I signed up for Itunes match as it seemed a quick and easy way to get all old ripped songs that were in the Itunes library in higher 256kbps versions and essentially ‘backed up’ within Apple’s infrastructure. When you switch it on it checks your library and finds out which songs are already in the Itunes store and matches them to yours. You can then update yours to the higher rate versions. Tracks which aren’t in the catalogue are uploaded. It is a bit of a faff to update them as you have to delete the songs out of your library that are matched and redownload them. If you switch on icloud status in the view options then you can order by whether the album is matched or not quite easily. Using a smart playlist isn’t very helpful as when I tried it the delete option wasn’t present so I couldn’t just delete them all and re-download them in bulk. Out of about 5000 tracks 3500 were matched which wasn’t too bad. The matching is a bit inconsistent as often whole albums were matched apart from one track or partial albums were matched. This was annoying as it means either not bothering to update them to the higher bit rate or faffing around with re-ripping or hoping a re-running the match would find them.

Updating and re-downloading took a while. I chose to put songs into the trash so I could retrieve them later if there was an issue. Luckily only one track wouldn’t download for some reason. I was using Itunes and playing other songs at the time so I wonder if that was the issue.

When re-ripping unmatched tracks I discovered an annoyance. Re-ripped tunes are not automatically uploaded to the cloud even if they are a higher bit rate. I chose ‘replace’ when re-doing them so I’d expect itunes match to do just that as sometimes re-ripped tracks were then marked ‘matched’. In the view options there isn’t a way of seeing what version is in the cloud without deleting the local copy. If it is the higher rate version then you’ll see the bit rate stay the same when the download icon appears. If it is lower then you ‘ll see it change to the lower rate. To get the higher rate saved it means having to delete the old album then re-rip so that itunes thinks it is new and will upload the higher rate version. Total nuisance and to me unnecessary.

Itunes match really needs the following enhancements: option to update cloud version to higher bit rate when songs re-ripped, easy one click ‘update and download matched songs with higher bit rate versions’, easy way of seeing at a glance whether there is a difference between the tracks stored locally and the cloud, manual match when matched albums are missing the odd track.