So many problems with iTunes Match...

Ditto. I have 4000 songs which are in a waiting state. I have not installed any new components and originally I got many songs to upload. I have completely removed itunes and the other itunes associated components twice and reinstalled. Since I have my itunes library on a pc, I tried shutting down data execution management to no avail. When it completes step 2, I get an error that itunes must close. Apparently the error is in itunes.exe and involves ntdll.dll. I installed a new .dll file but still it crashes at the end of step 2. I have also removed all files labeled as duplicate or error. I have several that are labeled as not elgible however I have many that are in a waiting state. It seems that some songs on an album uploaded and others did not. The other thing is that many of these songs that are in waiting are mainstream. Why they didn't match is a mystery.Very strange.

I guess I need to call Apple care and continue to read these forums for clues. But, I am at a loss. Perhaps I need to wait while they get the bugs out. However, I wish Apple would communicate if they are experiencing problems.

I am also having an issue in adding additional computers for Music Match for the songs that have matched or have been uploaded. I have Music Match on a PC, A Macbook, An IPAD, An ipod touch and my apple tv. I do not have it on 5 computers. When I try and add to another computer I get a message that I have maxed out the number of computers and need to deauthorize one. I thought we had a maximum of 10 devices and of those we could authorize five computers. If this is incorrect could someone let me know.Don't know what gives here either.

Sorry for the rant but after 5 days playing with this my impression is that Apple has a lot of work to do and I'm not happy.

Mike Connelly wrote:

I don't buy that wiping all songs and then having to immediately download all those same songs again (and over internet no less) is "what it's supposed to do".

Yes, that's actually what it's supposed to do (from Apple's site):

"iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud...All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match...Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices."

If you have to re-upload your songs that don't match and have to get your matched music from the cloud - it's a pretty good assumption that your library is going to be wiped out and you'll have to get your cloud music online (I don't know any cloud computing that doesn't require Internet). That seems pretty normal logic to me - I knew it before buying Match.

Granted, there are workarounds that have been suggested on here that work. However if you just use Match straight out it's going to clear your library.

thedoktor wrote:

I am also having an issue in adding additional computers for Music Match for the songs that have matched or have been uploaded. I have Music Match on a PC, A Macbook, An IPAD, An ipod touch and my apple tv. I do not have it on 5 computers. When I try and add to another computer I get a message that I have maxed out the number of computers and need to deauthorize one. I thought we had a maximum of 10 devices and of those we could authorize five computers.

Keep in mind that the basic (pre-Match) agreement with iTunes limits you to 5 computers, so the restriction that you're running into probably is only partly related to the new Match service. Do you have any old computers that you used years ago and didn't "deauthorize" before you scrapped them? They will still count towards your limit. Or do you have other computers where you play your purchased music, but are not using iTunes Match on? Those also count towards your limit. The Match service is not extending the old limit, but it is giving you a new way to bump up against it.

Try going into the iTunes Store, click on your account name in the upper right-hand corner to get to your account settings. There's a button there to deauthorize all computers associated with your iTunes account. You'll then have to enter your password the next time you try to play a purchased song on each computer, to reauthorize that computer - up to 5 of them, whether you're using iTunes Match on them or not.

That'll clear out any old computers that you don't use anymore, and give you an opportunity to choose exactly which 5 computers you want to play purchased or matched music on.

Thank you for your insight

bfarneth wrote:

Yes, that's actually what it's supposed to do (from Apple's site):

"iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud...All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match...Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices."

That says nothing about wiping out content on the device, or losing the ability to sync. Really nothing to do with what I said at all. As you said, you assumed it would be wiped out, there's no reason to expect anyone else would make that same assumption based on the info from apple.

In general, Apple has done a bad job of explaining the service and how it works, this is just one of many things where the way it works isn't what someone would expect based on their available info. And it's a braindead implementation, they need to update it so users can still sync and so that if a song file is available locally it grabs that copy instead of wasting time and bandwidth getting it from a server.

I too am having random matching issues, but I did just uncover one thing (which may be covered here and I apologize if so, but I didn't want to read all 13 pages of this thread) - iTunes is matching based on more than just a sample of the song (like Shazam or Sound Hound would do). It looks for other things, specifically song length, for matching.

My example was trying to match a Train - Drops of Jupiter CD. It matched all tracks except track 7. I pulled out the original CD and reripped track 7 as AAC 128 - failed to match. Tried again ripping it as "iTunes Plus" - failed to match. So I looked at the album on the iTunes Store and noticed that my track 7 was 5:00 long, but the one on the store was 4:34. I played the file and noticed it faded out and was silent around 4:34 and then picked back up with some instrumental stuff for the rest of the song. I opened it in Sound Studio and cropped my file back to 4:34 and then added the new version to iTunes and it matched.

I went back and looked at some of the other songs that I had that weren't matching and there's a lot of them that are the last song on the albumn and they have "hidden" songs after a period of silence. The iTunes store doesn't have the hidden track version so it's not matching. Several of the other non-matched songs are off by a couple seconds. I'm going to play with them to see if I can get them to match, but it looks like the iTunes Match algorithm is using the total track time as a matching criteria and may explain the "randomness" of what matches and doesn't.

I agree about the track time. For whatever reason, the songs in the iTunes catalog have differeing track times that a lot of the actual CDs. I really hope they find a way around this. Editing all the songs to get the same quality for a whole album is going to be a huge pain.

Mike Connelly wrote:

That says nothing about wiping out content on the device, or losing the ability to sync. Really nothing to do with what I said at all. As you said, you assumed it would be wiped out, there's no reason to expect anyone else would make that same assumption based on the info from apple.

In general, Apple has done a bad job of explaining the service and how it works, this is just one of many things where the way it works isn't what someone would expect based on their available info. And it's a braindead implementation, they need to update it so users can still sync and so that if a song file is available locally it grabs that copy instead of wasting time and bandwidth getting it from a server.

I'd mostly agree with your premise. However the last part actually is how iTunes Match works. If there is a "local copy", whether it was synced as I noted earlier or if it was previously streamed and there's a cached copy of the file on the device in question, the local copy will play...it isn't downloaded from iCloud again. Just a small point of clarification.

Christopher Dold wrote:

I too am having random matching issues, but I did just uncover one thing (which may be covered here and I apologize if so, but I didn't want to read all 13 pages of this thread) - iTunes is matching based on more than just a sample of the song (like Shazam or Sound Hound would do). It looks for other things, specifically song length, for matching.

My example was trying to match a Train - Drops of Jupiter CD. It matched all tracks except track 7. I pulled out the original CD and reripped track 7 as AAC 128 - failed to match. Tried again ripping it as "iTunes Plus" - failed to match. So I looked at the album on the iTunes Store and noticed that my track 7 was 5:00 long, but the one on the store was 4:34. I played the file and noticed it faded out and was silent around 4:34 and then picked back up with some instrumental stuff for the rest of the song. I opened it in Sound Studio and cropped my file back to 4:34 and then added the new version to iTunes and it matched.

I went back and looked at some of the other songs that I had that weren't matching and there's a lot of them that are the last song on the albumn and they have "hidden" songs after a period of silence. The iTunes store doesn't have the hidden track version so it's not matching. Several of the other non-matched songs are off by a couple seconds. I'm going to play with them to see if I can get them to match, but it looks like the iTunes Match algorithm is using the total track time as a matching criteria and may explain the "randomness" of what matches and doesn't.

Agreed, I've seen the same thing. It appears that if a track doesn't match up exactly to what Apple's servers have, it won't "match" and will be uploaded.

To be fair I've seen the same oddities with older and newer CD's, re-released songs, etc. for years. The content providers (record labels, etc.) aren't always delivering the same material even on the same medium, much less in newer digital formats.

I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt as they probably have the most recent digital copy delivered to them by the content suppliers on their servers. It's still very odd when you have an entire album match everything except for one or two songs though.

I would hope that Apple is compiling some sort of exception report that flags these situations. It doesn't benefit Apple to have to host thousands of unmatched content on their servers any more than it benefits users that have to deal with the time and effort it takes to upload it.

Although due to the inevitable variations in some content there will always be some differences requiring uploads, it seems logical to think that eventually we'll see improvements in this area.

My biggest issues with Itunes Match have been related to playlists and playback on my iPhone:

With regard to playlists on my iPhone:

- I understand that Smart Playlists referencing other playlists are not currently eligible to be stored in the Cloud. I don't like it but I understand it because there is a clear explanation about it within Itunes. Hopefully at some point, Apple will allow this to be done because I have several of these types of playlists.

- I also have some smart playlists that are eligible to be stored in the Cloud and they do show up properly on my computers but they simply do not show up properly on my iPhone. An example of this would be a playlist that has Rule 1: song rating is greater than 2 stars and Rule 2: date added is in the last 2 months. This playlist is just a mess on my iPhone and will not update properly; that is, on my iPhone, this playlist just contains a bunch of random songs that do not meet the rule definition associated with this playlist.

With regard to playback on my Iphone:

- It always takes about 10 to 15 seconds to play the first song on my iPhone when I'm using Itunes Match on my iPhone. I assume this is because it takes some time to begin downloading and transmitting the song from the Cloud.

- Most of the time I have my music on shuffle on my iPhone and sometimes I decide I want to skip a song and forward to the next song. Typically when I try and skip songs on my iPhone using Itunes Match it takes 10 to 20 seconds to move to the next song. I've even found that if I try and skip songs too often (this happened to me at the gym a couple of nights ago) that the iPhone music player will basically just lock up, preventing me from changing volume, skipping tracks, or switching playlists.

Has anyone ran into similar issues with Itunes Match on their iPhone? I'm pretty happy using Itunes Match on my various computers (it seems to work well there). But I've decided to turn Itunes Match off on my iPhone and just go back to regular syncing for now. I was getting too frustrated with it on my iPhone and think I will wait until they work out more of the bugs.

If song length is a factor, Apple needs to allow some wiggle room to allow more tracks to get matched. That data would be useful to narrow down between mutliple recordings of the same song that may be different lengths, but it shouldn't negate what would otherwise be a match just because it's off by a few seconds.

I wonder if some developer would take this opportunity to create a simple app that "cleans" unmatched songs by looking up the song lengths in iTunes and tweaking the files to match that?

richsadams wrote:

I'd mostly agree with your premise. However the last part actually is how iTunes Match works. If there is a "local copy", whether it was synced as I noted earlier or if it was previously streamed and there's a cached copy of the file on the device in question, the local copy will play...it isn't downloaded from iCloud again. Just a small point of clarification.

Sorry I wasn't clear, I meant that if the device needs to grab a file and your computer with the library on hard drive is sitting there, it should be able to grab that copy from the hard drive instead of having to download it from the internet (whether it's via usb cable or wifi, and whether apple still calls that "sync" or something else). Local in this case meaning in your house, not already on the mobile device.

I too found that when using Magch on my iPhone it constantly locked up. There appeared to be no way to force a download of a playlist.I hate to think what the data usage would be if you used it much.I gave up and turned Match off on the iphone and now just think of Match as a backup of my music.

mjbanks wrote:

I agree about the track time. For whatever reason, the songs in the iTunes catalog have differeing track times that a lot of the actual CDs. I really hope they find a way around this. Editing all the songs to get the same quality for a whole album is going to be a huge pain.

I certainly wouldn't edit any track for which I had the original CD to try and get iTunes Match to "agree" with it. If you've ripped a copy at 128kbps and get it to "match" you could download a 256kbps copy from Apple's servers I suppose, but you could do the same thing or rip it to an even higher bit rate yourself if you're going to all of the trouble of editing what you have.

In any case, you'll never get better than 256kbps from iTunes Match.

Here's an excellent article about iTunes quality, CD ripping and other interesting things about the subject written (and pretty much kept up to date) by an professional audio engineer...

http://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/itunes.htm

It's worth a read if you really want to dig into and understand the process.

I do certainly like the backup aspect of it.

I hadn't thought too much about data usage and possible overage charges but I've noticed a few people have brought that up on this thread and I now realize I have to be cognizant of that.

I like that I have the ability to upgrade most of my music files that are less than 256 kbps to 256 kbps simply by deleting the original versions from my computer and then redownloading them from the cloud (somebody made this suggestion earlier in this thread and it is a good one).

I like that I have access to all of my playlists on every computer in my house and can edit the files (change ratings, change track start and stop times, etc. from any computer in my house). I can also use the Itunes DJ on every computer in the house, which is nice. This is much better than the old "homeshare" option, which as far as I know didn't allow you to make any edits to your music or use the Itunes DJ on secondary computers.

So there are definitely some good things going on here. I'm just disappointed with how Match is working specifically with my phone.

Be sure to note what I said earlier about replacing songs rather than deleting them to preserve any cover art that you may have added yourself...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3494087?answerId=16811129022#16811129022