So many problems with iTunes Match...

Thanks Rich. How has your playback of music been on any Iphones that you may have? Have you had any problems on that end?

Ryan Hargrove wrote:

Thanks Rich. How has your playback of music been on any Iphones that you may have? Have you had any problems on that end?

I haven't had any issues with iCloud music on my iPhone so far. As mentioned I have a sort of "hybrid" version with a lot of my music synced to my phone and the rest of my library available from iTunes Match.

I do notice some latency with iCloud/streamed songs sometimes ...not as much as the 10 or 20 seconds noted in an earlier post though. However I think that issue will always be dependant on the carrier's service and the connection if you're in the wild. I listen to Pandora and the same thing is true.

How's it working for you?

Mike Connelly wrote:

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.

Oh, okay...got it now. The iPad and iPhone (and probably the iPod Touch) are actually capable of that if you have Home Sharing turned on in iTunes.

You just need to enable the "Shared" feature of the iDevice's Music App by tapping on "More" in the bottom toolbar and selecting your iTunes Library. That would avoid having to download/stream from iCloud while you're near your computer.

Otherwise iDevices aren't able to automatically "grab" files anyway...but it would be nice if they could.

It's not working so well for me. Some of my favorite smart playlists are not transferring over properly to my iPhone, as I noted in one of my earlier posts, even though they transfer over to other computers via icloud just fine. I had to copy the output of some of smart playlists into a simple playlist in order to have it appear properly on the Iphone. I've also become too frustrated with the delay between skipping songs.

I have not tried the hybrid approach yet but I did see your description of that approach. I've gotten busy at work so I'll probably just cool it for awhile and come back and revisit things in a week or two.

Ryan Hargrove wrote:

It's not working so well for me. Some of my favorite smart playlists are not transferring over properly to my iPhone, as I noted in one of my earlier posts, even though they transfer over to other computers via icloud just fine. I had to copy the output of some of smart playlists into a simple playlist in order to have it appear properly on the Iphone. I've also become too frustrated with the delay between skipping songs.

I have not tried the hybrid approach yet but I did see your description of that approach. I've gotten busy at work so I'll probably just cool it for awhile and come back and revisit things in a week or two.

Bummer. My Playlists and Smart Playlists migrated to my iPhone from iCloud okay. However I think I mentioned earlier that I had to cut them down to get them work properly.

Originally my various playlists would have up to 3,000 songs or so. During the first few days of getting iOS 5 to work my original playlists would cause the Music App to crash. I had to reorganize them into more "bite sized" pieces, none over about 1,200 songs or so and now they behave normally and no more crashes.

I don't think it's iTunes Match that's causing this problem though. It seems to be a bug with the Music App because it was doing the same thing when I was just syncing my iPhone to my iTunes library.

Best of luck when you get back to it...hopefully things will continue to improve.

Good luck with that refund. They turned me down. I'm no longer going to be buying my music from Apple.

You actually can sync with iTunes. Make sure Match is installed and done on your computer, then turn Match off on your phone, sync with your USB cable, and then turn Match back on on the phone. Any music that Match hasn't declared ineligible will be on your phone, and you can even do this again to add additional music, although for small amounts just downloading via Match is probably easier. Apple needs to make this MUCH more clear. If you have problems (I did intially) do a restore and then try it again. I agree, there's no way I'm downloading multiple GB via WiFi!

I don't know how apple recognizing the songs, but I'm sure it has nothing to do with tags or metadata. It's probably more like a shazam or soundhound kind of stuff.

It's all about tags and metadata.

They turned down my request for a refund, too. That's unacceptable, since the product simply doesn't work as promised. I'll be filing a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Thanks Again Rich. If you feel like venturing a guess, why do you think that "play count" and "last played" data are not updating across all devices when songs play on various devices through icloud?

Ryan Hargrove wrote:

Thanks Again Rich. If you feel like venturing a guess, why do you think that "play count" and "last played" data are not updating across all devices when songs play on various devices through icloud?

Is that the case? I don't know of any reason those features wouldn't work with iCloud, but I haven't really looked to see.

I don't have "play count" and "last play" columns in my lists views so I don't pay much attention to them. It would be interesting to confirm that one way or the other though.

Yeah, they're not updating or at least not consistently.

I thought I saw the play count updating on the day after Itunes Match was released but I may just be misremembering (as Roger Clemens would say). Otherwise, these have not been updating. I pay close attention because I have a number of playlists that are based off of "play count" and "last played" information. For example, I like to shuffle songs that I recently purchased more often than older songs and so I have playlists such as "3 Stars + and added in the last 2 months" or "4 Stars + and added in the last 12 months".

Also, I generally don't play songs that I've rated as 2 stars very often accept that periodically I'll go through my 2 star songs while I'm at home and listen to them again to see if any should be elevated to three star status. I do this by resetting the play count to zero on all 2 star songs and then strategicaly playing them using the Itunes DJ. Once they have a play count of one, they fall out of the playlist.

I don't bother to rate any songs as 1 star. If I dislike the song that much, I generally just completely delete it from my collection.

I inadvertently came up with something of a workaround, for those of you who have songs that are "Uploaded", but not "Matched" even though the songs show up in the iTunes Store. It is not perfect, but it beats nothing.

Before you attempt anything, back up your original music files, just to be safe. Goes without saying, but...you know.

What I did was simply use an outside program and reconvert the songs I want changed into a plain MP3 (I went in most cases from the .m4a to .mp3 form). I used Free Audio Converter, but who knows, it could work with any other converter. Delete the Uploaded original from the library and the Cloud, then take the file, convert it to something close to a 256-bitrate MP3. Add it to iTunes, and try uploading to the Cloud, see if it is now a Matched file. I did it with a few mainstream songs, and I got about 15 out of 22 I tried to get an iTunes Store-quality match.

The caveat to doing this is that the artwork does get lost, and any special settings (since you're not really duplicating the files, but creating a fresh MP3 from the old one) may disappear. As I said, not perfect. But I managed to get a few songs to go from the Uploaded column to the Matched column. Losing the artwork for me is a small price to pay, since Apple did not give me my money back last week when I had other issues with iTunes Match. They will only refund for data corruption or data loss, and not (just?) because the product is imperfect.

It worked for me, I can't guarantee it would work for anyone else, but I have some Matched files now that had been only Uploaded before. Until the hinkyness gets fixed by Apple, I'll take it. If you try this, again, back up your files first to make sure you don't lose anything. Good luck, and godspeed. 🙂