Can't upload songs to library for iTunes matching

Well, I wanted to waste two hours of my life and I sure did by trying to contact Apple support regarding the issue. They made me try the typical things of log out / log on, uncheck iCloud Music Library and recheck. I even did an uninstall and reinstall of iTunes since a service agent found a communities post saying this fixed the issue back in 2019. Nothing helped as we knew it wouldn't. Almost like they couldn't comprehend that Apple might have an issue with their service. (But the iTunes Service status is Green on the website? lol) I tested loading an album into iCloud (an album previously already matched that I had downloaded and was fixing meta data prior to re-importing into iTunes Match) and 6 out of 18 matched but looks like the process timed out and 12 are now in the "Waiting" iCloud Status. Only thing I can do is either delete them from the library or select File -> Library -> Update iCloud Music Library and hope more match or upload. So far not making much progress as the Library Update usually times out with no progress after 30 minutes. My recommendation would be to not mess around on your side and we just have to wait this one out. Maybe more tickets open will get supports attention.

[Edited by Moderator]

I keep getting my post removed for "petitioning" so I'm not really sure how to boil down my advice on how to get this issue solved without getting my post removed. I talked to a senior support manager who told me that issues are fixed by engineers once they accrue enough votes. Votes are added to an issue once a case is passed on to them or through https://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html. If you call in to check on your reference number, make sure they write down this thread's URL in the case notes. That helped me a lot.

I filled out the form at

https://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

as suggested above and included the URL of this discussion thread. I hope it gets someone’s attention. Why am I paying for something that doesn’t work?

A little update form „Apple System Status" (https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/)

iTunes Store - Resolved Outage

07/31/2021, 6:53 PM - 7:07 PM

Some users were affected

This service may have been slow or unavailable.

It should get better…

(But I did not experience any progress over the last 24 hours!) 🙁

The Apple support Senior Advisor who called and spoke to me a few days ago, after escalation from my online chat with first-level support, told me in no uncertain terms that his department is “compartmentalized” from the engineers who work on the Apple server-side. He stated that per policy there is “no path” for anyone in his department to escalate any issue whatsoever to a server-side engineer. I specifically asked if there was an internal site to raise issues that a server-side engineer might see and he said there wasn't. He said the engineers his department can escalate issues to work only on the customer-side, such as macOS, iOS, iPadOS and their associated applications and apps. He said a server-side engineer “might” see issues posted at https://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

I have just had a very similar conversation. We tried making a "clean" installation of Big Sur on my laptop and starting the process from scratch... The same issue occurred.

Interestingly, I've noticed a couple of things (which may or may not occur for everyone)

• Songs that can't be matched are uploaded and synced across devices almost instantaneously
• When the match process times out, I often find "duplicates" have been added to my library (see attached image) Not sure why?
• Songs bought on iTunes or added from Apple Music are unaffected, and sync across devices

I've been promised an update within 2-3 business days. Will let you know as soon as I hear back.

Positive news

I’ve just finished a call with a second level Apple Support engineer.

The good news:

• the engineer understands the problem (he was thorough and asked intelligent questions)
• he gathered appropriate data and screenshots so that he could forward them
• he promised me a response by Tuesday (10 August)
• he assured me that he would ‘own’ the problem until it is fixed.

I asked him to attach this Community conversation to the escalation so that the number of people affected can be seen (and also because each of us has had a slightly different experience).

I believe that this is good news. The response was very different from that which I had had previously (all the usual client-side reinstallations and updates). A named support engineer has now accepted ownership of my (and, I think, your) problem until it is fixed.

I will post again as soon as I get the promised update.

Like I said before, I'm having the same problem. It involves a classical CD with 12 tracks. I found the tracks in the iTunes Store so, in theory, all my tracks should have been matched. After a considerable delay, 7 were matched but the remaining 5 have defied all my efforts to get it to work. Over 24 hours ago, I just left the process running and ended up with "An error occurred". Here is a screenshot of the relevant part of the Activity window:

At least this gives me something to use when I try to move this further up the support chain tomorrow.

SUMMARY OF THE HUNDREDS OF REPLIES AND REPORTS

so far we know

the problem is affecting MacOS and Windows which run different versions of iTunes

therefore unlikely related to a software update on the client side

we know that the problem is affecting Apple Music users as well as peeps like me who just use iTunes Match

many have tried all the troubleshooting steps:

-reboot

-sign out of iTunes and iCloud

-connect via iphone hotspot over cellular to rule out home networking or ISP issues

many are reporting intermittent success of individual song uploads mixed with incomplete updates

expected symptoms include - greyed out tunes on devices that sync with your iCloud Music Library

the song metadata is being uploaded and synced successfully but the actual audio bits are not there so the song cant be played on any device other than the one the track was originally ripped on

we're all stuck in exactly the same spot:

and

it doesn't take a computer science degree to figure out this is not a client-side issue

Well, I'm not using a VPN, and disabling WARP (Cloudflare DNS) still didn't work for me.

How am I gonna keep my iPhone's music library updated?

’Sync Library' was always on, on my Mac's music preferences !!!

Llame al soporte de México y me dijeron que ya esta resuelta la situación , incluso me pidieron revisar el estatus de Apple para confirmarlo , pero el problema sigue , no se ha solucionado , en México tienen ya 233 reportes telefónicos según el asesor

Just another iTunes Match user here to confirm what we already know that the service has been unbelievably slow for the past week or so, just wish I had known it wasn't just me!

I have been checking online for any signs that this problem is being flagged up by any other Apple news media outlets, but other than the iMore article from July 28th, I can't see anything.

Perhaps we should all be writing to some of the more popular Apple websites like 9to5Mac or MacWorld rather than spending hours with Apple Care reps who clearly have a limit to what they can do in a situation like this.

I am one of those people who has been a constant user of iTunes Match since it was released 10 years ago and I already had over 3,000 CD's to rip into my iTunes account back then when it started.

I can say that in all those years I have personally never experienced an upload glitch like this one and have added songs on multiple computers from different corners of the world without a problem.

My Apple Music 'Match' account is now sitting at 88,000 songs.

Around 65% of these songs are 'matched' and the rest are shown as 'uploaded' - however many of the uploaded songs were ripped from commercial CD's that were readily available in stores.

For example, even a couple of Beatles albums show as 'uploaded" - so I was never really convinced that the 'matched' songs uploaded quicker than the 'uploaded' songs or that the algorithm that matched the songs was 100% accurate as some users have previously commented here.

Thinking I was alone with this mess and in desperation to get some new songs to upload this past weekend I signed out of Apple Music, unchecked 'sync my songs' in preferences and deleted all 88,000 files of downloaded music from my hard drive knowing everything was already matched or uploaded.

Before a restart I cleared all the caches, signed out and back in to my iCloud account and anything else I could think of the purge anything that might be causing this problem.

Then I re-booted the iMac, signed back in and clicked on 'sync my music' and walked away.

It took 2 ½ days, but I re-downloaded all 88,000 songs (813 Gb) and both the 'matched' and 'uploaded' songs downloaded really fast - all except of course the music I added on 29th July which was still showing as ....."waiting"!

However, one thing that I discovered during this long fruitless exercise was that the new downloaded version of 'matched' songs was smaller in size than what the Apple servers previously recorded.

I saw this as I watched the list update every time the song downloaded by showing 'view songs'

What I mean is that a song previously showing as 256 kbs Apple Music streaming quality that was previously a file size of e.g. 8.9Mb is now more like 7Mb.

I watched this happen hundreds of times in all types of music old and new as the files downloaded off the servers back onto my iMac.

Does this mean that Apple has further compressed the music files?

Is this problem something to do with new Lossless files being added?

Is their entire Apple Music library being updated and is this the reason we can't get our new songs to upload?

No idea. But it's just another theory to throw into the melting pot.

So the result of my weekend exercise was that whether songs were 'matched' or 'uploaded' Apple Music will let me download at high speed the entire 88,000 songs in my library - and yet it has taken 5 days to 'match' just 16 songs from a new 29 song album.

In my opinion this issue is 100% related to something at the servers, possibly in connection to the new lossless option.

I write all this to warn you off wasting your time doing what I did and 'cleansing your Apple Music".

It was a waste of time and the problem of slow uploads still exists.

After reading all the other comments from users who have asked Apple Support to help, I won't bother with that either because it looks like they no more than us.

Thanks for the heads up.

This evening though I have noticed a new twist.

To be 100% certain that this long delay in uploading new music wasn't only on my iMac, I added an album to Apple Music on my MacBook Pro...and waited.

The new album showed up quite quickly on my iMac.

The songs were listed and the artwork was complete, but so far (5 hours later) only 2 songs of 14 have matched the rest are in purgatory otherwise known as 'waiting'

At the same time I also added a few new songs to my iMac.

However they show something new and are showing as 'removed' and underneath the very same file shows as - yes you guessed it "waiting".

Anyone else getting 'removed' showing up in their library?

See screenshot below to show what I mean.

None of these songs were already in my library - so they could not be 'removed' and the Cloud Music Library has been at 95% complete for hours.

When I close Apple Music and select 'update cloud music' this window takes a couple of minutes to get back to this 95% complete position - but never ever completes matching.

Not sure if this is a coincidence or not, but after applying July's Windows Updates, I also am experience iTunes Match issues as described above. Can anyone confirm same issue without recent Windows updates applied? Or better yet, is this happening on Macs as well?

I also talked to them and had basically the same runaround. Lady on the phone talked to IT for 5 minutes and they told her everything was fine on their end, to which I told her that this thread clearly shows that this is not a user-specific issue. She told me she would escalate it up and I made her write down this thread's URL to send up as well. Like, there's five of us in this thread with an issue, and another person who made their own thread with the same issue. I understand that this probably accounts for the entire userbase of those who use iTunes match lol but obviously there's something going on with their servers.

Also the only way I was getting any songs uploaded at all was to sign out of iTunes, sign back in, and then sync my iCloud again. However today this almost really screwed me, as it took hours to finally get the iCloud library synced again, so just a warning if you pursue this. It seems pretty obvious that their servers are just being impossibly slow. That's probably why they show as "green", because technically data is transferring, but at such a slow rate that it makes the functionality useless on a practical level.

[Personal Information Edited by Moderator]