, which may have prevented some of the m4p files from being ported to m4a automatically (though I think it has more to do with tags and whether Apple can give you an unprotected version of that song).
So I downloaded everything that matched from the cloud and I came up with 127 singles in m4a format. The stuff from Amazon started as mp3 and sometimes those don’t match, but I think if I changed the tags back to the original tags, they would have a better chance of matching at iTunes (when I retag songs, I try to put the original album name, track number, and composed by in the comment tag so that I can go back if I need to). Then I have a bunch of m4p files (234!). Some of these are duplicates and some were made available to me as m4a files. So once I eliminated those, I was down to 127 songs. Generally when I bought songs I would burn them to CD and rip them to mp3 pretty quickly so I could play them on either the Archos (which I didn’t use for long) or the PC (and eventually my phone) without using iTunes. So I have old mp3 versions of most of the m4p files, though I misplaced some of them. Once I fixed up the tags on those mp3 files, most of them matched (time consuming, this took a day), with just a handful of exceptions. So I was down to about 20 m4p files that I couldn’t match. I burned those to a CD (plus I had bought an entire album by M. Ward in m4p called The Transfiguration of Vincent which I burned and ripped separately, but it didn’t match very well). Other than the M. Ward album, I got matches on all but maybe 4 songs, which means I can download unprotected versions of all of those on my other computer.
Then I started going back and realized I was missing some singles. What I really needed was a record of songs I had bought, so I could make sure I had all of those. So I searched my email archive at Yahoo and I think I found all of my confirmation emails from iTunes with the names of songs I had bought. I made a list of 207 songs I had bought from Apple, plus about 65 songs from Amazon (a few of those “songs” are actually albums). This was another day of sorting through things and then re-tagging songs to get a match and then reverting the tag back to Single. The nice thing is that with higher speed internet, downloading a song takes just a few seconds now. When I started buying songs I still had dial-up internet and it would take an hour to download an album’s worth of songs. I also wrote down which protected songs matched without doing anything, which ones could only be matched by using a ripped mp3, which started out as an unprotected file, and which one wouldn’t match at all (so just have to use the mp3). I was surprised how many m4p files matched, giving my an unprotected m4a file on the cloud, even some of the earliest songs I bought. And again, about four songs had no match available even if I used the correct original tags, which I was able to dig up sometimes from the original iTunes download (these files and emails go back to 2003). I also started going through my singles to see which ones I never purchased, so I will try to buy a few more of those. I still need to through each of the Amazon purchases and decided if I want to try to match them by reverting the tags or if I should just live with the mp3 files which are high quality already (and usually include artwork, which gets lost if I have to switch an m4p to mp3).
So the idea was to get the maximum number of singles to match, then download all of the matched files onto the second computer. Then take all of those matched m4a files (and a few mp3’s) and delete the singles on the original computer and replace them with the m4a files. But I didn’t do a great job of preparing for that. Some of the singles I had added to iTunes were in the Amazon MP3 folder, which was a bad idea. Then sometimes I would take the mp3 and drop it into the iTunes folder called “Automatically Add to iTunes” and it would add the song to iTunes and move it in the correct folder based on the tags, which often were the original album and artist tags instead of the Single folder. So I wound up with a bunch of extra folders mixed in with my CD collection that I had to get rid of and some of that had even reflected one way or another onto the second computer. Plus some of the m4p files that had matched were still just m4p files on the other computer, so there were more of those than I wanted. When I deleted the Singles on the first computer, it then tried to mirror that on the second computer and now I was missing a bunch of files that were deleted (really in Trash) and I made a big mess with duplicates and deleted copies showing up in iTunes. Like if I had an mp3 on my first computer, it might match to a m4a file on the cloud. But the m4a match on the second computer would then try to match to the m4a file and would show up as a duplicate. So really, the thing to do was save a copy of all of the m4a Singles and then remove all of the Singles from both computers in iTunes, wipe those folders to make sure, then put them all back on the first computer and add that folder to iTunes again, then download all of those from the cloud again onto the second computer. Even with the tags being in my Singles scheme, because they were the exact copies of the songs Apple uses to match, almost all of them matched. Not that it matters since the format of matched m4a files and uploaded m4a files would be exactly the same. Meanwhile with all of the deletions, I had to go through my list of purchases again one by one and make sure I wasn’t missing anything, which of course I was, so I had to find those or recreate some of them. But I got it and I’m pretty happy with it now.
I still need to rip all of my classical music, but that can wait a little. Mostly I just wanted to get a good copy of my main music so I could have that in the car. In the car, I can do voice commands to play music which is easier and safer than trying to scroll through a long list. It is easy if you know the name of the album, but more challenging with things like Greatest Hits albums where there might be several artists with an album called Greatest Hits, or maybe they didn’t call the album Greatest Hits, but Best of Blondie, and I have to remember that. But you can also just tell the car to play the artist which kind of works and if I want the Greatest Hits, that is probably the only album of theirs I have. Then I have I want to play my Singles, I just say “play artist Single” and it gets all of those and then I push the shuffle button. In the old car I would just rotate one CD after the next (each CD containing 10 or more albums) so I didn’t have to think about album names and the mix was good with each CD having one U2 album, one Talking Heads album, and maybe one Lyle Lovett or Randy Newman album, plus other stuff. Now I have to think of what I want at the end of each album, which is a little harder, but I guess better. And I can play some of the albums now that didn’t fit on those 6 CDs that were in the old car.
Also, I kind of want to make a giant playlist of all the Singles plus a few cuts from albums I don’t usually listen to all the way through. I’m not sure if an iTunes playlist is in standard format. I think I used to make playlists using WinAmp, my computer mp3 player, but now I use VLC and it seemed to crash when I tried to do a playlist. I could get a dedicated playlist maker or see what Winamp is up to (or see if iTunes uses a standard format that could be put on the flash drive for the car).