iTunes Match Freezes in Step 2

SteedGun wrote:

One thing I did was reboot and restart iTunes every few hours or so. If the service comes back to you and you have a stuck iTunes it will ignore you and move on. Try that. I know that this should work in hours and not days but it does appear that it is working a bit better today so try what I did. I hope this helps. 😐

Agreed and I've already done that twice, today. I plan to do that a few more times until I see some progress.

For about 15 minutes I was really going great - I guess it was before the US had their coffee and starting re-trying their matches. 🙂

Lucky thats working for you, I just deleted all songs that were waiting to be checked, I could not be bothered to wait, hopefully by the time I decide to add some more songs to iTunes they will ahve fixed it, I mean its not like I am paying £20 a year for the service ¬.¬"

I'm having a similar issue. The first 4,000 songs ripped from my CDs loaded flawlessly and quickly. They matched up perfectly with no issues. Then, earlier this week I loaded another 3 CDs (35 songs total) and the process fails every time.

I contacted Apple Support & they suggested two things this morning: First, to "stop and then restart the Match service" and second, to sort the problematic tracks by their errors, move the error tracks to the desktop, and run the Match service again. Here's what I told them about these two proposed solutions:

1. Stopping and restarting Match is not a solution. 4,000 songs loaded and got matched with no trouble at all. Stopping and restarting the Match process is clearly not the answer, as I've let it work on these 35 tracks for 24 hours or more with no progress at all. This is NOT the way anyone would expect this service to work.
2. I literally have NO songs with errors. The bit rates are right, the AAC format is right, and the tracks are offered in iTunes = There simply are no errors to fix.

Just to see what would happen, last night I went into iTunes and bought an iTunes copy of one of the CDs in my collection. It downloaded and matched up in no time at all. I don't know what this means, but there's clearly something in the process of matching non-purchased music that's different than the process for matching purchased music.

My latest suspicion is that this recent breakdown of Match (within the last few days) is somehow related to the global rollout of the product - Maybe Apple was unprepared for so many people jumping in or something. I only think this because it was working fine for me for weeks, right up until a couple of days ago...

At any rate, I'm in summit talks with some dudes at Apple via a case that I opened last night. They haven't come up with anything substantial yet, but I at least feel better about the fact that I'm not the only one who's having some amount of difficulty here.

I'll keep y'all posted & if anyone knows anything that will help me, PLEASE holla.

I concur. We saw this same slowdown for about a week after the last major rollout in December. I'm actually a good metric to use because I Match almost daily (just a few albums at a time). For the last few weeks it's been very fast, but starting on the 17th this week it's been a complete mess. Today is a little better, but not by much.

My biggest concern is that Apple isn't acknowledging this, which I've stated on other threads. Most likely things will clear up by early next week, regardless. But what happens when they rollout India or China? I hope they wait at least 6 months because i don't want to be Matching when that happens. 😮

Just got another email from the very friendly Edna at Apple Support...

"...Very interesting to hear that it is just 35 songs. Weird. Have you tried removing them from iTunes completely, making sure to have a copy somewhere else, and then importing them back in before trying again? It definitely could be that these items need, oddly enough, a refresh in iTunes. It also could be the fact, as you said, that we have expanded our service recently to other countries. This could definitely put some strain on our servers, and could be causing such a delay..."

So I shared with Edna that I had, in fact, tried that very suggestion just last night, but to no avail. I further shared with her that another of my solutions was to run the iTunes AAC converter on JUST ONE of the 35 songs, and to then try to add JUST THAT SONG to iCloud by right-clicking on it in my library.

Guess what. Same hang. No forward progress. Match just spun and spun and spun.

No solution yet, but the talks continue...

Try it now. As in right now -- 12:35PM EDT 1/19. I was stuck for over an hour and suddenly it just completed. There may be a small window atm before it slows down again. 🙂

EDIT: Just matched another 20 songs in about 45 seconds. It's like the eye of the storm - Matching more before I lose the window! 🙂

Same here, I matched 88 songs in less than a minute, earlier today I matched 200 songs, I'm almost there, I need to match 24 more songs and will be in Step 3 at last 😀

I see iTunes Match as a big lady who ate a lot of food (19 countries) and now she is trying to diggest that to the toilet, keep pushing lady, keep pushing!! 😁

Just tried 68 songs....got to 67 and now I'm stuck again. So close!

This is exactly what we saw last month. I might be stuck for the next few hours, then it will suddenly complete and I may have another 15-20 minute window where things are speedy before it tanks again. Very frustrating.

Also, not to be a shill but my Amazon uploads have also been running all morning - I think it's been about 600 songs uploaded so far. Amazon beats Apple, at least for the last few days. Yes I know that one could affect the other, but it was running when my 20 songs matched in 45 seconds, so it's actually a consistent baseline that doesn't explain why the iTM Matching varies so much depending on when I run it.

Aaaarrgh... I'm at the office and therefore can't try to shove things through Match right now, but I'll have my teenaged minion try it for me when he gets off the bus in a half hour or so...

On another note, I heard back from the helpful Edna at Apple Support. She and I have been emailing back and forth about this all morning, which I guess it pretty cool. However, she very nicely said that she can't think of anything else for me to try, and was going to ask for "assistance with the issue" I reported.

We'll see.

And I thought that maybe all this was because iTunes didn't care for the Alannah Myles CD that it fed it...

OK - here's a new angle!

Like so many others I haven't been able to match/upload anything for days. And like others I am seriously wondering if Apple is a company I am willing to continue trusting if they can't even give a small acknowledgement / update to prevent us wasting time searching for faults within our own systems. When a train breaks down, haven't they found that passengers cope MUCH better when there is a simple honest announcement rather than hours of silence?

Anyway ... like others, my computer's matching thermometer has restarted and has been slowly creeping up all day today (encouraged by stops / reboots, computer restarts etc) from 6 out of 709 to get as far as 708 out of 709 where it has been stuck for three hours.

But the odd thing is that I notice that new matches have been appearing on my phone as well as new uploads. In fact very few of my tracks are now left over. And I have noticed the typical "upload" slowing down of my computer and internet all day.

I'm pretty sure this is a new behaviour. Previously no uploading took place until the whole of step two had finished. But it seems that my iTunes has been secretly uploading WHILE it has been still doing / showing step 2 matching.

Jimscriv wrote:

But the odd thing is that I notice that new matches have been appearing on my phone as well as new uploads. In fact very few of my tracks are now left over. And I have noticed the typical "upload" slowing down of my computer and internet all day.

I'm pretty sure this is a new behaviour. Previously no uploading took place until the whole of step two had finished. But it seems that my iTunes has been secretly uploading WHILE it has been still doing / showing step 2 matching.

I noticed that earlier, and was going to comment, but actually I'm not sure that this is new behaviour.

Usually Match doesn't spend a significant amount of time on stage 2. It could very well always start uploading as soon as it identifies the requirement during stage 2, but we never noticed it because by the time the tracks have actually uploaded it has finished the matching check and moved onto stage 2.

For what it's worth, mine has about 15 tracks which it hasn't managed to get past for about 5 hours now. It others weren't reporting success I would have assumed it was down again.

Exactly the same happened to me. It went to stage 3 perfectly before and I bought an album and now it hangs at 8 tracks short of the whole amount on stage 2.

Yes, KeithJenner, this may not be new behaviour and simply behaviour that hasn't been noticed before - but it is interesting and a bit of a relief that it is doing something rather than just twiddling its thumbs.

I have now been keeping an eye on the cloud status icons in iTunes and can confirm that tracks are going from "waiting" to "uploaded" even without any movement in the thermometer still showing the same number in Step 2.

KeithJenner wrote:

Jimscriv wrote:

But the odd thing is that I notice that new matches have been appearing on my phone as well as new uploads. In fact very few of my tracks are now left over. And I have noticed the typical "upload" slowing down of my computer and internet all day.

I'm pretty sure this is a new behaviour. Previously no uploading took place until the whole of step two had finished. But it seems that my iTunes has been secretly uploading WHILE it has been still doing / showing step 2 matching.

I noticed that earlier, and was going to comment, but actually I'm not sure that this is new behaviour.

Usually Match doesn't spend a significant amount of time on stage 2. It could very well always start uploading as soon as it identifies the requirement during stage 2, but we never noticed it because by the time the tracks have actually uploaded it has finished the matching check and moved onto stage 2.

For what it's worth, mine has about 15 tracks which it hasn't managed to get past for about 5 hours now. It others weren't reporting success I would have assumed it was down again.

I noticed this today, as well. I thought that maybe I just never looked at it hard enough in the past, but maybe they did change something where the iCloud Status is now updating songs before Step 2 completes.

It does mean that it IS worth leaving iTunes Match running - even if it seems to be stuck unmoving for hours. Mine is still "stuck" at the same number ... but, all the same, it is slowly slowly uploading tracks -all the time, just not proclaiming it!