iTunes Match: what could possibly go wrong?

2012-01-21 21:54:00

I was pretty happy when I got my hands on iTunes Match. Still am by the way. But Marli? Not so much! You see, when at least one of the people using the account actually care about things like play counts and star ratings, you need to take a really good approach in switching to Match. Case in point, the rather pissed off voice mail left during kendo practice this morning ^_^;

What'd happened? Thursday I'd immediately set my Mac to syncing with iCloud and yesterday morning it was done. It all works swimmingly and I was playing music from the cloud all day at the office. Great stuff! So in the afternoon I told Marli to enable it on her Macbook as well. Clickety-click and you're done. Until this morning when she was rather unpleasantly surprised to find that all of her playlists and her meticulously kept database had been fscked up. Because my Macbook was the first to sync, iCloud assumed that it was also -my- ratings and playcounts that mattered most. She also had now gone from a library listing of ~3300 songs, to ~9000 songs. And she really doesn't want to see all my music :D 

So! Here's my tips when sharing an iTunes Match account between two people, hoping that one of them (like me) does not care about play count and star ratings. 

  1. On the iTunes library of the person who does NOT care: reset all play counts and star ratings.
  2. On the iTunes library of the person who DOES care: make a backup of 'iTunes Library.itl' and then enable iTunes Match. Finish the whole syncing process.
  3. On the iTunes library of the person who DOES care: change all the smart playlists to include the extra rule "Location is on this computer".
  4. On the iTunes library of the person who DOES care: create a smart playlist which is "Location is on this computer" and "Media kind is music". This will act as the new, local library for this person.
  5. Finally enable iTunes Match on the other person's computer. He'll now get a bunch of ratings from the other user, but won't care ;)

The main library of the caring user will still show -all- of the music in iCloud, but at least the ratings and such will be retained.


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