Remember that Apple Music fiasco where songs from users’ Macs were getting replaced with mismatched tracks from Apple’s catalog? An iTunes bug might have been the main culprit of that, but the problem with the mismatching of songs still remained. That was iTunes Match’s problem.

But not anymore, according to The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple. It seems that it has slowly rolled out audio fingerprint analysis for the past while, a much better indicator of telling what version of any given song the track holds. Is it live? Is it a cover? Is it the inferior 2005 remaster? The waveforms can tell it much better than scanning the metadata which may have been put together by people who didn’t care anyways. Bah.

And the best part? Your local songs won’t get deleted. At least, they shouldn’t be.

So, how is the new method being implemented? Well, if iTunes Match incorrectly paired a song to Apple’s library, it’ll likely rematch the song and get it right this time around. More importantly, you can download the matches DRM-free. Apple Music users and those who signed up to iTunes Match a la carte will benefit.

Dalrymple wrote that Apple has been moving about 1 to 2 percent of its users over to audio fingerprint matching from metadata matching every day for some time now.

Source: The Loop
Via: 9to5Mac