With today’s high speed Internet, how people play music has shifted towards streaming. But I’m old school and love “owning my music”.
Many years ago I subscribed to iTunes Match, that matches what you have in your library and allows you both streaming and downloading access to either songs identified in the database, or uploaded songs if otherwise for a fee (RM 100). The service has worked relatively well, matching at least half of the songs in my database (a lot of game soundtracks are not on iTunes). I have quite a collection of songs, at the beginning almost exclusively collected by compiling songs from other friends’ computers during my university days. The rest are through cough, torrents, cough. Frankly, I can't afford to buy all of the music I want to own. A few months back I’ve found a way that would allow me to have new songs and get old songs that were previously uploaded but not matched “iTunes matched”.
The key to this is YouTube and having a program that could extract the media files from the YouTube videos being streamed. In the past, it's possible to download the media being played on YouTube by going through the web developer tools. This is no longer the case at present (or maybe I’m too lazy to Google it). What I use now is an app called iTube Studio, which allows me to extract any media on YouTube as either a video file, a music file, or subtitle file, of course for a price (using this only for music hunting is not the sole reason I bought this app). Another alternative to YouTube are some sites still available to download MP3s directly from (despite DMCA takedowns); I won’t publicly name the one I use.
When downloading/extracting these songs, it’s important to compare the YouTube video with what is in the iTunes Store database to ensure that the music file in both are as similar as possible. Don’t use the music videos as they are usually not the same as the album version of the song. Looking for lyric videos, presence of the same album cover-thumbnail, details like “original”/“remastered”, duration of the files, etc all will help. Once extracted and imported into iTunes, I then try to add them to the library and see if they get matched. If none of the YouTube videos work, then I go for the alternative MP3 sites.
Additionally, some of the songs in iTunes do get matched but actually have the wrong names of the tracks, artists, etc. That’s where Siri comes in, as Apple a while ago bought the company behind the Shazam app. Just use the command “Shazam this” and you’ll get the required information.
It is quite some work in sorting things out, but at the end of the day, if I decide to cut ties with iTunes Match, I can decide to download all unmatched and matched music (as DRM free 256 kps AAC) then call it a day.
Some might cry that it’s stealing, considering that it’s only RM 100 versus purchasing each song/album I want. But one, this is actually per year rather than a single payment. And two, you’re wrong if any streaming solution pays artists a lot (and Spotify’s among the worst).
