Save iTunes to Google Drive

I know how to change the default location for storing the audio files. Go into Preferences & click on Advanced & change the location.

I suppose that I can do the same to store the audio files on Google Drive, right?

Sure - Google Drive creates a regular folder (in much the same way that Dropbox and OneDrive too) so you can treat it like you would any other.

vansmith said:

Sure - Google Drive creates a regular folder (in much the same way that Dropbox and OneDrive too) so you can treat it like you would any other.

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I was hoping that you would tell me that.

Thank you.

dcs.79c said:

I know how to change the default location for storing the audio files. Go into Preferences & click on Advanced & change the location.

I suppose that I can do the same to store the audio files on Google Drive, right?

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Hello - I'm just curious if your goal is to put your entire iTunes media library in the cloud someplace? And if so, why do you want to? My assumption is to make your music available to all of your various devices?

If not considered, iTunes Match is another thought that permits 'sharing' your music, but there is a small price, i.e. $25/year - however, all of your music, whether purchased through iTunes, another online site such as Amazon, or ripped from your CDs will be available. Of course, you'll need a connection to the internet to use this service. Dave

RadDave said:

Hello - I'm just curious if your goal is to put your entire iTunes media library in the cloud someplace? And if so, why do you want to? My assumption is to make your music available to all of your various devices?

If not considered, iTunes Match is another thought that permits 'sharing' your music, but there is a small price, i.e. $25/year - however, all of your music, whether purchased through iTunes, another online site such as Amazon, or ripped from your CDs will be available. Of course, you'll need a connection to the internet to use this service. Dave

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I have over 200 music CDs. I've ripped some of them in MP3 format & saved them on a flash drive so that I can play them in my car. Once I'm done, I want to rerip all of my CDs in a universal uncompressed format. Each CD can hold a maximum of 700 MB or .7 GB. 200 X .7 = 140 GB. I don't want to spend an arm & a leg & a few other body parts on a 256 GB flash drive. Solid-state drives have a limited number of read-write cycles & are more expensive per GB than hard drives. While hard drives are reliable, eventually they will fail. That's why I want to save my CDs in the cloud.

For $25 how many gigabytes do I get? I chose Google Drive because they don't charge anything for 15 GB. 1 TB is $1.99/month & 10 TB is $9.99/month.

Of course, by saving all of my music in the cloud, I can access it from any computer or smartphone.

That's not how iTunes Match works. It's not a set amount of space.

The $25 (which is an annual, not monthly, fee) can store up to 25,000 songs PLUS any you bought from iTunes (unlimited amount). None of this storage counts against your iCloud storage. The best part (imo) is that the $25 is used to compensate the artists when you stream the songs from iTunes Match to your devices.

More info: https://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

chas_m said:

That's not how iTunes Match works. It's not a set amount of space.

The $25 (which is an annual, not monthly, fee) can store up to 25,000 songs PLUS any you bought from iTunes (unlimited amount). None of this storage counts against your iCloud storage. The best part (imo) is that the $25 is used to compensate the artists when you stream the songs from iTunes Match to your devices.

More info: https://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/

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Most of my CDs are classical music so there aren't "songs" & the playing time for each movement of a symphony, for example, varies. I could still consider it. $25/year is better than $25/month. I doubt if I would download any songs from iTunes. Another option that I have is to get an external hard drive backup with a RAID mirror like the Western Digital MyCloud mirror.

dcs.79c said:

Most of my CDs are classical music so there aren't "songs" & the playing time for each movement of a symphony, for example, varies. I could still consider it. $25/year is better than $25/month. I doubt if I would download any songs from iTunes. Another option that I have is to get an external hard drive backup with a RAID mirror like the Western Digital MyCloud mirror.

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Hi again - now that you've told us that your CDs are classical music, then irritations may arise as to the length of movements (not w/ compressed tracts but if you want to upload uncompressed music), finding the proper CDs (especially if you own multiple versions of the same works), and likely renaming the CDs/tracks to something you dislike - some experience HERE, if interested.

Now, I do not use iTunes Match - I have well over 100 hrs of MP3 music (mixture of classical and popular music) on my iDevices, but I own over 4000 classical music CDs (and 2500 non-classical ones), so no way that I'm about to rip all of these discs - WHOA! My backups are local for my MBPro but redundant - external HDs (EHD) are cheap these days even at 1 or several TB sizes - for my laptop, I have two EHDs doing Time Machine (kind of like having RAID 1), two other drives doing CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner), and a LaCie SSD backing up my personal files, including the music. My wife's iMac is being backed up similarly except her personal files go to Carbonite in the cloud.

Of course, a big advantage of using iTunes Match is sharing the media w/ all of your devices, but that is not really a concern for me. Good luck w/ your choice(s) and let us know - Dave

If you're just looking to have your music available everywhere, you could use Google Play Music - you can store 25,000 songs with GPM for free and stream them from any device for the wonderful price of $0. The joy here is that the music can be deleted from your local filesystem if you so choose, freeing up space while keeping your media accessible.

RadDave said:

Hi again - now that you've told us that your CDs are classical music, then irritations may arise as to the length of movements (not w/ compressed tracts but if you want to upload uncompressed music), finding the proper CDs (especially if you own multiple versions of the same works), and likely renaming the CDs/tracks to something you dislike - some experience HERE, if interested.

Now, I do not use iTunes Match - I have well over 100 hrs of MP3 music (mixture of classical and popular music) on my iDevices, but I own over 4000 classical music CDs (and 2500 non-classical ones), so no way that I'm about to rip all of these discs - WHOA! My backups are local for my MBPro but redundant - external HDs (EHD) are cheap these days even at 1 or several TB sizes - for my laptop, I have two EHDs doing Time Machine (kind of like having RAID 1), two other drives doing CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner), and a LaCie SSD backing up my personal files, including the music. My wife's iMac is being backed up similarly except her personal files go to Carbonite in the cloud.

Of course, a big advantage of using iTunes Match is sharing the media w/ all of your devices, but that is not really a concern for me. Good luck w/ your choice(s) and let us know - Dave

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I've spent hours ripping my CDs into MP3 format &, after reading about the problems with iTunes Match, I'll pass. Either I'll stick with Google Drive or I'll use Time Machine or an external hard drive.

dcs.79c said:

I've spent hours ripping my CDs into MP3 format &, after reading about the problems with iTunes Match, I'll pass. Either I'll stick with Google Drive or I'll use Time Machine or an external hard drive.

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Well, many of us have spent 'hours' ripping CDs - I could spend the rest of my life ripping 6000+ discs -

BUT, again I'll emphasize to be sure to have redundant backups, i.e. don't rely on just a single method - I've had 3-4 external HDs fail on me in the past and the occurrence was usually sudden w/ some 'clicks & clacks' - a combination cloud backup would certainly not hurt, either. Good luck - Dave

I should point out that iTunes has a *VERY EXTENSIVE* classical section if you care to have a look. The beautiful thing about a digital store is that nothing every goes out of print!

Having read Dave's Link to the Apple Support site, I would say that my experience with iTunes Match and classical music is far more positive than negative. I agree that pop, jazz, country & western and so on are probably better cared for, but as far as I can see, my multiple versions of a specific classical piece have been properly matched.

But for me iTunes Match is simply an incredibly cheap "safety net" with the additional benefit of across-device listening.

Like Dave, I have 2 Time Machine backups and a cloner (SuperDuper! in my case). In addition, once a month at least, I back up my iTunes Library to an EHD (as well, I might say, as iPhoto, Aperture and my Documents).

Ian

IWT said:

Having read Dave's Link to the Apple Support site, I would say that my experience with iTunes Match and classical music is far more positive than negative. I agree that pop, jazz, country & western and so on are probably better cared for, but as far as I can see, my multiple versions of a specific classical piece have been properly matched.

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Hi Ian - as already stated, I'm not using iTunes Match @ the moment, but my understanding is that the music on my laptop (eclectic mixture w/ a lot of classical tracks; all in MP3 format) would be 'matched' and available to be in the lossy AAC codec - my questions are: 1) For the thousands of CDs I own that have not been ripped, do I first need to rip them to my HD or simply insert each into my SuperDrive for recognition by the Apple servers; and 2) Can they be ripped in a lossless format, such as FLAC or even WAV and then be uploaded to the Apple servers in that format which would be timely (I understand that to listen, the AAC format would be streamed).

So, my main hesitation in using this service has been the presumed need to rip SO MANY CDs to get them online w/ either Apple or w/ another online streaming service. Thanks for any comments. Dave

Dave

Please forgive tardy reply. Having a long week end in a place with no WiFi, no 4G, no 3G, only Edge. Gone to library with 2MB WiFi. Will reply properly on Monday. Didn't want to appear rude by not responding. I know what I want to say but it's just too difficult here.

Apologies.

Ian

IWT said:

Dave

Please forgive tardy reply. Having a long week end in a place with no WiFi, no 4G, no 3G, only Edge. Gone to library with 2MB WiFi. Will reply properly on Monday. Didn't want to appear rude by not responding. I know what I want to say but it's just too difficult here.

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Hi Ian - no problem @ all; I've been thinking about this for years, even when on my Windows machines but the number of my CDs is a major obstacle for me. However, might help others w/ much smaller classical collections make a decision to use the cloud for storage and streaming? Thanks - Dave

Hi Dave

At last, back to communication with the outside world.

My comments re your posting are, in no particular order:

iTunes Match only matches what you have in iTunes on your Mac. Therefore you'd have to import any or all the CDs which you wished to match into iTunes itself. A total non-starter in your case. Having learnt from previous postings that you are a "senior citizen" and further assuming that anyone with thousands of CDs is highly likely to be someone who catalogues them and treats them like gold; I would say that they are safe the way they are.

Next: Apple will match formats up to and including Apple Lossless and will allow download in the same format as matched. It is important to note that iTunes on your Mac will play some formats, such as AIFF, but these cannot be synchronised with any iOS device mainly because these tend to be recorded or downloaded at greater than 44.1 kHz or with a Bit Rate in excess of 256Kbs. OK for iTunes to play, but not iOS devices. And, as far as my personal experience tells me, these are not matched with iTunes Match.

So, the "rule" is—if it plays on iOS, it will be matched. In my limited opinion, Apple Lossless is as "high" as you need to go. In a series of personal experiments, I have been quite unable to discern any difference between Apple Lossless and FLAC, for example, and increasing the bit rate or sample rate has, similarly, been unrewarding. So, if you do feel like importing any CDs to iTunes, set the import parameters to Apple Lossless. You can play them and match them, and re-download them in the same format.

I think that covers your questions?

Sorry again for the delay.

Ian

Thanks Ian for your detailed and excellent description of the iTunes Match possibilities - yes I've been collecting CDs since 1984 and am a big classical music fan - I've probably ripped a couple of hundred CDs for placement on my iDevices but 6000+ is not in my future, and yes I'm in retirement so time would be an issue.

If I were much younger & had half that amount, I might do a 'lossless' rip on the cds, store them on redundant backups, and then do a lossy extraction for placement on my iDevices, but no longer is a possibility. Dave

@IWT

Thanks for that excellent information /Clarification of iTunes Match parameters.

I'm considering it and similar options for playing music on our iDevices. None of which have enough space to hold our entire library. Perhaps you know the answer to the following question:

Suppose you have some music in your library and that is matched via iTunes Match as usual. At some later date some of the songs are removed from the iTunes Music Store catalog. Would that content still be available to you via iTunes Match?

Hi Sly and thank you for your kind comments.

In response to your question, I cannot provide a definitive reference to back up my "understanding", but I know that I read a reply to a similar question in one of the Mac magazines by an iTunes "Guru". I am going through all my past copies to see if I can find the exact reply and will do a follow-up post if I find it.

But, my fairly clear recollection was that provided your song was matched in the first instance, then even if it didn't feature in a future catalogue, a copy was allocated to you and therefore would always be available.

I realise my answer lacks a verifiable source, but I do remember reading this. Best I can do for the moment. Sorry. Will post back when I find something more definitive.

Ian