Seeing Apple Music instead of Matched on your iTunes tracks?

iTunes Match is a part of Apple Music in the $9.99 per month subscription plan(or $14.99 for families of up to six). Thus, if you subscribe to Apple Music, you have the access to Match’s matching algorithms and also the DRM-free iCloud copies of their Mac’s local tracks. Although, now since October, you will have access to proper matching. But if you’re still seeing the Apple Music instead of Matched on your iTunes tracks, don’t worry. Here is how to fix it.

What exactly is matching?

Basically, it is a feature of Apple’s iCloud Music Library through which you can quickly and easily access your Mac’s local music on all your other devices. This will include previously purchased on other services, ripped from CDs, home-recorded. Thus, if you have a copy of an album on your iMac and enable iCloud Music Library, you can play and download it on your iPhone, iPad, and other Macs. Apple can make all the songs from the album to download on all of your devices, but it will be time-consuming and waste your internet bandwidth. Thus, Apple scans the album using audio fingerprinting to compare the audio signatures of the tracks to the millions of tracks in the iTunes Store catalogue. If a match is found, the two will link in your iCloud Music Library. Thus, instead of uploading copies of your album, you’ll be downloading or streaming the iTunes Store’s copies when listening on another device.

iTunes Store offers DRM-free 256kbps AAC files. Thus, you always get a high-quality download whether you listen on your iPhone or download to a new Mac. Also, as you own the original copy of the files, their redownloads are still yours.

How does matching work for Apple Music subscribers?

Earlier, Apple Music matched your Mac’s tracksby using simple metadata matching rather than audio fingerprinting. Then it connected tracks to Apple Music’s streaming catalogue. But, in this process, tracks frequently got mismatched, and any re-downloaded tracks would show up as having Apple Music’s FairPlay DRM on them. Due to this, there were many issues with track matching and people thought that Apple Music was DRM-locking their libraries and asking Apple to quit matching altogether.

Thus, now Apple Music matches tracks the same way it’s $24.99/year iTunes Match service does. It uses audio fingerprinting to the DRM-free iTunes Store catalogue. So, if you had a subscription for both Apple Music and iTunes Match, you will only need Apple Music. It will properly match your local tracks to iTunes Store versions in iCloud Music Library.

Force iCloud Music Library to rescan your library- Seeing Apple Music instead of Matched

You can go for a few different options to force iCloud Music Library to rescan your tracks and catalogue them appropriately. Here are all the options to do so, if the first option doesn’t work, you can try the next options. Although, before starting, have a complete offline backup of your iTunes library.

Update iCloud Music Library- Seeing Apple Music instead of Matched

1. Open iTunes on your Mac.
2. Click on File from the menubar.
3. Hover over Library from the drop-down menu.
4. Select Update iCloud Music Library from the menu.

Apple will then rescan your tracks, and categorize them appropriately.

Create a secondary iTunes library to force iCloud Music Library to rescan

1. Create a secondary iTunes Library for iCloud Music Library.
2. After iCloud Music Library finishes loading, it will display any Mac-matched tracks as Matched.
3. Quit iTunes from the pop-up box.
4. Option-click when relaunching iTunes and select your original library.

Manually rescan your iCloud Music Library- Seeing Apple Music instead of Matched

If nothing else is working, you can force iCloud Music Library to do a manual rescan by deleting everything in that repository. Note: If you go this route, your local files won’t be affected, but you’ll get rid of any Apple Music tracks or albums you’ve saved to iCloud. Do this at your own risk.

1. Open iTunes on your Mac.
2. Select Music from the dropdown menu on the left side of the iTunes window.
3. Select the Library tab from the menubar.
4. Click Songs under the left column of the Library window.
5. Select all your music in Songs view (use Command-A on the keyboard).
6. Press the Delete key on your keyboard.
7. Click on the Delete Items option to remove these tracks from iCloud Music Library. (Remember not to click Remove Downloads — this will move all your local music to the trash, rather than delete songs from iCloud.)
8. Further click File in the menubar.
9. Hover over Library from the drop-down menu.
10. Select Update iCloud Music Library.

• If you get a dialogue box querying what you’d like to do with the songs already on your devices, choose Replace.

Enhance your Mac with these solutions

Keyboard

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Wireless Headphones

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Conclusion

With the new feature of Apple Music, you don’t need to subscribe to both Apple Music and iTunes Match. Now Apple Music matches tracks the same way it’s $24.99/year iTunes Match service does. It uses audio fingerprinting to the DRM-free iTunes Store catalogue. But if you’re still seeing the Apple Music instead of Matched on your iTunes tracks, you can do a few things to fix this. You can either update your iCloud Library or create a secondary iTunes Library to force iCloud Music Library to rescan. If both these don’t work, you can manually rescan your iCloud Music Library.

If you have any questions you can ask them in the comments section below.