iTunes Match is a fantastic service. If you have more than one Apple device, it makes managing your music so much easier–all of your music becomes easily available on all of your Apple devices. It even lets you re-download high quality versions your poorly-encoded MP3s, regardless of origin.
But that doesn’t preclude me from complaining anyways. So, here are my iTunes Match complaints and grievances:
- It will frequently match your “explicit” songs with their “clean” versions, turning your prized early 90s gangster rap collection into an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba. Thankfully, my George Carlin MP3s escaped this mangling. (Can you even imagine?)
- It will refuse to match or even upload songs encoded below 96kbps. Ostensibly, this is to ensure the accuracy of the audio fingerprinting. However, this doesn’t make sense to me for two reasons: One, I see no plausible reason not to allow low-bitrate songs to be uploaded. Two, I upconverted my MP3s and iTunes Match had no real problem matching my 5,000 songs with remarkable accuracy.
- It provides no methods to replace your ID3 tags with correct ones in cases where your tags are incorrect / incomplete.
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