iTunes Match Freezes in Step 2

Follow up #001 RE: 😕 FLAWED ETL CODING!

Ok, so some follow up after playing with this for a while on win-7x64 build machine. By the way 3,548 songs matched of my c15,0000, various crashes later, still trying to redo Step 1 while it amusingly reads every file on disk. P.S. itunes is showing after reinstall/various retries after killing halted Wait States in Resource Monitor as having 25,848 tracks now - we will see how this plays out later. Physical files is of course still the c15,000.

What is the objective of the ETL process here? Fast uploading, precise matching, low cost to upload, low chance of Apple blamed over consumer setup for fails - all legitiamate options I and thus Apple would consider in setting this service up on Day 0.

To think on this: People have acquired music files by

(a) theft (torrent/ect)

(b) online legal stores

(c) online illegal stores

(d) CD/DVD ripped

(e) other

Those from the (b)(c)(d) categories are arguably quite to most likely to have good metadata and tagging content. The others let's assume less so. Let us also assume 75% of client music files are in this set of buckets. (P.S. the defacto web DB (grace DB) has 100million tracks known, and Apple only have 18m, hence 18% matching if your an advocate of the non popular music areas)

- secondly the (a)(d) categories are most likely to have footnote/lyric data embedded of any type

It is important the point above as means, the simple (quick n dirty) route of uploading the client itunes database to Apple would in truth provide for those with the majority of their music in b/c/d categories with a good chance of instant match, a feeling the service is progressing and working, while the grunt/hard matching happens later. We could then take the route perhaps Apple have taken, as their Step 1.

Personally that route, their Step 1 of reading every local file for anomalies worth noting (for comparision to online files) is a good idea, but surely not the first thing you do. You need to fill the consumer with confidence.

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WIll update as my success/failure moves forward.

(PP.S) - I have a Synology NAS so the concept of icloud music/video/photo sharing I have been doing for nearly two years on my android/iphone/other machines/friends pc's - my sole interest here is uploading some ripped CD's I did back in 1998 (c5,000 tracks worth) to up the bitrate then redownload to 256kb/44.1 - my harddrive atr home then was a rather sad 100gb set up in 1998 so not much room. (CD's stolen hence not re-ripping at lossless). If this was a fast turnaround, worth the £21.99, but not yet. I do intend ending the account (never mind renewing imatch) once I have downloaded the upgraded files due to this being less functionality that I have today.

Mine seemed to keep stopping on the same song during step 2, but after reading a few other posts in this thread, I checked activity monitor and saw that my upload rate was maxed out. I left it for a while longer and it eventually progressed to step 3. I have very few files compared to some of the posts here (I have 1600 or so) and this was resolved in 15 minutes, so if you have tens of thousands of songs it might be a long wait.

As a consumer I appreciate you need to believe in the software as have few options to debug the code .

I also appreciate there are many folks talking up any new Cupertino service!

Right enough of my distrusting and back to the update......

After recording the CPU, network, disk activity, ect on resource monitor over the last 24 hours the most interesting was the times ITunes opened ports to one of my ISP's servers and sent traffic. Will review the captured packets another day. Network speed and disk activity are a red herring probably told to you by a noddy 1st liner support person who wants to fob you off - I had net over an hour where both had gone down to zero usage yet CPUs were ranging for the iTunes app from 4-33% implying code was doing work albeit in efficient way as there was north if 50% spare on each real/virtual CPU .

The good news: 10037 matches out of 15,000 tracks and of the matches c4,000 of the 1998 low bitrate files are thus in theory able to be upgraded for sound. (if someone knows why we can't get lossless from apple please say as really I could have had 256kbps back in 1998 and really we are all on flax/ lossless or 320)

The bad news: after I have uploaded the 20gb in the next week we will see.... I am not the most popular person nuking the Internet connection over the holidays, .... I may have to rejigger my QoS on the routers.

Follow up #002 RE: 😕 FLAWED ETL CODING!

So my overall thoughts to my experience with both iMatch, and giving opinions on this forum (not done for about 5 years!).

1 Get the product if you cannot afford your own NAS, or don't like the free google music option, and your therefore really after a cheap method to upgrade your <256kbps files that match. As stated in another email before it was censored ⚠ as long as you have >200 low bitrate files you want to upgrade to 256kbps its financially a sensible move, even though the ETL/codeing of the process to use the technical term (*****).

2 Don't get the product if you have a web enabled NAS with music sharing or getting one soon, or have access to one; or have <20,000 tracks of reasonable bitrate as Google music can do the job, and be accessed on PC/android/iphone/ipad at little or no recurring cost.

3 Commercial thoughts/ marketing points: If your apple marketing vp, suggest you create a modified offering here, as I really cannot see why anyone bar laziness to copy files elsewhere, will stay after month one/year one if at all knowledgeable on their tech, once they get the upgraded kbps files from you. You need to rollout in 2012 therefore the Apple OpenOffice equivalent and link it to the iCloud, and ALSO stop the seperate data space charging as makes no sense whatsoever. For those wondering on that point, I had c3500/15000 tracks not match, and as a lot are 320kbps, the space I am taking up in multiple datacentres for the next year, and their offsite storage, is at c7mb a file, about 25gb for each location apple copies it to in their datacentres. This means its cheaper to use this as a data storage service than the actual icloud storage service (admitedly for music files only).

4 On another thread now censored, there was a discussion also about whether deleting files is encouraged or not. Yes in effect it is - as we are encouraged to use the icloud as our primary source of data storage, and every marketing literate our there, apples, MSFT's, googles, HP's, sugarsync's - all advocate irst safer, more secure, more resilient, more adaptable, more available, than what the average Joe Bloggs consumer is likely to have in their home.

Ok, here is what works for me and a lot of others too in The Netherlands (please bear in mind that I use a Dutch version of iTunes, so translations may be incorrect):

-start iTunes Match and wait till it hangs

-go to your music, click "view" and set your view on "list"

-right click on the bar above the numbers (the one with "name", "artist", etc) and select "iCloud status"

-sort your music on "iCloud status" by clicking on it

-find any song that has "duplicate" or any other error under "iCloud status" on your hard disk and copy it to another location

-delete all those songs from itunes

iTunes Match will now continue. Afterwards you can import those songs again (although duplicates may be unnecessary to import) and try if it works this time.

Mine seems to not working at all, I don't see error status other than "ineligible" and those are just 3 music videos I purchased with another iTunes account, no problem, I deleted them and move them to the trash and then emptied it.

iTunes just rolled out to my country today and it is stuck on step 2, coincidentally the numbers of song "checked" is the exact number of songs purchased on the same iTunes account I subscribed to iTunes Match in my country. I am assuming this issue is due to the high demand (it just opened in 19 countries at the same time), but strange is that a friend of mine didn't have any problems finishing the step 3 with his 5k+ library, mine is a tenth of his size and it got stuck barely beginning step 2. Very disapointing

I'm having exactly the same issue. But It does not start at all. 0 matched songs.

Another VERY frustrating scrub service from Apple. First I have a severly lame battery issue with my MBP and MBA, and now I can't get iTunes Match to work. My iTunes match has been stuck on step 2. I tried this suggestion..

Martijn Kruiten

-start iTunes Match and wait till it hangs

-go to your music, click "view" and set your view on "list"

-right click on the bar above the numbers (the one with "name", "artist", etc) and select "iCloud status"

-sort your music on "iCloud status" by clicking on it

-find any song that has "duplicate" or any other error under "iCloud status" on your hard disk and copy it to another location

-delete all those songs from itunes

After I deleted the files I ran match again and it completed. BUT then I put one file back in, and I was right back where I started. iTunes will not either upload the file, OR just set it to be ignored. I'm stuck on one file. Now I can't add anything else to iTunes Match. How lame!

Unfortunately, Apple is turning out like Microsoft and Google. They're putting out products that are half baked. They look cool, but they don't work right. I'm really disappointed.

Verry dissapointing. Has been stuck on 30 out of 800 for more than 24 hours now on a fast network. I've already deleted 1/3 of the songs from my library. Basically everything that wasn't a complete album. What is this service about if I can't match my music???

Exactly the same problem here. I have very few songs oin my library right now. Of those 320 songs, 319 can be matched. Then iTunes is stuck on "Step 2: ..." on song 319 of 320. The problematic song is one I purchased through the iTunes Store. I tried:

- deleting the song completely (also in iCloud)

- let iTunes Match finish

- importing it again

- deleting the song completely (also in iCloud)

- let iTunes Match finish

- importing a converted AAC version again

to no avail. iTunes Match matches whenever the song is missing in the library but fails to do so after I imported it again. This is ridiculous, the solution just can not be to "delete the song in question from your library". I paid for this song and I paid for iTunes Match. So get this solved, Apple!

Did I mention I'm also missing a bunch of artwork on my iPad? Yes, I did the whole Get Info business and still I have missing artwork. This really is pathetic. I'm relying Google Music....it worked...the first time.

A small mistake in my original post: sort by clicking on the cloud symbol, not by clicking on iCloud status. The latter won't do anything useful.

If you bought the song from the iTunes store, why don't you just download it from there, instead of adding the offline file to your library?

Thanks for this somehow obvious hint. I didn't think of that before, tried it and it worked. Removed the somehow corrupted song completely and then, instead of adding it from my backup, downloaded it from the "purchased" area in iTunes Store. Solves the problem for now, let's hope there will be no other problematic songs in the future.

Silliumsen wrote:

The problematic song is one I purchased through the iTunes Store. I tried:

- deleting the song completely (also in iCloud)

- let iTunes Match finish

- importing it again

- deleting the song completely (also in iCloud)

- let iTunes Match finish

- importing a converted AAC version again

to no avail.

At the moment, this isn't caused by a problematic song, but because there is trouble at Apples end. Don't mess about with it any more, and just try running the match process every now and then. Until Apple get their end sorted nothing you do on iTunes is going to help.