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I signed up for iTunes Match. It matched most of my songs and uploaded the rest. I was playing one of my favorite songs and discovered it has a glitch at 21 seconds in. It is consistently there, even on multiple devices. Luckily I found I still had my copy in a backup, so I removed the song from the iTunes library and re-added it. Unfortunately it is one of the songs Apple "matched" so it keeps getting replaced with the glitchy version.

I guess I could try renaming the song so Apple doesn't keep replacing it, but that seems like a lot of work. What else can I do?

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    Unless you tell iTunes to download the file, it should keep your existing version, so I'm not sure how yours is being replaced all the time. Renaming won't help because from what I can tell, it runs some algorithm on the file contents.
    – user479
    Jan 10, 2012 at 5:13
  • @Randolph I keep all my original music on the backup drive then play it from the cloud on all my devices.
    – Jim McKeeth
    Jan 13, 2012 at 23:41
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    You also may want to contact iTunes support (apple.com/support/itunes/contact) to notify them of the glitchy song, so they can correct it in their system.
    – jmlumpkin
    Feb 13, 2012 at 13:51
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    @jmlumpkin I Contacted Apple iTunes support and they have a hard time comprehending that there is a problem with one of their songs. I went to the Genius Bar today and the Genius had the same song on her iPhone and it played the same for her. Hopefully they can get it fixed now.
    – Jim McKeeth
    Mar 5, 2012 at 20:00
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    @JimMcKeeth did you ever get any feedback from this?
    – jmlumpkin
    Mar 22, 2012 at 13:53

1 Answer 1

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My understanding (although not precise science) so far with Match knows the song signature and uses this in conjunction with the track length to match against their database.

This would explain why some songs get replaced with explicit versions on Match while renaming one song to another (incorrect) does not trick Match into thinking it is a new song. You can test both quite easily

  • the former by deleting a non explicit matched song (remembering track length) and pulling it back from iCloud
  • the latter by ripping a CD without any info into Track01...02 etc and have it matched correctly.

all the above is somehow tied with Genius.

With the above assumption, to keep your proper version try padding out the length, add noise, or combine the track with the next (if it belongs to an album) and it should cause enough difference to be uploaded instead of being matched.

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    As a side note, always remember that iTunes Match is not a backup solution. Remember to keep copies of your library
    – osx86x
    Jan 13, 2012 at 22:30

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