
Apple Music Matches Files with Metadata Only, Not Acoustic Fingerprinting - ingve
http://www.mcelhearn.com/apple-music-matches-files-with-metadata-only-not-acoustic-fingerprinting/
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abalone
Uh.. pretty significant update to this post. Unable to reproduce.

 _Update: I’ve been unable to reproduce this issue, and my guess is that there
was a glitch with Apple’s servers that has since been corrected. If you only
subscribe to Apple Music, or are using it on a free trial, then your songs are
matched using metadata only. If you subscribe to both iTunes Match and Apple
Music, then iTunes matches your songs using digital fingerprinting._

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SG-
A lot of negative comments from people here, but I have to ask, have you used
Apple Music and has this feature failed you? I didn't have any problems myself
(not a huge collection, but it worked well for 24GB of songs).

Some people have mentioned that it can be easy to fool the system and gain
free songs, but paying $9/month for Apple Music gives you access to every song
either online or offline and you can add them to your library.

iTunes Match however is a different thing and they likely have to be almost
sure the song you have is the song you should get access to from the iTunes
Store.

~~~
eridius
My iTunes library is apparently 95.96GB (for music) and it's been working
pretty awesomely. There's the occasional bug with iTunes itself, but Apple
Music has been pretty solid.

> _it can be easy to fool the system and gain free songs_

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you have Apple Music, you already have
access to the entire catalog, so there's no trickery to gain "free songs",
because they're already available. And if you don't have Apple Music, you
can't do this either, because iTunes Match exclusively uses acoustic
fingerprinting[1] to ensure you can never download a song you didn't already
have.

[1] For non-purchased content. For purchased content they obviously already
know you own it.

~~~
SG-
Yes, I wasn't saying it's a problem to 'fool the system' and get free songs, I
was mentioning that it's not a problem because of how it works.

~~~
randyrand
Plus if they used fingerprinting couldn't you still circumvent that with a
youtube downloader or even torrent downloading?

~~~
eridius
If you do that, then you already have the song, so you're not really getting
anything out of Apple that way (besides making it easier to play that song on
your other devices).

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lupinglade
Apple’s been doing stuff like this lately all over the place. Total lack of
attention. They’re trying to do too much too quickly and the attention to
detail Apple is famous for is quickly dwindling. Please Apple, STOP RUSHING
EVERYTHING.

~~~
lupinglade
Not to mention the poor integration between Music and the user’s existing
library — its definitely not what I expected from Apple Music.

~~~
eridius
What poor integration? My entire library operates like it always has, except
that viewing by Artists now has extra information about each artist in the
list of albums, and also has a segmented control that lets me see all of that
artist's music instead of just what's in My Music. And if I find a song I
like, I can add it to my library pretty easily, at which point it shows up
with the rest of my music just like all my existing owned music does.

Overall, it's actually working pretty amazingly.

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eridius
I read some time ago (I think on one of Serenity Caldwell's iMore articles)
that Apple Music uses metadata to match _on iOS devices_ , because acoustic
fingerprinting is too resource-intensive, but on the desktop it uses acoustic
fingerprinting like iTunes Match has always done.

I don't know if this is true, but it does make sense. Although I wonder who
actually has music on their iOS device that isn't also in iTunes on their
desktop, because the only way you'd hit this is by adding an iOS device to
Apple Music that contains music that iTunes did not have.

~~~
bestnameever
I didn't know you could use iTunes match from iOS devices but if Siri can be
integrated with Shazam which has acoustic fingerprinting, then I would think
they could do the same with iTunes Match on iOS devices.

~~~
eridius
You can't use[1] iTunes Match from iOS devices (for precisely this reason).
It's Apple Music that you apparently can (I haven't tested but that's what
I've heard).

Shazam does have acoustic fingerprinting, but it's much cheaper
fingerprinting. And it's cheaper because Shazam is allowed to get it wrong. It
doesn't have to get 100% of songs, and when it does get songs, it's perfectly
ok for it to not recognize which particular performance a song is from if the
artist has multiple versions.

But iTunes Match has to be as close to 100% accurate as it can (and better to
avoid recognizing a song entirely, thus requiring it to be uploaded, than to
mis-identify it as something else). Shazam is only listening to part of the
song, but iTunes Match has to fingerprint the entire song, and the amount of
processing it does per second of music may very well be higher as well.

[1] Where "use" means "upload music to"

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pasta_2
Serenity Caldwell wasn't able to duplicate this, probably a bug.

[https://twitter.com/settern/status/627162699076665344](https://twitter.com/settern/status/627162699076665344)

~~~
Shebanator
I agree - it is most likely a bug. If not it seems like this would be a huge
hole.

~~~
JeremyBanks
I've had a dozen songs across several albums exhibit this behavior. Never mind
elaborate acoustic matching -- I've had fifteen minute live performances of a
song replaced with three minute studio versions, which should have been
prevented by a trivial metadata sanity check.

I haven't been thrilled by the experience.

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uptown
Wow. If true, this is a massive flaw. I'm trying to think of a rationale for
this approach considering they have the technology to match using the acoustic
signature of the tracks.

~~~
wutbrodo
I'm consistently surprised at how often I hear about hacky, poorly engineered
solutions in Apple products (and those are only the ones that are externally
visible/relevant to product quality directly). I can't imagine they don't have
access to broadly the same quality of engineer as other big companies, which
leaves the question of why presumably deliberate product choices were made
this way.

~~~
eric_h
My guess is inflexible deadlines for products and a certain death march
culture for meeting them (from what I've heard (third-hand, admittedly) from
people who work there) lead them to be forced to cut corners in some places.

On the bright side, Apple does usually eventually fix or replace the hacky
solutions. The other side of that is that it sometimes takes years.

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mercurialshark
Last summer, Sander Dieleman was working on recommending music based on audio
signals, while interning at Spotify. Very interesting work:

[https://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-
cnns.html](https://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html)

~~~
Qantourisc
Can't wait for a service utilizing this. I find finding new music hard.

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ben1040
iTunes Match would acoustically match songs, and then if the match failed,
would just upload the song to iCloud as-is.

I imagine maybe this behavior is intended to replace uploading the song if the
song doesn't match? It'd explain the situation in the quoted tweet where a
live Phish show got replaced by a live recording, assuming that it failed to
acoustically match and iTunes resorted to a metadata-based search instead.

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falcolas
Yeah, this is totally the case. I imported a CD awhile back which didn't have
any metadata. Now if I try and listen to it on another machine, I get some odd
indy artist who likes drums and screaming.

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bitslayer
If this is true, you can create thousands of 1 second "songs" with different
metadata and fill up your library really fast.

~~~
ben1040
Unlike Match, Apple Music will DRM-wrap the downloaded files, so it doesn't
really get you free music.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Technical difficulty of stripping the DRM? FairPlay was easy enough, I'm sure
this wouldn't be much harder.

~~~
eridius
If you're going to intentionally commit copyright infringement, it's probably
easier[1] to just pirate the music than it is to download it from Apple and
strip the DRM, especially because downloading it from Apple requires having a
paid Apple Music subscription.

[1] Note: I do not in any way condone music piracy. I'm just pointing out that
it's more practical than stripping DRM. But really the best thing to do here
is to just pay for your music.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I was merely questioning it from a technical perspective.

I don't much care either way. People want digital content for free, publishers
continue to rape the idea of works entering the public domain in a reasonable
amount of time. Its hard to feel bad about either party.

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jdlyga
I had a ton of Apple Music problems initially, but I couldn't be more happy
with it now. I love Apple Music. It screwed up the metadata all over my
library, had problems with adding playlists to my library. It turns out it was
all because there's no way to reset iTunes Match. The old iTunes Match songs
in the cloud were screwing up everything. I had to use a second computer to
delete the songs and create a blank library to Apple Music before all my music
would sync to the cloud correctly. Apple really needs to get it together with
their iCloud platforms. The amount of bugs is getting embarrasing. But Apple
Music as a service is pretty awesome.

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iaskwhy
This also happened to me when I signed up to iTunes Match. At first it seemed
everything was working properly, a lot of uploads as expected, but with time I
realised there were some songs missing forever. Mostly bootlegs that were
returning from the cloud as the original studio songs, I lost a lot of them.
The most strange one was with Tool with the song "The Pot". The files on my
iTunes were from the original CD and they all got a match but "The Pot" was
returning as a 96kbps file! That was it, I stopped using iTunes Match that
moment and will probably never sign up for any matching service again. Long
live my several library backups in different locations. My library is sacred.

~~~
iaskwhy
Forgot about this strange one: I own all System of a Down original and
explicit CDs but iTunes Match got me the clean versions instead.

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arrakeen
Lala (the iTunes match predecessor) at least took track length into account

~~~
imperialdrive
Ahhhh Lala, forever missed! Among the best, and Apple shut them down. I gave
up on my iPad and mac-book and went to PC after that let down. MediaMonkey and
Spotify have my business.

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StavrosK
Tangentially related to this, but I bemoan the fact that there's no portable
playlist format. I have various services my music is on, and I wish there
existed a playlist format that detailed every piece of metadata you had per
song, such as file path, IDv3 tags, AcoustID, etc. That way, I could load the
same playlist file on Winamp, Spotify and iTunes and have the songs available
in each immediately, even if one was a cloud services and the paths were
different in the others.

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oomkiller
I have a particular hip-hop album on my phone that is an orchestra version of
the original. Every time I attempt to play the studio album, I hear the
orchestra (live) version. It's extremely annoying, and I hope they fix it.

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pbreit
I'm pretty sure they use audio fingerprinting (Gracenote MusicID has been
cited) but using metadata with track lengths would probably suffice most of
the time without too much piracy risk.

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vlunkr
It's hard to imagine how such a huge oversight made it all the way to the
final product from a company as huge as Apple. No one thought about this along
the way? Or if they did they were ignored?

