Music trivia

I've managed to waste about two days on something that should have taken ten minutes, and really shot myself in the foot in the process.

All I wanted to do was backup my music.  I hadn't done so in quite some time, and had recently ripped a bunch of CDs.  My first thought was just to backup to two DVDs, which would have taken just a few minutes, but there would be no way to sync them.  Plus, that was decidedly uncool.

So I started looking at online storage options, such as Google Music, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Skydrive, and iTunes Match.  Online file hosting is certainly not a new idea, but it's always been very slow, clumsy, and expensive.  I was hoping these new services would be better.

I needed about 8GB to save all of my songs.  Google Music offered 15GB for free, but it immediately told me it wasn't available outside of US.  (Obviously it is very annoying when the UK is treated as a second-world country, but at least there is an ocean between the two countries -- I wonder how Canadians feel when they see this message?)

Amazon was a second choice because it only offered 5GB free--I had to pay for the rest--but it assured me their cloud was available in the UK.  I signed up but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to upload files.  After 20 minutes, I finally tracked down a help file that told me I had to open the music player to find the "upload button."  I downloaded and installed the music player, found the upload button, and when I clicked it was told "This feature is not available outside of the US."

Microsoft Skydrive was my third choice because, although it offered 15GB for free, you can't upload folders!  They expect you to put everything into one big folder, which is ridiculous.  I did manage to track down a third party tool that let you upload folders and finally got that installed, told it to upload my 8GB, and it told me it would take 3 days and 4 hours.  After about 20 minutes, I cancelled it.

Finally, iTunes Match, which offered nothing for free -- it's $25/year in the States and £21 in the UK -- but had two big advantages:
  1) If it "matched" your song with one it already had, it didn't need to upload it; it just created a link to it.  Thus, it wouldn't take 3 days to upload everything!
  2) Once it matched, you could replace the song on your hard drive with the official Apple version.

The second bullet really appealed to me because four years ago, when I ripped most of my CDs, hard drives were considerably smaller and so I saved everything at 56 kbps, whereas Apple used 256kbps.  Now, I don't know that the quality makes that much of a difference -- I certainly never noticed anything -- but now I had plenty of space on my hard drive, and this was an easy way to update my songs, so I signed up.

After Apple took my money, of course they told me the version of iTunes I was using was out of date, and I had to update it.  Once that was done, it set of to match my music and, of the 3,500 songs I owned, it matched about 150.

Seriously, 150.

Even more disturbing, it had put a little cloud icon with a line through it next to most of my songs, and when I clicked on it, it just said "ineligible."  I had no idea what that meant but a little googling uncovered a note that said iTunes would not match music recorded at less than 92kbps!  That was the reason I had given Apple £22!

I looked around at programs that would "convert" files to a different bandwidth, but most of them cost around $20. (One of them indicated it was free, let me install it for free, and only when I told it to convert a song did it tell me it would convert HALF the song for free, but if I wanted the whole song I had to pay.)  Plus I realised if I did that, I would lose all of my stats and ratings in iTunes.  I was not happy.

The solution, ironically, came from iTunes itself.  Originally, iTunes sold songs that had "DRM" to prevent copying.  When they finally introduced DRM-free music, they added an option to create an MP3 version so you could jailbreak your old songs.  Now, all of my songs were already MP3, but iTunes wasn't smart enough to realise this, so it let me create a new MP3 version and, critically, the new one was 128kbps (and kept the stats and ratings).  So I told iTunes to create MP3 versions of all my MP3 files, then told it to match the new 128kbps versions, and it matched about 3,000 of my songs.

Then I deleted all 6,000 of those songs (since I had two versions of each) and told Apple to download them again, thus getting the clean 256kbps version.  (Fortunately it's a lot faster to download than upload, and only took about six hours.)  There are still 400 songs it refuses to match -- and it's very random, with one or two songs on an album, and the rest are fine -- but that's good enough for me.

If this all seems a bit ridiculous to you, it's because it is.  Nothing in life should be this difficult, and I realize it's only because I know enough about technology that I can possibly make things this complicated.

But it gets worse.  Because of the higher quality, my 8GB of music is now 25 GB.  That's not a problem on my hard drive, but when I went to copy the songs to my phone -- which only has 2GB of space -- I could only copy one-third of the music I used to!  I completely forgot that on my phone -- and my old mp3 player -- file space is still an issue!!

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to get back to the 56kbps versions, so I'm stuck.  But at least I've backed up my music collection, which is really all I set out to do.