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One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

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Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#21

Post by ChuckMcM »

nodata wrote: post #6

If it's DRM free, how will the yearly subscription work? It's not like the tracks can expire.

This was the curious bit for me as well. So for $25 all my music 'upgrades' to 256 bit AAC, can I replace the MP3's I ripped with 128bit MusicMatchJukebox in '99 and are sitting on my filer?

And what is this $25 really paying for? Is Apple empowered by the labels to license me a DRM free digital copy?

If I pay the $25 annual fee will it automatically 'upgrade' any songs that come on over a torrent link? Is this really a one time license to every single song in the iTunes store? (Seriously, there is probably an mp3 or ogg file of every song in the iTunes library out there) If I put them all on my machine and then pay my $25 does it go 'ding' and now I own a legitmate digital copy? (if so its a screamin' good deal)

Can I get immunity from prosecution by this? I mean if I've got the insta-legit card in my iTunes and a metallica song comes across the intertubes and metallica comes calling can I just show them the itunes copy?

It's a bold move, and one which I support, but I wonder how its going to look once its put into practice.

My guess, is that if you have a $25 subscription you can put a CD into your Mac and it will 'register' those songs as being available to you. But we will see, could be very very interesting. Or not.

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#22

Post by mdasen »

sil3ntmac wrote: post #19

Are the mp3s going to be in the cloud? Or on my hard drive? ... because it seems like it would be trivial to "spoof" an mp3 for downloading (take a random mp3, perhaps cut to the correct length, add the correct id3 tags and tell iTunes Match to download it).

I'm guessing that they're going to use an audio hash to look at the file and determine what song it is. It's probably more reliable than using ID3 tags which might get mixed up (especially around remixes, live versions, or just generally missing information).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Finding_similar_r...

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#24

Post by sevenproxies »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #10
klous wrote: post #3

iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?

This should actually be really attractive to pirates. You know all those albums you downloaded, but could only find in 128 kbps? Well, spend $25, and all those can now be 256 kbps. I absolutely loathe iTunes, and that's attractive enough to me that I'm considering reinstalling it.

I doubt that there would be many albums that are not available at at least 256kbps from various file-sharing networks. A pirate would have to first search their favourite file sharing network anyway to get the music they then have to pay Apple to listen to.

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#25

Post by mdasen »

nodata wrote: post #6

If it's DRM free, how will the yearly subscription work? It's not like the tracks can expire.

It isn't a subscription to your music, it's a subscription to the matching service. The point of iCloud is that they'll sync all of your music that you've bought from iTunes to all your devices. No more connecting your iPhone to your computer or managing the 2 computers you have with iTunes and how they get copied and such. Now, for music that you've ripped or bought from other sources, Apple is offering a matching service. Basically, it'll look through your collection and if they're in iTunes Apple will note that you already own those songs and allow you to also sync those songs via the new iCloud sync mechanism.

So, the tracks don't expire and you'll always have them. It's unclear if the subscription is for the syncing and the matching or just the matching. If it's just the matching, you can basically import your old music into your iTunes purchases and then not have to continue paying for it (assuming that you don't get new music outside the iTunes Store). The subscription also seems to cover syncing music that isn't in iTunes via uploading your MP3s.

So, it isn't a music subscription as much as it is a service/convenience subscription.

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#26

Post by middus »

klous wrote: post #3

iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?

So Apple’s basically betting you’ll pay $25 a year to legalize all your content[…]

I really don't like the part about legalizing my collection. The music I ripped and encoded myself from hundreds of CDs that I bought retail are just as legal as tracks from iTunes.

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#28

Post by r00fus »

klous wrote: post #3

iTunes Match premise: Once a pirate, not always a pirate. Pirates are willing to pay $25 / yr for legit 256 kbps AAC tracks of stuff they already have? And you must keep paying $25/yr in perpetuity for access to these tracks?

This just sounds surreal.

So instead of buying music, you can now "pirate" it, then allow iTunes Match to "legitimize it" for you.

Bingo, free "legitimate" music (I assume with artwork/etc included).

Re: One More Thing: ‘iTunes Match’ Will Upgrade Your Ripped Music For $24.99 A Year

#30

Post by weaksauce »

billybob wrote: post #16

Is this perpetual? For example, could I pay my yearly subscription fee, torrent anything I want, upload it and get a legit version? If so, this is $25 a year for all the music I want. Which, if the labels have agreed to that, it's very surprising. It's sort of a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy: they start getting a cut of this fee from every participating pirate, which is a lot more than they used to get (…

Piracy is still going to happen; this way the record labels get a cut. If they make it easier than pirating it will be popular. I switched to amazon downloads because it was much easier than buying a CD and ripping it and I cannot live with DRM. Not to mention faster than waiting for the package to arrive.
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