Aaaand the cluster-f*uck keeps getting' more clustered.
F*ck...
Anything Apple does is always a "clusterfuck", because of a tiny percentage of people whining on the internet. Odds are 95% of people using Apple Music absolutely love it and have no issues. If one would take the overall views of this forum on Apple, the company would have been bankrupt a long time ago. Thankfully, the internet tends to be an extremely negative, distorted image of reality.
If you can't see that Apple's "thing" is becoming more and more complicated; and not just that; it's becoming more and more complicated, unnecessarily. Then you are either a noob, or your not paying attention.
One annoyance (unless am missing something) is if I switch off iCloud Music library in iTunes, I lose the iCoud Status under Playlists leaving me with iCoud Download only. One has no way of knowing without going into their account if iTunes Match is available or not.
The new service and iTunes is a clusterfick, sorry to say...Im a 25 year Apple user, the whole family is actually...
The problem starts with Apple forcing you to use icloud Music Library IF you want to use a very reasonable feature of Apple Music, offline listening.
This totally disables any normal local syncing, and you can even control what gets uploaded to the cloud - it tries to jam everything up there.
Of course, if you have your own music that does not have it's doppelganer in the iTunes Music services, iCloud Music library won't upload those songs, and you will need to buy an annual $24.95 Match service to accomplish this - for each person in your family that has this issue! Otherwise you cannot get those files off your computers and onto your mobile devices. They wont upload, and you've lost the ability to sync locally. NICE. Pay up!
More amazingly, Apple Music offline download initiations are per song/album/playlist, per device! There is no global setting to indicate all your Apple Music hould be automatically downloaded to all your devices. Instead, you must manually go to all your devices, and hopefully remember what you saved to My Music that you haven't yet download, and download them manually. If you don't do it for a week, will you remember? Andwill you remember before you get to a place without wifi and realize you can't play music?
And you have to check each playlist, songs, or album manually, because there isn't an intuitive way to see what logically grouped media are in the cloud only and not local.
From Apple's perspective, we must live off the cloud. Who pays for streaming over cellular? Not Apple, so PAY UP. Even if you were dopey to want to pay each month for considerable more cellular data, who has perfect service wherever they work, or drive,? Or commuting in a bus, train, or in a subway. Or in every building? Or on a plane? Apple was utterly asleep at the wheel here.
Environmentally, why should we be wasting all this energy to repeatedly stream the same music over and over, when one download could be played locally with no more energy and congestion burden on the internet?
iCloud Music Library is a nice OPTIONAL idea, for those who are not impacted by the very real and severe limitations. But to coerce and force use while adding much cost and complication is ridiculous.
And of course, I could turn iCloud Music Library off. But then I lose the ability to listen to content offline. So what's the benefit of Apple Music?
All they needed to do was provide the option to continue local syncing as it always existed, and use the Automatic Download option thats already there for music purchases to also work for Apple Music rentals...You can turn it on for each device once, and let it filter down once, AUTOMATICALLY, and thats it.
Many ways to handle this far better than they have. Does anyone at Apple at a senior level eat their own dog food?
Apple Music is a great idea, but unfortunately count me in to the group of ppl who have had their carefully crafted music libraries completely messed up by the new service.
This is really not something that in my opinion can be dismissed as something minor. It's breaking my music collection, gathered over 30 years and painstakingly curated over dozens of hours. It's now a complete mess.
Also - the service itself doesn't work properly. Exit Stage Left by Rush (a live concert album from 81' or so) now plays a combination of Studio tracks and live tracks from their R30 tour. As fellow geeks I'm sure you all share my outrage on that point ;-D
I'm a big classical and opera fan. The plus side is Apple music makes finding the right performance easier than any service out there, bar none. The downside is 1) it's hacked up my existing library (some albums have 40+ tracks), and albums I've subscribed to have tracks that for reasons unknown won't play in my car via iOS but are just fine on iTunes. See, e.g. Das Rheingold, Solti conducting. If anyone can figure out that problem it'd be most appreciated!
For now I'm sticking with Spotify. I hate having to use a separate app that doesn't integrate well with my car, but it's reliable.
Still don't understand what the big deal is about on-demand music. Oh well.
same here, if I wanted 30 million songs I would have put some effort into collecting them by fair means or foul.
Seriously, I only have about 7,000 tracks and I don't even listen to half of them anymore, they were historically enjoyed. I'm no big listener and hardly have a vast library but i genuinely think most people are the same no matter how much music they have.
Also - the service itself doesn't work properly. Exit Stage Left by Rush (a live concert album from 81' or so) now plays a combination of Studio tracks and live tracks from their R30 tour. As fellow geeks I'm sure you all share my outrage on that point ;-D
I am an iTunes Match user and have been since the start (no Apple music for me). I have seen that sort of thing happen and i suppose I have to ask, have you out of interest looked at the iTunes Store version of said album and done a compare? Are you, please don't get angry, but are you sure your digital set of files were all actually from the live recording? perhaps the metadata on those tracks was different?
I undertook a review of my iTunes Matched library a few weeks ago. It is very clean and I have no same album duplicates, no iCloud errors etc (some effort has been taken) and I'm soon going to look at why on certain albums have even single tracks that never matched... and I am going to be the rare person who will admit that it could be because I didn't rip it from my own CD, it came to me (sometimes I did this for I had owned the tape/cd) and worse, I ripped music before the grand libraries of metadata were as good as today and my own hand entered tracks name and meta data back in 1997 for example might not be quite as the systems are expecting
same here, if I wanted 30 million songs I would have put some effort into collecting them by fair means or foul.
Seriously, I only have about 7,000 tracks and I don't even listen to half of them anymore, they were historically enjoyed. I'm no big listener and hardly have a vast library but i genuinely think most people are the same no matter how much music they have.
For classical it's simply awesome. An opera costs $40 on CD. You have to pick one performance, and there are many that are good. Which do you like the most? You'll drop hundreds of dollars in the old world finding what you like. Now, you have access to all of them.
I am an iTunes Match user and have been since the start (no Apple music for me). I have seen that sort of thing happen and i suppose I have to ask, have you out of interest looked at the iTunes Store version of said album and done a compare? Are you, please don't get angry, but are you sure your digital set of files were all actually from the live recording? perhaps the metadata on those tracks was different?
I undertook a review of my iTunes Matched library a few weeks ago. It is very clean and I have no same album duplicates, no iCloud errors etc (some effort has been taken) and I'm soon going to look at why on certain albums have even single tracks that never matched... and I am going to be the rare person who will admit that it could be because I didn't rip it from my own CD, it came to me (sometimes I did this for I had owned the tape/cd) and worse, I ripped music before the grand libraries of metadata were as good as today and my own hand entered tracks name and meta data back in 1997 for example might not be quite as the systems are expecting
I am sure the metadata is different to some extant to what Apple has in their DB. However, the artist and album name are identical. And the disc was burned from CD via iTunes a number of years ago. It was able to correctly identify the album and track names using CDDB back in the day. Now it seems to be confused.
There are also a couple albums that are now split into two albums in my library. There are instances when I sort by artist, only to find there are 2 artists with the same name and the albums broken up between the two. It's really weird.
I already subscribed to iTunes Match and now Apple Music. All working as expected, I can redownload my iTunes matched library (without DRM) with no issues.
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
But if you don't have iTunes Match why would you think that you could go deleting your own music and then redownload it when you are not paying for that service? Apple Music doesn't advertise this as a feature unlike iTunes Match.
If you delete and then redownload your iTunes purchases do these remain DRM free?
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
hang on, are you saying that if a person has Match and Music then they can download from Music and it will be DRM free???
Surely not, otherwise I might just take that 3 month trial and raid the place
I would avoid turning on iCloud Music library at all costs. It completely destroyed my whole music collection. I'm really disappointed at how much of a mess iCloud Music is. After I turned on iCloud Music, it took a while for Apple to go through my library so I just let it do its thing all night. In the morning, I had a big wtf happened moment. iCloud Music deleted a ton of my music. A few weeks ago, I cleaned up my all my playlists so I ended up with about 10. After turning on iCloud Music, it created over 40 playlists, mostly all duplicates but with more songs added. For example, I had a reggae playlist with about 40 songs. Apple created 7 more of the same reggae playlist but added more songs that weren't even reggae. Some of the other duplicate reggae playlists were just random songs. I had a bunch of studio master recordings that were deleted and replaced with DRM added songs. I don't have any clue how that happened. I didn't delete anything. Luckily my studio master recordings are all backed up on other hard drives, but this is just one huge mess. iCloud Music also deleted a ton of new unreleased music I have that's not available to the public yet. Luckily I had those songs backed up as well. It's going to take me a long time to fix this mess.
Still confused. I have iTunes Match and on my computers I still see that. On my iOS devices iTunes Match and the option to sign in or out of it has disappeared. Having seen enough to know I don't want Apple Music and would just like to revert to iTunes Match, I do not see a way. I can stop Apple Music from auto renewing but not cancel outright. And since the iTunes Match option has vanished in my settings on both my iPhone 6 and my iPad Air, unlike in your screenshot above, I'm confused about what will happen entirely evens after reading the article. (And several others).
I have iTunes Match and apple music. I added a song via apple music and then downloaded to the Mac. The file IS NOT DRM FREE. I checked the properties and it shows as drm protected, where previous match downloads are not. This does not match up with info provided in the article.
I already subscribed to iTunes Match and now Apple Music. All working as expected, I can redownload my iTunes matched library (without DRM) with no issues.
It is not that hard to figure out. It is not confusing at all.
As long as you keep giving money to Apple every month for both Match and Apple Music, you will not have any issues. If you avoid Apple Music, you won't have any issues. If you cancel Match and keep Music, you could have issues. If you lose or delete your previously matched files downloaded from Match, those files will be replaced with DRM versions courtesy of Apple Music when you re-download them. If you stop paying for Apple Music, all music you downloaded through the Music service will stop playing because you canceled your rental subscription (thanks to the DRM). As long as you retain your matched files in your library, those files will continue to play even if you cancel either plan because those files do not have DRM.
Bottom line: Don't delete any of your music from your iTunes library with the belief that they are the same, or safe, in the cloud. The only way Apple could get licensing from the record labels for this streaming service was to wrap the files with new, more restrictive, DRM. The other companies do the same thing. Stop paying, and the music stops playing.
People praised Apple for removing DRM. Now they like Apple Music which brings back DRM, in the worst way? That doesn't make any sense. I don't need to rent music, or give Apple $10-$15 every month so those files can continue to play. I only paid for Match, for the same reason everyone else did, to replace their low bit rate music, or early AAC-protected DRM files, with higher bit rate music without DRM.
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
Your information is incorrect. As long as you keep your Match account, you can continue to use iTunes Match the way it always worked. If you subscribe to Apple Music, any music you download from the streaming service will have DRM, even if you still have Match. If you delete your Matched files, cancel your Match account, then re-download them from Apple Music, those files will now have DRM because they came from the Apple Music service. You do not have to subscribe to both Match and Music to keep non-DRM files. You can continue to subscribe to Match, and NOT subscribe to Music and still use iTunes Match the way you always did. Apple Music is a rental service. Any music you download from Apple Music has DRM to prevent you from playing it if you stop paying for it. If you cancel iTunes Match, your matched files will continue to play because they do not have DRM. Don't delete your matched files from your library. Don't rely on the cloud.
Yes, today I subscribed to iTunes Match, turned it on, and promptly lost all music files, including years of carefully tuned matching of album artwork to music. Since the vast majority of my library consisted of ripped CDs and vinyl, it didn't help much that after disconnecting and reconnecting to the internet at least my purchased music (through iTunes music store) started showing up.
I didn't wait to see what would happen with all of my other music. Instead, I did a full sync from iTunes on my computer with almost complete success (one album cover mysteriously still does not appear), so little harm, little foul. But I would like to see a clear explanation of how all of this is supposed to work, or what I did wrong, before trying it again.
PS -- I tried to turn OFF my iTunes Match subscription in the iTunes "my music" account settings and got a message that "The iTunes store is unable to process your request at this time." !
I have iTunes match and apple music. I downloaded songs from Apple Music. However they are not DRM free. I checked the file properties on several songs and they show as protected. Can someone explain that? If that's the case, then no need to pay for match.
Is there anything more tedious than editing music tags?
I still have a whole lot of songs at the end of my library that look like this:- 01.01.01.01.song, as a result of multiple backups dating back to the nineties.
Spotify doesn't have a whole lot of stuff e.g. AC/DC, I dumped it as soon as the 6 month premium trial I was given ended, it also stopped playing anything except via PC (Australian version) but only let you look at stuff.
Who wants to look at playlists, it's almost as tedious as editing them.
Comments
Aaaand the cluster-f*uck keeps getting' more clustered.
F*ck...
Anything Apple does is always a "clusterfuck", because of a tiny percentage of people whining on the internet. Odds are 95% of people using Apple Music absolutely love it and have no issues. If one would take the overall views of this forum on Apple, the company would have been bankrupt a long time ago. Thankfully, the internet tends to be an extremely negative, distorted image of reality.
If you can't see that Apple's "thing" is becoming more and more complicated; and not just that; it's becoming more and more complicated, unnecessarily. Then you are either a noob, or your not paying attention.
The new service and iTunes is a clusterfick, sorry to say...Im a 25 year Apple user, the whole family is actually...
The problem starts with Apple forcing you to use icloud Music Library IF you want to use a very reasonable feature of Apple Music, offline listening.
This totally disables any normal local syncing, and you can even control what gets uploaded to the cloud - it tries to jam everything up there.
Of course, if you have your own music that does not have it's doppelganer in the iTunes Music services, iCloud Music library won't upload those songs, and you will need to buy an annual $24.95 Match service to accomplish this - for each person in your family that has this issue! Otherwise you cannot get those files off your computers and onto your mobile devices. They wont upload, and you've lost the ability to sync locally. NICE. Pay up!
More amazingly, Apple Music offline download initiations are per song/album/playlist, per device! There is no global setting to indicate all your Apple Music hould be automatically downloaded to all your devices. Instead, you must manually go to all your devices, and hopefully remember what you saved to My Music that you haven't yet download, and download them manually. If you don't do it for a week, will you remember? And will you remember before you get to a place without wifi and realize you can't play music?
And you have to check each playlist, songs, or album manually, because there isn't an intuitive way to see what logically grouped media are in the cloud only and not local.
From Apple's perspective, we must live off the cloud. Who pays for streaming over cellular? Not Apple, so PAY UP. Even if you were dopey to want to pay each month for considerable more cellular data, who has perfect service wherever they work, or drive,? Or commuting in a bus, train, or in a subway. Or in every building? Or on a plane? Apple was utterly asleep at the wheel here.
Environmentally, why should we be wasting all this energy to repeatedly stream the same music over and over, when one download could be played locally with no more energy and congestion burden on the internet?
iCloud Music Library is a nice OPTIONAL idea, for those who are not impacted by the very real and severe limitations. But to coerce and force use while adding much cost and complication is ridiculous.
And of course, I could turn iCloud Music Library off. But then I lose the ability to listen to content offline. So what's the benefit of Apple Music?
All they needed to do was provide the option to continue local syncing as it always existed, and use the Automatic Download option thats already there for music purchases to also work for Apple Music rentals...You can turn it on for each device once, and let it filter down once, AUTOMATICALLY, and thats it.
Many ways to handle this far better than they have. Does anyone at Apple at a senior level eat their own dog food?
Apple Music is a great idea, but unfortunately count me in to the group of ppl who have had their carefully crafted music libraries completely messed up by the new service.
This is really not something that in my opinion can be dismissed as something minor. It's breaking my music collection, gathered over 30 years and painstakingly curated over dozens of hours. It's now a complete mess.
Also - the service itself doesn't work properly. Exit Stage Left by Rush (a live concert album from 81' or so) now plays a combination of Studio tracks and live tracks from their R30 tour. As fellow geeks I'm sure you all share my outrage on that point ;-D
I'm a big classical and opera fan. The plus side is Apple music makes finding the right performance easier than any service out there, bar none. The downside is 1) it's hacked up my existing library (some albums have 40+ tracks), and albums I've subscribed to have tracks that for reasons unknown won't play in my car via iOS but are just fine on iTunes. See, e.g. Das Rheingold, Solti conducting. If anyone can figure out that problem it'd be most appreciated!
For now I'm sticking with Spotify. I hate having to use a separate app that doesn't integrate well with my car, but it's reliable.
same here, if I wanted 30 million songs I would have put some effort into collecting them by fair means or foul.
Seriously, I only have about 7,000 tracks and I don't even listen to half of them anymore, they were historically enjoyed. I'm no big listener and hardly have a vast library but i genuinely think most people are the same no matter how much music they have.
I am an iTunes Match user and have been since the start (no Apple music for me). I have seen that sort of thing happen and i suppose I have to ask, have you out of interest looked at the iTunes Store version of said album and done a compare? Are you, please don't get angry, but are you sure your digital set of files were all actually from the live recording? perhaps the metadata on those tracks was different?
I undertook a review of my iTunes Matched library a few weeks ago. It is very clean and I have no same album duplicates, no iCloud errors etc (some effort has been taken) and I'm soon going to look at why on certain albums have even single tracks that never matched... and I am going to be the rare person who will admit that it could be because I didn't rip it from my own CD, it came to me (sometimes I did this for I had owned the tape/cd) and worse, I ripped music before the grand libraries of metadata were as good as today and my own hand entered tracks name and meta data back in 1997 for example might not be quite as the systems are expecting
same here, if I wanted 30 million songs I would have put some effort into collecting them by fair means or foul.
Seriously, I only have about 7,000 tracks and I don't even listen to half of them anymore, they were historically enjoyed. I'm no big listener and hardly have a vast library but i genuinely think most people are the same no matter how much music they have.
For classical it's simply awesome. An opera costs $40 on CD. You have to pick one performance, and there are many that are good. Which do you like the most? You'll drop hundreds of dollars in the old world finding what you like. Now, you have access to all of them.
I am an iTunes Match user and have been since the start (no Apple music for me). I have seen that sort of thing happen and i suppose I have to ask, have you out of interest looked at the iTunes Store version of said album and done a compare? Are you, please don't get angry, but are you sure your digital set of files were all actually from the live recording? perhaps the metadata on those tracks was different?
I undertook a review of my iTunes Matched library a few weeks ago. It is very clean and I have no same album duplicates, no iCloud errors etc (some effort has been taken) and I'm soon going to look at why on certain albums have even single tracks that never matched... and I am going to be the rare person who will admit that it could be because I didn't rip it from my own CD, it came to me (sometimes I did this for I had owned the tape/cd) and worse, I ripped music before the grand libraries of metadata were as good as today and my own hand entered tracks name and meta data back in 1997 for example might not be quite as the systems are expecting
I am sure the metadata is different to some extant to what Apple has in their DB. However, the artist and album name are identical. And the disc was burned from CD via iTunes a number of years ago. It was able to correctly identify the album and track names using CDDB back in the day. Now it seems to be confused.
There are also a couple albums that are now split into two albums in my library. There are instances when I sort by artist, only to find there are 2 artists with the same name and the albums broken up between the two. It's really weird.
I already subscribed to iTunes Match and now Apple Music. All working as expected, I can redownload my iTunes matched library (without DRM) with no issues.
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
But if you don't have iTunes Match why would you think that you could go deleting your own music and then redownload it when you are not paying for that service? Apple Music doesn't advertise this as a feature unlike iTunes Match.
If you delete and then redownload your iTunes purchases do these remain DRM free?
hang on, are you saying that if a person has Match and Music then they can download from Music and it will be DRM free???
Surely not, otherwise I might just take that 3 month trial and raid the place
I would avoid turning on iCloud Music library at all costs. It completely destroyed my whole music collection. I'm really disappointed at how much of a mess iCloud Music is. After I turned on iCloud Music, it took a while for Apple to go through my library so I just let it do its thing all night. In the morning, I had a big wtf happened moment. iCloud Music deleted a ton of my music. A few weeks ago, I cleaned up my all my playlists so I ended up with about 10. After turning on iCloud Music, it created over 40 playlists, mostly all duplicates but with more songs added. For example, I had a reggae playlist with about 40 songs. Apple created 7 more of the same reggae playlist but added more songs that weren't even reggae. Some of the other duplicate reggae playlists were just random songs. I had a bunch of studio master recordings that were deleted and replaced with DRM added songs. I don't have any clue how that happened. I didn't delete anything. Luckily my studio master recordings are all backed up on other hard drives, but this is just one huge mess. iCloud Music also deleted a ton of new unreleased music I have that's not available to the public yet. Luckily I had those songs backed up as well. It's going to take me a long time to fix this mess.
I already subscribed to iTunes Match and now Apple Music. All working as expected, I can redownload my iTunes matched library (without DRM) with no issues.
It is not that hard to figure out. It is not confusing at all.
As long as you keep giving money to Apple every month for both Match and Apple Music, you will not have any issues. If you avoid Apple Music, you won't have any issues. If you cancel Match and keep Music, you could have issues. If you lose or delete your previously matched files downloaded from Match, those files will be replaced with DRM versions courtesy of Apple Music when you re-download them. If you stop paying for Apple Music, all music you downloaded through the Music service will stop playing because you canceled your rental subscription (thanks to the DRM). As long as you retain your matched files in your library, those files will continue to play even if you cancel either plan because those files do not have DRM.
Bottom line: Don't delete any of your music from your iTunes library with the belief that they are the same, or safe, in the cloud. The only way Apple could get licensing from the record labels for this streaming service was to wrap the files with new, more restrictive, DRM. The other companies do the same thing. Stop paying, and the music stops playing.
People praised Apple for removing DRM. Now they like Apple Music which brings back DRM, in the worst way? That doesn't make any sense. I don't need to rent music, or give Apple $10-$15 every month so those files can continue to play. I only paid for Match, for the same reason everyone else did, to replace their low bit rate music, or early AAC-protected DRM files, with higher bit rate music without DRM.
Yes. To keep your files free of DRM, you have to subscribe to iTunes Match AND Apple Music.
If you only subscribe to Apple Music, and you accidentally right click on one of your own music files and select "Remove Download", then that file is ERASED by iTunes as if you never owned it. Then the only form that can be downloaded is a DRM'd form. When you select to download the file, it cannot be found in the finder. iTunes places it in a cache somewhere on your drive, taking up hard drive space even if your music is in an external drive. Only if you copy that file to another place do you realize that it is an M4P file - a DRM'd version of the file you owned which was erased.
iTunes Match will replace it with a non-DRM version that may be at a lower bit rate - e.g. if you ripped with lossless format, you will get the lower 256 kbps format from iTunes Match.
Your information is incorrect. As long as you keep your Match account, you can continue to use iTunes Match the way it always worked. If you subscribe to Apple Music, any music you download from the streaming service will have DRM, even if you still have Match. If you delete your Matched files, cancel your Match account, then re-download them from Apple Music, those files will now have DRM because they came from the Apple Music service. You do not have to subscribe to both Match and Music to keep non-DRM files. You can continue to subscribe to Match, and NOT subscribe to Music and still use iTunes Match the way you always did. Apple Music is a rental service. Any music you download from Apple Music has DRM to prevent you from playing it if you stop paying for it. If you cancel iTunes Match, your matched files will continue to play because they do not have DRM. Don't delete your matched files from your library. Don't rely on the cloud.
I didn't wait to see what would happen with all of my other music. Instead, I did a full sync from iTunes on my computer with almost complete success (one album cover mysteriously still does not appear), so little harm, little foul. But I would like to see a clear explanation of how all of this is supposed to work, or what I did wrong, before trying it again.
PS -- I tried to turn OFF my iTunes Match subscription in the iTunes "my music" account settings and got a message that "The iTunes store is unable to process your request at this time." !
I have iTunes match and apple music. I downloaded songs from Apple Music. However they are not DRM free. I checked the file properties on several songs and they show as protected. Can someone explain that? If that's the case, then no need to pay for match.
Is there anything more tedious than editing music tags?
I still have a whole lot of songs at the end of my library that look like this:- 01.01.01.01.song, as a result of multiple backups dating back to the nineties.
Spotify doesn't have a whole lot of stuff e.g. AC/DC, I dumped it as soon as the 6 month premium trial I was given ended, it also stopped playing anything except via PC (Australian version) but only let you look at stuff.
Who wants to look at playlists, it's almost as tedious as editing them.