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Wow. If true, this is a massive flaw. I'm trying to think of a rationale for this approach considering they have the technology to match using the acoustic sig
by uptown 11y ago
Wow. If true, this is a massive flaw. I'm trying to think of a rationale for this approach considering they have the technology to match using the acoustic signature of the tracks.
- whitten 11y agoMaybe they can't spare the computer power to create an acoustic signature? How complex is the algorithm anyway? By the way, I agree that the same song can be sung by the same artist in multiple versions, especially if it is a "signature song" for the artist. Just Acoustic vs. Rock beat can totally be different, and they are both worthy of having in your music library and not wantonly purged because the metadata is the same.
- Zikes 11y agoThe acoustic signature would be generated by the client, then matched by the server. A bit more work than comparing tags, but not particularly onerous.
- brianpan 11y agoNot onerous? For what size libraries? For your iPhone? For a 3 year-old iPod Touch? My iPhone 5 was trying to process photos in the background last night and my Twitter app stopped responding to touches. The keyboard was lagging by 30-60 seconds. Are you sure acoustic signatures will not be particularly onerous?
- wutbrodo 11y agoI'm consistently surprised at how often I hear about hacky, poorly engineered solutions in Apple products (and those are only the ones that are externally visible/relevant to product quality directly). I can't imagine they don't have access to broadly the same quality of engineer as other big companies, which leaves the question of why presumably deliberate product choices were made this way.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- eric_h 11y agoMy guess is inflexible deadlines for products and a certain death march culture for meeting them (from what I've heard (third-hand, admittedly) from people who work there) lead them to be forced to cut corners in some places. On the bright side, Apple does usually eventually fix or replace the hacky solutions. The other side of that is that it sometimes takes years.
- meej 11y agoLast I knew, Apple licenses Gracenote's MusicID for acoustic signature matching in iTunes and iTunes Match, it's not technology they themselves possess. So perhaps the rationale is a licensing issue.
- oddevan 11y agoAgreed. I like Apple more than most but... C'MON, GUYS! They've already got the technology in iTunes Match and it works pretty well. No clue why they didn't use it for this, especially when the whole "iCloud Music Library" is one of the bigger selling points of the service v. Spotify, Rdio, etc.
- randyrand 11y agoFlaw in that you can match songs you down own or that the meta data might be wrong? If they checked acoustic signature wouldn't it still work with illegally downloaded music?