I have numerous audiobooks that I've manually ripped to <96kbps mp3 format. The steps I've taken to adhere to Apple's iTunes Match policy to get these files available to match are as follows:
- Convert track to m4a, automatically up-converted to a higher bit rate; now meets standards.
- File size was over 200mb, so I ran it through splitting software, which brought the total size of each individual m4a down to ~64 MB.
- Attempted to match the file, and received an "Error" message in return.
- I followed Apple's recommendation and removed the tracks from iTunes, added again, and received the same message while syncing.
Is there something I'm missing? Since these tracks don't sync, is there an alternative way to get these tracks on my iPhone so I can listen to them without syncing through iTunes Match? For some reason I can't set the metadata to AudioBook (Get Info -> Options -> Media Kind) since that is grayed out.
Best Answer
First, you can save some space by only up-converting to 128kbps m4a or even mp3, perhaps that is what you did already.
The metadata Kind should probably be set as "Music" if not already.
Finally, it's possible that Apple uses the audio fingerprinting to also detect whether it is music at all (but it seems unlikely).