Access Your Music and Movies on All Your Devices - iConnected: Use AirPlay, iCloud, Apps, and More to Bring Your Apple Devices Together - page 36

The Benefits of Cleaning Your iTunes Library
Joe Frabotta of TuneUp Media explains how cleaning up your music before using iTunes
Match can save a lot of time and effort:
“One limitation with iTunes Match is that it doesn't always do a great job matching every
song. iTunes Match sometimes will have trouble finding the right information for each song as
it copies it to the iCloud. This is usually an issue of metadata. iTunes — whether on your
desktop or portable device — relies on metadata to organize and display music. Each song in
your library contains metatags, which are small amounts of data that provide more information
about the file such as song name, artist, album, genre, date released, and so on. If your
metadata is disorganized, iTunes will be as well. Unless you just started building your library or
have used TuneUp before, you probably have plenty of problems with your tags — missing song
names, iterations of the same artist (The Beatles; The Beetles; Beatles, The), duplicates of songs
(Don't Let Me Down; don't let me down), albums without cover art, and even some songs
without any information at all!”
Subscribe to iTunes Match on a Mac or PC
Followed all the tips from before? Got $25 to spare? Then you're ready to set up iTunes Match.
First make sure you have the most recent copy of the iTunes software installed on your computer.
Visit www.itunes.com to check. In iTunes:
1. If you're not signed in to your iTunes Store account, choose Store > Sign In, then enter your
username and password in the dialog box that appears, and click Sign In.
2. Choose Store > Turn On iTunes Match.
3. Click the Subscribe button (or Add This Computer if you have used iTunes Match on a dif-
ferent computer) in the window that appears and enter your password to confirm. Then
click the Subscribe button in the same window.
4. iTunes Match then performs three steps to scan and match songs in your library as well as
upload artwork and unmatched songs (shown in Figure 2-12).
It's best to leave iTunes Match running while it completes the matching process, but you can
click the Stop button to pause the process. Simply click the button again to restart the process.