A number of people have found that iTunes Match sometimes matches incorrect tracks; not that the songs are wrong, but that the versions might be wrong. This seems to happen especially with music that has been remastered. iTunes may match either an original or remastered track, and the user who matched the track may have tho one that iTunes doesn’t have. This can be a problem, if, say, you prefer an original album over a remastered version, or vice versa.
But I today I found, for the first time, a bad track coming from iTunes Match, one with an audible problem. It’s one of an excellent set of Bill Evans recordings, The Last Waltz, from the summer of 1980, just before his death, made at the Keystone Korner; the song is Your Story, While iTunes matched these tracks, I was listening to some of this music today, and found a bad track. There’s a gap of about a half-second at one point in the track. Looking at it with Rogue Amoeba’s Fission, you can clearly see the missing chunk of music:
If this happens, you’re basically screwed. Who can you complain to? Contact the iTunes Store? I doubt anything will happen. The only way to have a good copy of the track is to take your original and make sure it stays in your library; if you ever have to download it again, you’ll get the track with the gap. It’s worth noting that this track is not available on the iTunes Store. This makes me wonder exactly how they match such tracks; do they match them to tracks that other people have uploaded?
I don’t expect this will happen a lot, but the fact that it happens at all shows the weakness of this system. iTunes Match clearly needs an option for tracks that you don’t want matched, ones that you want uploaded, because the matched version may not be the same as yours.
Has anyone else found matched tracks that have similar problems?
(As an aside: if you like Bill Evans, there are two box sets of this run at the Keystone Korner, in San Francisco, between August 31 and September 8, 1980. The Last Waltz is music from the first sets, and Consecration has tracks from the second sets. Just a week before his death, Evans was playing some of his finest performances. These two box sets, together with Turn Out the Stars, recorded at the Village Vanguard in June, 1980, comprise 22 discs of astounding piano music.)
Update: my son came across a bad track today. It’s a match of Philip Glass’s Witchita Vortex Sutra, from the Minimal Piano Collection box set. There are clicks throughout the track, with one big dropout at 4:25:
Posted: 1/13/2012 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, iPod & iTunes Tags: Bill Evans, iTunes, iTunes Match | 15 Comments »
Over at Macworld, we’ve just introduced Ask the iTunes Guy. This occasional column will take readers’ questions and explain how to do what you want with iTunes. I’m the iTunes Guy, and I’ll be answering questions over the coming months. So far, response has been well above what we expected, and we have dozens of great questions, so look for a first column with your questions and my answers soon.
Posted: 1/10/2012 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes Tags: iTunes, Macworld | No Comments »
I recently noticed that the Album Artwork folder in my iTunes folder (~/Music/iTunes/) has more than doubled in size. I recall, not long ago, that it was around 2 GB, but it is now around 4.6 GB, for roughly the same amount of music. (About 80,000 tracks, or just over 5,000 albums; the album number is more important, as there is only one cache file stored per album.)
The Album Artwork folder is a cache folder that iTunes uses to quickly display album art in the program’s different views. It contains three sub-folders:
- Cache, which is the cache for album art embedded in files in your iTunes library
- Cloud, which is a local cache for album art embedded in files in the cloud, if you use iTunes Match
- Download, which stores album art that you downloaded from the iTunes Store, either when you purchased content, or when you used iTunes to find artwork for music you ripped (right-click on one or more tracks, then choose Get Album Artwork).
As you scroll through your iTunes library, the program reads the album art in files or linked to them, and displays artwork in the program’s window. All the cache files do is allow iTunes to display art more quickly, rather than having to extract the artwork from the ID3 tags in music files when it wants to display it.
So, at some point, iTunes must have changed the way artwork is saved in this folder. I notice that the majority of my artwork files in the cache folder – these are .itc files – are 969 K. Some of the files are slightly smaller, and some are much smaller, but most end up being the same size. But I’m very careful to keep most of my album art around 100 K or smaller; when I find art on the Internet, I scale it to 600×600 (if it’s larger than that), then save as JPG, and make sure to compress enough to keep the files small.
I have always had this folder excluded from my Time Machine backups, so I can’t see when the size changed. If any of my readers can check in their Time Machine backups, I’d be interested to find out if their folders have increased in size, and, if so, when. My guess is that something was changed in iTunes 10.5 or 10.5.1 which altered the format of cache files, or changed their size.
Posted: 12/28/2011 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes Tags: album art, iTunes | 4 Comments »
Just because I can. Using Doug Adams’ mySpins, which aggregates play counts from your iTunes library:
The first column is the number of plays by artist – you’ll note that I set the artist for classical music to the composer’s name, as it’s easier to navigate on iPods with the tag set this way. The Grateful Dead is in the lead, followed by Franz Schubert, notably because I listen to his lieder a lot; these are songs that are, on average, 3-5 minutes each. There’s much less Beethoven, because those are longer works: piano sonatas, string quartets, etc. Bill Evans beats out Brad Mehldau by a bit, in part because I’ve been listening to him longer. And Bob Dylan is very high up, as I have all of his albums, and listen to them regularly.
The second column is the songs I’ve played most, across albums (that’s what “pooled” means). In other words, I’ve listened to Playing in the Band, by the Grateful Dead, 151 times, over 59 different albums (lots of different live versions). All of the top ten pooled spins are by the Grateful Dead.
Note that these play counts are not absolute for all artists or songs, as removing then re-adding music deletes their play counts. I’ve done that several times with certain composers, and with many Grateful Dead concerts.
Posted: 12/21/2011 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes, music Tags: classical music, iTunes, music | 5 Comments »
A friend shared with me an interesting tip, which allows one to get iTunes album art without using iTunes, but instead from a web browser. Since I always want to add album art to my music when I rip CDs, and don’t always find it in iTunes (select the tracks, Control- or right-click and choose Get Album Artwork), this technique, which is brilliant yet simple, will save me a great deal of time.
Start by doing a Google search for the album whose art you’re seeking. Do the search like this: [artist] [album name] site:itunes.apple.com. This restricts the search to Apple’s iTunes web site, where you can see information about items on the iTunes Store via a web browser.
You’ll get results such as the following:
Click on the link that corresponds to your album. You’ll see a web page. In most cases, the page will attempt to redirect you to iTunes. There are two ways to prevent this. The first is to press the Escape key as soon as the page loads, but before the redirect occurs. The second is to use, if you have Safari, the NoMoreiTunes extension. This blocks the redirect, but, as you can see below, provides a button you can click if you do want to switch to iTunes.
Next, Control- or right-click on the album art you see. Choose Open Image in New Tab, or Open Image in New Window.
Click in the URL in the address bar; you’ll find a section at the end of the URL like this:
170×170-75.jpg
Change the 170s to 600, so the URL ends like this:
600×600-75.jpg
Press Return. A larger image will now load:
Control- or right-click on the image and either copy it, by choosing Copy Image, or download it, by choosing Save Image to Downloads. You can now add this 600 pixel image as album art.
Note: in some cases, 600 pixel images are not available, but 700 pixel images are. If you don’t find a 600 pixel image, try using 700 in the modified URL above.
Posted: 11/26/2011 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes Tags: iTunes | 26 Comments »
I recently posted an article about Lion video freezes occurring with my new Mac mini. There were clear error messages, showing that this is related to the previous Lion video freeze problem I experienced.
Since then, I’ve a couple of other freezes, unrelated to video. And looking at the logs at the time they occurred, it looks as though iTunes is the guilty party, and, in particular, the usbmuxd process, which is a daemon used for communicating with iPods and iOS devices. My guess is that, with Wi-Fi updating, these devices remain “mounted,” as far as iTunes is concerned, and that, at times, iTunes looks for them and can’t find them.
I had a freeze this morning, but my music was still playing in iTunes, so I connected to the Mac mini via ssh. I was able to perform a number of operations, showing that, while the computer was frozen on a GUI level, this was not the case at the lower level. After about seven minutes, the Mac mini “unfroze,” and everything went back to normal.
At the time of the freeze, a number of messages were written to console logs:
11/22/11 11:42:15.758 AM com.apple.usbmuxd: _SendAttachNotification (thread 0x1012ea960): sending attach for device 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.: _GetAddrInfoReplyReceivedCallback matched.
11/22/11 11:42:15.989 AM usbmuxd: _AMDeviceConnectByAddressAndPort (thread 0x102f81000): IPv4
11/22/11 11:42:16.482 AM ath: _AMDDeviceAttachedCallbackv3 (thread 0x101acd960): Device ‘AMDevice 0x102b73fe0 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ attached.
11/22/11 11:42:16.482 AM ath: _AMDDeviceAttachedCallbackv3 (thread 0x101acd960): Device ‘AMDevice 0x102e1d840 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ attached.
11/22/11 11:42:16.482 AM iTunes: _AMDDeviceAttachedCallbackv3 (thread 0x11f92f000): Device ‘AMDevice 0x7fcfa64775a0 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ attached.
11/22/11 11:42:18.028 AM AppleMobileDeviceHelper: _AMDDeviceDetached (thread 0x19c32c0): Device ‘AMDevice 0x8df3bf0 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 85, FullServiceName = a4:67:06:45:79:cd@fe80::a667:6ff:fe45:79cd._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ detached.
11/22/11 11:42:18.230 AM AppleMobileDeviceHelper: _AMDDeviceAttachedCallbackv3 (thread 0x19c32c0): Device ‘AMDevice 0xbc62dc0 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ attached.
11/22/11 11:42:44.522 AM com.apple.usbmuxd: _SendDetachNotification (thread 0x1012ea960): sending detach for device 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.: _BrowseReplyReceivedCallback got bonjour removal.
11/22/11 11:42:44.522 AM ath: _AMDDeviceDetached (thread 0x101acd960): Device ‘AMDevice 0x102e1d840 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ detached.
11/22/11 11:42:44.522 AM iTunes: _AMDDeviceDetached (thread 0x11f92f000): Device ‘AMDevice 0x7fcfa64775a0 {UDID = XXX, device ID = 86, FullServiceName = 5c:59:48:92:eb:ae@fe80::5e59:48ff:fe92:ebae._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}’ detached.
11/22/11 11:42:44.522 AM iTunes: _NotificationSocketReadCallbackGCD (thread 0x10dd71960): Unexpected connection closure…
Note that I have replaced my device’s UDID by “XXX.” The device in question is my iPod touch; it’s the same UDID that shows up in every message.
So, is iTunes Wi-Fi syncing causing freezes? Anyone else seeing this?
Update: I’ve had about one freeze per day, and the last few freezes show GPU debug info in the Console logs, as described in this post, so I think it’s safe to rule out iTunes as the guilty party.
Update 2: It turns out that there is something wrong with the video card – since I get GPU debug logs in Console – but also, perhaps, a problem with the SSD. Apple is exchanging the Mac mini for a new one, and I should have the replacement in a week. In the mean time, it freezes several times a day…
Posted: 11/22/2011 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, iPod & iTunes Tags: iTunes, troubleshooting | 7 Comments »
While I have some issues with iTunes Match – notably the fact that it doesn’t match very well – I was ripping some CDs today, and realized that there is one feature that could be very useful.
I got a 12-disc set of Murray Perahia playing Mozart’s piano concertos, and had to spend a long time ripping the CDs. Wouldn’t it be great if you could insert a CD on your computer, have iTunes match it, then have it added to your library without needing to rip the discs? While you’d have to download the music, it’s still less labor-intensive than ripping CDs, at least for multi-disc sets.
I can see the reason why this wouldn’t work – it’s too easy for a friend to bring their CD collection to your home, and for you to insert one CD after another, matching them, then downloading the tracks. But since you could also just rip that friend’s CDs, it’s not that much of a difference, other than the time saved.
You may ask why I am buying 12-disc sets of music on CD rather than from the iTunes Store or Amazon? It turns out – paradoxically – that most classical box sets are much cheaper than they are by download. I bought this set from Amazon FR, for €30; on iTunes, it’s €60, and it’s not available by download from Amazon FR. Go figure.
Posted: 11/21/2011 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, iPod & iTunes Tags: iTunes, music | 3 Comments »
Apple introduced iTunes Match earlier this week, and I haven’t written anything about it, given that my colleagues at Macworld have done such a good job. I’m also busy working on an update to my Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ, which I hope to have finished very soon. (I also have some criticism of iTunes Match, which I wrote about for Macworld: iTunes Match shouldn’t shun those with big libraries.)
In the meantime, what has perplexed me in my experiments with iTunes Match is the number of tracks that aren’t matched. In some cases, a single song may not be matched, even though the rest of an album is matched – Lex Friedman, writing at Macworld, pointed out that in many cases, one song on The Beatles’ Abbey Road (She Came In Through the Bathroom Window) wasn’t matched, even though all the others were. (It turns out that in Lex’s survey of people who tried to match that album, I was the only person who did see that song matched.)
But it’s very odd that some things match and others don’t. I don’t think it has to do with Apple’s recognition algorithm, and suspect that it’s more of a bug. I’ve seen a number of cases where one or more tracks won’t match, even among items that I had purchased from the iTunes Store.
This morning I did an experiment for the people at Hyperion Records (who are one of my sponsors). They asked me to check two albums: one that is sold on the iTunes Store, and has sold quite well, and another, a compilation, that is not on the iTunes Store, but whose individual tracks are all available from the iTunes Store on different discs. The results were surprising: in both cases, some, but not all tracks were matched. In the first example, two of 14 tracks were not matched and had to be uploaded; in the second example, only 8 of 20 tracks were matched. The screen shot below shows the results (click to see a larger screen shot).
I’m perplexed by this, and I wonder how exactly Apple matches tracks. The album above that is sold on the iTunes Store uses exactly the same tags as in the files I tried to match, so if Apple were only matching by tags (which they are not), it would be a perfect match. I know they use some sort of acoustic fingerprinting, and I wonder what causes certain tracks to not be matched.
I have no answers here, simply evidence of the oddity of iTunes Match. If you have other interesting examples to share, feel free to mention them in the comments.
Addendum: it’s worth noting that if you have iTunes match files with poor or non-existent tags, you won’t get tagged versions of those tracks when you redownload them. iTunes stores your tags, and doesn’t supply tags based on their matches.
Posted: 11/18/2011 by kirk | Filed under: Apple & Mac OS X, music Tags: Apple, iTunes | 18 Comments »
