Apple Music to finally drop copy-protection from your ripped tracks on iCloud

I’ve been an Apple Music subscriber for a few months now and I’m mostly happy with the results. It’s nice to be able to download any album without worrying about purchasing it and as a result, I’ve discovered a lot of new music. There are issues of course. The radio is terrible for me anyway, and Apple Music never seems to find the kind of tracks I like, especially when compared to YouTube or Last.fm. The worst offender, however, has to be iCloud Music Library. The promise of Apple Music is appealing, on paper. You get access to Apple’s entire library of 43 million tracks (if you’re on the US Store), unlimited, ad-free radio and all your ripped tracks would be synced via iCloud. The problem with that last was that Apple Music uses meta-data to figure out which of your tracks are on iTunes and then matches the two. When you delete the local copy of the song from iTunes, it would be replaced with the iTunes version. This is a problem because meta-data isn’t always accurate, especially for ripped tracks, and I can’t tell you how many times iTunes tried to replace a live album with a studio one. Worse still, any copy you download is replaced with a DRM-protected one. These are my songs from my CDs that I ripped and which should have been uploaded to iCloud storage that I paid for. Why does it need DRM? It’s like Microsoft or Google adding DRM-protection to all the documents you uploaded to Office365 or Google Drive. Apple already has a solution in the form of iTunes Match, but for whatever reason, they isolated it from Apple Music. What does iTunes Match do? Exactly what Apple Music is supposed to. iTunes Match will check the audio fingerprint of your track, compare it to Apple’s music database and replace the song with the correct, DRM-free version of that song. As with Apple Music, if it can’t match the track, it’ll upload it to iCloud. Unfortunately, iTunes Match is a separate $25 a year subscription. But that’s changing now. Macworld reports that Apple has been slowly phasing out iTunes Match and integrating its features into Apple Music. The rollout is happening slowly, with a reported 1-2 percent of Apple Music users being upgraded every day. Those who subscribe to Apple Music and iTunes Match can let their iTunes Match subscriptions lapse with no consequences (as long as they’re subscribed to Apple Music). iTunes Match-only subscribers will need to retain their subscription. Of course, Apple Music subscribers will eventually be upgraded. If you’re an Apple Music subscriber who has been upgraded, you’ll see a ‘Matched’ tag next to matched tracks in the iCloud panel in iTunes.