iTunes error -50 and 8268 while downloading from iTunes Match

As above, see About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support to see if that gives more clues about those items. If you create a new blank library and enable iCloud Music Library can you download this particular album into it?

tt2

See About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support to see if that gives more clues about those items.

tt2

I'm having this 8268 issue with one of my albums on my Mac. What's weird is the same album will play just fine on my phone. I've tried restarting iTunes, turning iTunes Music Library off and on, and I still get the error. I've only noticed it for one album, but all the fixes I've seen online point to issues with my internet connection, and I know that's not the problem since I can stream many other songs without issue.

Statuses show "Matched" and "available for download." I created a new iTunes Library, enabled iCloud Music Library, and the album still won't play. I tried restarting my machine, still nothing.

When trying to play a song from this album, iTunes "thinks" for a few seconds as if it's trying to start streaming, then it skips the track and then the next, and the next, all the way through. If I try to download one of them, I get the aforementioned 8268 error telling me to check the network connection. All the while the album plays without incident on my phone (same iCloud account). Baffling.

I'm having the exact same problem on my Macbook Pro (no problems on iPhone) and it started at about the same time as your post, Pewtey. I've contacted Apple Support but they were unable to help...I'd be very curious to know how this got resolved if it did.

I wasn't able to find out what happened. In the end, I went to my older Mac, where the album would play. I suspect this is because I used this Mac originally to upload all my music that I didn't purchase through iTunes, and a lot of it is still downloaded to my machine, this album being one of them. So I archived the song files to be sure they weren't deleted, then removed the album from iTunes on that machine as well as my phone. Then I re-imported the album from the archive, and it propagated to all my other devices. So it's a hack that certainly won't always work, but it happened to get me out of this situation.

I suspect the issue is just some corruption in the file on Apple's servers and without a specific cause it's basically impossible to diagnose. Also, this is an album that is not available in the iTunes Store or via Apple Music, so it points to something specific within iTunes Match as being the culprit.

Thanks very much for your response! I originally uploaded the tracks from a Windows machine, but I believe that I have the .mp3 files somewhere on that computer or on an external hard drive. I may ultimately delete the albums causing issues, as you suggested, and directly import the files onto my Macbook.

I'm not sure if Apple will ever be able to figure out what happened at the end of January, but the timing of my issue and yours are uncanny - I also suspect it's something on their end.

I've got this exact same issue, on multiple Macs, iTunes fails to play or download the file but on iOS devices it works fine.

The full issue for me seems to be the Songs are in a matched and downloadable state, but no longer available on iTunes Store or Apple Music perhaps, and iTunes tries to download from those places, where as the iOS devices use some other iTunes Match/iCloud Library server.

I haven't yet sniffed my network to see the end points each device is hitting to compare but I'm guessing they are different.

I have also contacted iTunes support using the Support path of

Product iTunes Store

Support Category Connecting & Downloading

Support Topic iTunes Match

and they did email me back with some not useful generic support articles and told me to contact Technical support team. Pretty sure I just did buddy thanks for nothing. Maybe contacting the apple music/icloud library support team might help.

All my songs were originally matched via iTunes Match years before Apple Music and the iCloud Library were around, not sure if that's part of the issue or not. I'll update here further if any support contact actually helps out.

Exact same issue here. I had chat with several apple support people and even a phone call with tech support but they could not resolve the issue. It seems like they have no clue on the problem at the beginning. I searched web for this problem and it seems like they exist since the beginning of the iTunes match service. How could they be clueless on this issue in 2019?

Hello all, I'm currently working with Apple to resolve this. The issue has been escalated to their engineers, but they cannot provide an ETA on its fix. In the meantime, if the ONLY place you have the broken songs is in iTunes match, you can download them to an iOS device (which strangely is not affected by this issue), and then use one of the various tools such as iExplorer to extract the original m4a files.

Of course, if you drag those extracted files into iTunes they will match against the broken versions in the cloud, so don't delete them from your local library until the issue is resolved.

Also, call Apple and push them to get a resolution, because it's now been over a 2 months I've had this issue on 12 songs and still they have not been able to fix it.

Same issue. I have uploaded the album twice now and it seems to lose the first two songs. They are marked as matched, if I delete the local version, I get Error -50 or 8268.

Makes me wonder how many other songs I will not be able to recover. Cloud support should be 100% secure, it's what we pay for.

I used this method but I had to install and try about six different tools until I found one that didn't immediately crash. The one I used was iMazing but I am sure there must be others that work. Moral of the story is - always keep a backup of the source files!

If you have an iPhone or iPad the songs should still download to those devices. Then you need an app that scans the mobile device and can extract the songs you need. I used 'iMazing' but there are many to choose from. Good luck.

Keep an offline copy of all of your media in future.

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