Hot diggity!  I’m excited.  Can’t wait to work on this tonight.

I almost have all my metadata cleaned up and chaff excised from my collection.  What was once a 17k song collection is floating in the 11k range now, and I just made it under 100GB.  (Replacing thousands of 320k MP3s with 256K AACs will help that further.  Being a fanatic for prog rock with 20-minute songs makes it a bit tougher.) 

Apple isn’t being too forthcoming with what combination of metadata checking, la-la audio wave parsing, and server-side comparison produces (or precludes) a match, so I want to be able to maximize my chances, and ensure that I don’t have “explicit” and “clean” versions mixed up, remasters matched to premasters, and so on.  iTunes in the Cloud already messed up once, for example, matching my acoustic UK Kerrang version of Coheed and Cambria’s “Welcome Home” (which was an iTMS purchase! but is no longer available in the store) to the album version of “Welcome Home” from Good Apollo IV, which I own separately, ripped from CD, and never purchased from iTMS.  I expect to see that happen a few times, but hopefully not too often.

It’s a lot of work for those of us in AS (or OCD) curated-music-collection land, but the payoff they are promising seems more than worth it, especially at $25/yr.

Bit confused at the moment—it’s finding iTunes matches for some songs on an album imported into my library but not all.  Some songs are apparently marked that they can’t be synched, matched, or uploaded at all (i.e. you get a cloud with a slash through it).  The no match or upload makes sense for videos and pdfs, but why a random song?

And I really hope it doesn’t start messing with my tagging…

Engine Joe,

Apparently it does not change your metadata.  I was hoping it would correct album covers and such, but nope.

Also, some songs are ineligible (the slash-cloud icon), generally because the original copy is lower than 128kbps, but there has not been a definitive answer on that from Apple, just speculation from the community based on early trial-and-error such as what you are doing.  There may be other factors making a song ineligible that we haven’t had documented yet.

Thanks for the “scuttlebutt” (i.e. crowd-data), Ross.  Some of my ineligible tracks are above 128kbps… so there has to be more going on.

Some other oddities include Clouds with exclamation points (indicative of an error, but with no further explanation apparently available).

I know Apple isn’t exactly known for deep documentation for users, but there’s a lot of confusion and unknowns out there right now.

The download is definitely available here Down Under in Oz as of this AM.

Match underway.

“iTunes Match is currently not taking new subscribers please try again later” - what the *#*#*#!  Getting this message last night and this morning after you click on the subscribe button. Are the apple servers swamped??

Are the apple servers swamped??

That does seem to happen a lot right after an update or new feature is released.