iOS iTunes Apple Music – How to Disable Apple Radio in iTunes and iOS

Analog Source over Line-In → iTunes Match:  It works!  Kind of.

I just ran my experiment. While I don't have a cassette player handy, I did have the means to make a reasonably good quality analog recording to try with iTunes Match, as follows:

1. I used this old CD player:
   
   

2. And this excellent CD:
   
   

3. I plugged the CD player into my Windows^* PC's blue audio input (line in) with this cable:
   
   

4. I recorded the entire CD using EAC's "Record WAV" feature. Then, I split up the resulting single, large WAV file into individual WAV files (using EAC's "Process WAV" menu item.) I judged the track boundaries by eye/ear, and I ended up within a second or two of the actual track lengths reported elsewhere.

5. I compressed the WAVs into MP3 using EAC w/LAME.

6. I renamed and copied the resulting MP3 files to my Mac.

7. I added the MP3s to iTunes, and then added them to iCloud. After a few minutes, iTunes Match finished doing its thing, and 10 of 11 tracks were Matched. Proof:
   
   

Summary

It doesn't appear that a strictly digital-sourced (i.e. ripped) MP3 input is required for iTunes Match to succeed (somewhat) at matching. However, I did make sure line levels were appropriate during recording to avoid clipping, and though my recording was analog, the source is high quality.

What I still don't know is if iTunes Match would work with audio cassette, LP, or FM-sourced audio. Does anybody care to run a follow-up experiment? :-)

^* (my apologies for using Windows for the recording part of this experiment. I'm not yet familiar with audio recording/editing on the Mac.)

In 2018 - AirPlay and AirPlay 2 are the premier ways to play Apple Music. Most people will want to just connect their speakers to a computer or device and use Siri / AirPlay to queue up music.

If we go in a time machine back to 2015 - the situation was a little less clear, but using iPhone and Apple TV was still the best way to stream music over WiFi from many controllers.

(much of what follows is wrong and/or outdated, but were possible solutions at a past point in time)

Your iPhone is a first tier player in Apple Music. It would be better to just play the music on your phone rather than monkey with "remote". Send the music over the network to the PC rather than sending the remote commands over the network to the PC.

Remote options are:

• Wait for Apple's remote to get updated for the hot newness
• Get a VNC/RDC remote and control the PC (janky - but does 100% what the PC can do without needing anything else on the PC end) screen directly.
• Third party remotes like Rowmote Pro (I say like since I have a handful of iPhone to Mac remotes - just can't recommend specific PC ones)

The iPhone can AirPlay to a PC quite easily with software on the PC such as AirFoil for Windows and you're set with Apple's full fledged iOS music controls but taking advantage of the PC to speaker connection you have already set up.

Depending on how the PC outputs to speakers, you could also add hardware ($5 to $65) to get the sound from either the PC or the iOS devices to the speakers. You don't need to do that as there are several workable software solutions.