So many problems with iTunes Match...

My iTunes Match had been working great...until today. Last night, I started experiencing issues with my iTunes App store account. Told me to reset my password, still wouldn't work, etc. I assumed the issue was with Apple so I went to bed and hoped it would be resolved by this morning.

No such luck. I've been on the phone with Apple for close to 2 hours and my issue is only worse. Have done a reset settings, turned off iTunes match, reloaded songs, etc. But problems persist. I cannot download any apps from the app store on my phone. My iTunes match has completely stopped working.

This stuff is all great. When it works. But when it doesn't work, it just *****.

Wow! I'm in the UK and eagerly got iTunes Match as soon as it popped it's little nose out. I've spent the entire weekend trying to get it up and running smoothly on my iMac and my iPhone 4. i've found it very inconsistant to start with; going through the three steps of the set up took a while and worked eventually after several reboots and an all night upload. but it got there. i've got about 12,000 songs.

foolishly i deleted all of my songs that were 200 bkp or less, but realising how many i've now got to upload is making me panic about my data allowance!

what's disturbing me the most is how it's rendered my iphone's music capability completly useless! play music in the car? forget it! how about at work through the wi-fi? not a sausage! i turn off music match and it still won't play. if i keep turning this on and off surely i'm going to be uploading the same songs over and over. how many times should i pay for the same song!!

the only time Match works is at home when i activate home sharing...and then when it's on shuffle apparently i've got to download every song that plays. turn home sharing off; then my options are rather confusing; loads of songs disappear, but the remaining ones don't play either! it won't skip to the next playable track either.

my computer knowledge is limited, however i'm a perfect guinea pig for Apple stuff as usually they can answer all of my stupid questions. but on this one i've looked everywhere for answers and remain extremly unimpressed so far.

i'm doing a lot of distance driving over xmas and it looks like it's going to be a quiet journey...grrr. will have to listen to my partners iphone instead as she didn't waste hours trying to get Match up and running on her phone!

Help!

Elwyn, you do realise that iTunes match is not a streaming service but rather a means of downloading music from the cloud to any of your cloud connected devices. The idea is that you have your music downloaded onto your iPhone and play it from there. You are out. You fancy listening to an album not on it, you download it to add to your local library. All your listening should be on the local device, not streaming from iTunes.

You are also working with high quality AAC files and mp3s unlike the lofi files found on a streaming service - more band width - hence they take longer to download.

Finally, you really wouldn't want to stream. 100 or so songs and you'll blow your phone contract data allowance.

Use it as intended. Fill your phone with music safe in the knowledge that you can swap it out at will, never tied to your local library. It still has painful issues - album art, finding out what you actually have installed, deleting installed stuff easily, smart playlists, etc. definite work in progress.

This is not a streaming service. Apple said so many times. Neither their servers nor the mobile networks can handle mass streaming of the entire library of 90 million iOS devices at 256kbps.

Thank you zerolight, call me thick but I understood that if songs on my phone have got a cloud next to them than I've got the option to download them, otherwise I could play them unless they were light grey, however those in dark and without a cloud won't play, neither will those in light grey, and actually even the onrush wih the cloud won't download so that I can hear them.

My alarm clock relies on music but it won't play anything if it's on shuffle and it won't skip to the next playable song.

Am I just being dim here?

I have spent the day trying to get it to work on my iphone and ipad. I give up. After a day of setup it is too slow. Hangs up both my iphone and ipad.

I will call Apple tomorrow for a refund on itunes match.

A cloud next to it means its on the cloud. You can play it from there, but all it does is download it and starts playing when the download has cached enough. Once downloaded, it stays downloaded. This is on iOS devices. On a Mac or PC running iTunes, it streams - sort of - but as it wasn't intended to there is still a lag.

Anything you want to play on your iPhone, especially on shuffle, you will want to download from the cloud to your phone in advance. The cloud just gives you the ability to swap things in and out of your phone on the fly, not tied to a computer. It is not a streaming service.

I'm in the UK and have had a less than smooth start with iTunes Match. It took so many restarts to get through the main 3 phases. Thought that was because of how busy the servers were at that time so fair enough (ish)....

It just seems so untested for bugs on iOS. It's pretty shocking how many things wrong there are.

As widely discussed Smart Playlists just don't work at all now. Nice one Apple. I had the same problem prior to having iTunes Match on my new iPhone 4S and had to delete everything off the phone and re-add all songs and they started to work again, that is until I paid £21 for this new amazing service.

Secondly, most of my album art isn't showing within iOS devices.... They just seem to be seen in the first track of an album on most occasions.

Now what I want to know is:- On my iOS devices, because I don't have enough space on them, I checked the option for 'convert higher bit rate songs to 128 Kbps AAC' ..... So that I could get the whole of my library onto my iPhone and iPad. Now that you can't manage music via iTunes, will everything downloaded from the cloud be 256 Kbps or will it put 128 Kbps onto them? I'm confused. The check box is still checked within iTunes.

Many problems here also. Uploading terribly slow and having to restart all the time. Never got past 50 songs and I'm trying to upload a little less than 3000. At this rate my year subscription will have expired before I get access to those songs.

Does anyone know how to force a song to your iPhone if it's not in the cloud (i.e, if you have reached the limit on number of songs uploaded). You can't manually add a song to the iPhone anymore, with Match switched on. So what if there's some specifics I want on there, do I have to take some albums out of the cloud to allow the ones I want to go up there?

The pain of early adopters... nothing's perfect until it's been field tested to the nth degree...

Hi everybody,

I was an early (very early) adopter of iTiunes match in France. I probably should have waited a bit.

After several temptatives it seemed to go right (very slow updates of song on step 3).

But the match process never ended since.

It has freezed while uploading a song (?). And now it freezes while checking the matched songs on step 2.

So : iTunes quits during the second step while trying to match mycomputer iTunes library with the one witch is already uploaded (almost everything in fact : still a hundred tunes to upload).

Last friday, it have gone further : a short way on step 3 that was brutally stopped by a crash while uploadind a version of Ravel"s Bolero by Berlin orchestra (not the best version : that could be a reason for the crash ;-)

Really raging.

If a song does not "fit" (I don't know why in my case ?) it should be marked as "ineligible", no ? No big deal and no reason to freeze an app.

For me there are two solutions :

1) It will be corrected in a revised iTunes version.

2) It will be corrected in Apple servers.

Hopes ASAP

What do you think ?

Best regards

:-(((

My sympathies to all, I thought I was also an earlier adopter in the uk.

I have spent hours uploading tracks and I tunes now informs me its complete, (many of my tracks are not on I tunes as they were from my fathers small band).

Unfortunately my other devices such as apple TV and my wife's and my I pad 2s wont accept the fact that I have subscribed to I match. I have tried turning I match on and off on my I Mac with no success.

I think its soon going to be time to give up.

The marketing of this product leads people to believe it is capable of streaming songs , but from previous posts I can see that will not be practical. I bought it as I thought it would save me having to fill the Ipad memories with music.

I am wondering now whether I really need it, or should just ask for a refund as it is clearly not working anyway.

Why can't Apple get anything right when it comes to cloud services? They have more money than any other company, not to mention tons of other companies that are doing this stuff right but every attempt at cloud services has been a disaster, it doesn't make sense. iTunes match had so much potential but is just horrible, it doesn't work and is poorly designed. My music finally all got pushed to iCloud from iTunes after weeks of trying, but only some if it is showing up on my iPhone, and even after I download albums they don't always stay there. And for the ones that aren't there, there's no other way I can get them on there when you enble iTunes Match. I've been trying to use it for a while now and it's never worked properly and today I gave up on it. What a shame!

Apple, here is how iTunes shoud work: Your iPhone shows up in iTunes and you can drag whatever you want into it, whether it be some songs from iTunes, or some mp3s, photos, books, or videos that are on your hard drive not in iTunes. I don't want to store everything in iTunes, sometimes I just want to throw on a few new things just for my iPhone or iPad without having to put it in iTunes first. If your iPhone is plugged in it will use the cable to copy the files, otherwise it will use WIFI. On your iPhone it should only show the songs you have on your iPhone in the Music app and there sould be a button for iCloud in the app. You tap that and it will show all the songs you have in iCloud and you can download whatever you want. It's that simple. Don't force us to sync our content from iTunes, and don't lock us out of manually adding music from iTunes if we are using iTunes Match. It's just a mess the way it works now.

Apple - it just doesn't work.

No Smart playlists with iTunes match? Well that's what made iTunes and the iPods, iPods and iphones special.

No recognition of whole ripped Albums? I dont want a Mix of 128 and 256 Songs!

The iCloud Service regarding iWork Files between Macs and IOS devices doesn't work either. As it should..

Apple - it just doesn't work.

I just got my refund, but rather than repeating myself, refer to this thread. Sorry that it doesnt work for some of us, and glad that it works for some of you. Maybe next year I will give it a whirl again, if they get it to work properly. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3549597

It's actually been worse than a waste of money for me. A waste of money would be a service that doesn't improve anything; iTunes Match is a service that makes iTunes worse. The reason I bought it was to improve my dated mp3s, but instead it just uploads them. That right there makes it a waste of money. Here's what makes it a con: it invalidates my most useful playlists, destroys the artwork I must have spent days of hours finding and matching perfectly, has had me delete so much metadata in the quest to make it match that the time I've lost is inconceivable, and to make matters even worse it has created a lag in my iTunes library. What a disaster. I want a refund.

Hi,

I even did not went so far in the disaster.

For me it "only" crashes iTunes when it arrives at the begenning of step 3.

It is more the time spended than the money (in fact this time is far mor than 25$ don't you think ?,Even the time that takes to write this post !).

Aplle shouls :

1) Publically apologize (as they did for Me.com and new calendar issues).

2) Make the stuff WORK (for gosd sake !!!!!).

Don't you think.

Petition for at least this !