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You don’t really have to jump through hoops if you value cash less than hoop jumping time. iTunes Match is still around: “iTunes Match gives you access to all

You don’t really have to jump through hoops if you value cash less than hoop jumping time. iTunes Match is still around: “iTunes Match gives you access to all of your music on all of your devices, even songs that you've imported from other sources such as CDs.” https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146 It’s $25 a year, and will cheerfully upgrade crappy .mp3s of dubious origin from the 90s-00s to high bitrate drm-free AAC. “Matched, uploaded, and purchased tracks reside in iCloud Music Library, Apple's cloud-based music locker. Users can stream or download these tracks from iCloud Music Library to any of their 10 devices as long as their iTunes Match subscription remains active; downloaded tracks will either show up as a 256kbps matched DRM-free AAC file or an AAC-converted file of tracks you uploaded on devices other than the Mac or PC from which tracks were uploaded. If you uploaded music in WAV, ALAC, or AIFF formats, then they will remain in those formats on the Mac or PC from which they were uploaded.” https://www.imore.com/apple-music-vs-itunes-match-whats-difference https://www.imore.com/apple-music-vs-itunes-match-whats-diff... I moved from home grown to this when it first came out, as for me the $25 a year was worth not maintaining anything.

rakoo 6y ago
Indeed this is a real step-up to a homemade installation, and it's definitely worth the price. Problem is I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and don't plan to be, and it's all running on a closed source system. There's also been stories about people losing their unique recordings of specific songs, because iTunes Match replaced them with a "standard" recording of the same song.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Outside the Apple ecosystem, for easy home curation of both video and audio with access on the go for the whole household, readers may wish to consider Plex, which I highly recommend as making it easy to curate, serve from your own home NAS, and (most importantly for family acceptance factor) frictionlessly access: Plex Music: https://www.plex.tv/your-media/music/ https://www.plex.tv/your-media/music/ Supported Devices: https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/ https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/ (I recommend a Lifetime Plex Pass for $120, as after three years that will have been the better bet and one tends to stay invested in a curated library. Also consider the subscription Tidal integration for a high sound quality streaming library of 60M tracks.) --- To your point about stories of unique recordings, yes, first release was pretty sketchy but it didn’t replace the origin computer recordings. Many people tried using it to “upgrade” found rips or bootlegs, and lost things that way as its early matching was considerably worse than that era’s open tools. My hand curated library was around 25,000 tracks. It initially matched only a minority, mostly mainstream. Through time, it’s matched more and more tracks, more and more accurately. By now I’m surprised when it can’t match something, and it’s rare if gets confused between releases of the same song by the same artist.

rakoo 6y ago

Indeed this is a real step-up to a homemade installation, and it's definitely worth the price. Problem is I'm not in the Apple ecosystem and don't plan to be, and it's all running on a closed source system. There's also been stories about people losing their unique recordings of specific songs, because iTunes Match replaced them with a "standard" recording of the same song.

Terretta 6y ago
Outside the Apple ecosystem, for easy home curation of both video and audio with access on the go for the whole household, readers may wish to consider Plex, which I highly recommend as making it easy to curate, serve from your own home NAS, and (most importantly for family acceptance factor) frictionlessly access: Plex Music: https://www.plex.tv/your-media/music/ https://www.plex.tv/your-media/music/ Supported Devices: https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/ https://www.plex.tv/apps-devices/ (I recommend a Lifetime Plex Pass for $120, as after three years that will have been the better bet and one tends to stay invested in a curated library. Also consider the subscription Tidal integration for a high sound quality streaming library of 60M tracks.) --- To your point about stories of unique recordings, yes, first release was pretty sketchy but it didn’t replace the origin computer recordings. Many people tried using it to “upgrade” found rips or bootlegs, and lost things that way as its early matching was considerably worse than that era’s open tools. My hand curated library was around 25,000 tracks. It initially matched only a minority, mostly mainstream. Through time, it’s matched more and more tracks, more and more accurately. By now I’m surprised when it can’t match something, and it’s rare if gets confused between releases of the same song by the same artist.