Apple, iTunes Match Is Not For Me

Apple's iTunes Match Failed Me

I was so excited to finally buy iTunes Match from Apple.  It always seemed like a great service for a good price, but when Apple added ad-free listening to iTunes Radio, it was the push I needed.

If you don't know, iTunes Match is supposed to totally simplify your experience by allowing you to essentially upload all of your music once to iCloud so that from each of your Apple made devices you can download what you want, or stream, without ever needing to "sync."

I really wanted to like, and use iTunes Match.  I made the purchase of $24.95, watched and waited as iTunes on my computer uploaded and matched thousands of the songs that I own to Apple's iCloud servers.  I then turned on iCloud on my iPhone only to find out that I was missing songs.  What's the problem with iTunes Match?

Well, for some dumb reason, Apple decided that songs that are uploaded to iCloud must be 96 Kbps.  If you don't know exactly what that means, like me, it means Apple demands that your music be a certain quality in order for it to be uploaded to iCloud and work with iTunes Match... I had over 4,000 files ("songs") that didn't qualify because they are spoken messages (Sermons, etc.).

Apple's Tech Support only offers you the work-around of re-encoding your low quality files to higher quality 96+ Kbps files... this is just stupid.  Besides the fact that there would be no reason to upgrade a low quality song to a higher quality file, because of course that's not possible - plus, in my attempts, it increased the file size almost four times

 So, for example, there was 317 sermons (Chuck Tracks) that I wanted to upload to iCloud to use with iTunes Match, and they totaled about 2.5 GB.  If I was to "upgrade" them to make Apple allow them, they would have taken up more than 10 GB.  This means, on my 32 GB iPhone (which really only gives me about 30 GB) I would be using up one third of my storage.

Apple, please don't limit what I can upload to iCloud to use in iTunes Match. I really want to use iTunes Match, but these limitations will not meet my needs.

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