iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one’s music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.
Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the “clean” version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.
iTunes Match differs from Google’s and Amazon’s music cloud storage lockers in that it doesn’t require users to upload their entire collection to Apple’s servers. Instead, it scans one’s library of music, identifies each track using its metadata and then matches it with a high-quality audio file in the cloud, even if the original was encoded at a lower bit-rate.
It looks like what’s happening here is the system is misreading metadata for certain tracks and cross-referencing with radio-friendly edits of the same song. At the very least, this has happened with four hip hop tracks as reported by Cult of Mac.
To some, this may smack of the nothing-dirty-please, prim-and-proper censorship for which Apple has gained a reputation in the iTunes App Store. More likely than not, it’s just a bug. The company may not want filthy porno-filled apps populating its App Store, but that’s quite different from allowing people to listen to a profanity-laden Jay-Z song that they purchased (or otherwise) acquired on their own accord.
Apple has acknowledged that this is an issue and is reportedly working on a fix.
