So many problems with iTunes Match...

Problems? What problems?

- sometimes songs play until the end

- some albums match completely

- sometimes it even matches the right album

- iphone music app is sluggish but works fine

- iphone itunes app is sluggish but works fine

- some album covers appear

- some playlists work

- genius symbol not visible, so no bug here

- no unnecessary bug fixes since many weeks

Sorry, I forgot so many things which also work, but that's what a I like the most. -;)

Well, after a weekend of complete disaster and nightmares for iTunes Match, everything is back to normal except one major flaw that's really annoying me.

On friday no other tracks but the matched ones would stream on either my Apple TV or my secondary computer. They wouldn't download if I wanted them to on this secondary computer. Music videos included.

Later last evening every track on iCloud started working properly again. Except music videos. They'd not download on my secondary computer. They wouldn't stream on my Apple TV. I did some tests and out of 208 music videos currently compatible with iCloud (because they were purchased with the same account) only 3 actually stream and download. So either this is part of the temporary breakdown iTunes Match has been suffering, or because of it my music videos are corrupted.

I've contacted Customer Support 4 times to no avail so far regarding a response. Either I can play/download my music videos again or one of the main features for me of iTunes Match on my Apple TV is absolutely broken and useless.

Apple really needs to address this and solve my problem. Otherwise iTunes Match is only partially working. What would the use of buying music videos at the iTunes Store would be for me from now on???

What's going on?

While I can't say for certain that this is a solution for your particular problem, yesterday I was having quite a bit of trouble with my current generation Apple TV. The solution for me was simply to do a restore, which thankfully did not force me to re-enter any passwords, nor did it kill my custom screen saver.

Here's what was happening that led me to do the restore. Songs would play for a brief time, the stop. Bringing up the menu, I had the standard "download error loading content, please try again later." If I restarted the song, most of the time it would play though, but the problem would crop up again for other tracks. There was also a lot of streaming stutter.

Netflix was behaving in a similar manner, but re-starting a video didn't get it going, so Netflix was basically unusable.

As soon as I did the restore, all problems disappeared.

Well, I can say you're in the right direction. But my recent troubles with iTunes Match this weekend are far worse. One of the multiple things I tried was doing a restore and factory restore of my Apple TV. But my worst suspicions were true, as I couldn't stream from my secondary computer and I correctly guessed it is a problem with the music video files on iCloud. Otherwise I wouldn't have been having any problems streaming from iCloud on my secondary computer, would have I?

I've factory restored my Apple TV once more but I'm pretty sure it won't help at all...

Somehow streaming of music was restored yesterday. So my only problem at the moment is with music videos. Either it's a general breakdown with iTunes Match and iCloud or my purchased music videos have been corrupted up there. Contrary to what could be done with music files, As music videos purchased on the iTunes Store are the only ones that can be streamed to my registered devices on iCloud iTunes Match, there's no use on me deleting anything and re-uploading it again, as music videos are not uploaded, but streamed from iCloud.

I've contacted Apple Customer Support 4 times since friday to no avail. So far I've not even had a response. So I'm calling Apple first thing in the morning on Apple. This is one of the main features I use iCloud for on my Apple TV, not just music, but music videos. It was enough losing a 100 music videos that had been purchased with old accounts. I'm not ready to give up on streaming more than 200 music videos purchased with my iTunes account on my Apple TV.

So either Apple refund me for more than 200 videos, 208 to be precise, or solve whatever corrupted my music videos purchased up there...

I managed to eventually get about 80% of the tracks matched rather than uploaded, but the only way was to re-encode from 96kbps to 256kbps. No amount of removing and re-adding did anything for me.

Overall, I'm happy enough with it now, except that my default cover art on my iPhone has now inexplicably become the cover of In Rainbows by Radiohead, even though I don't have that on my iPhone!

The other surprise I had was that I couldn't mix iTunes Match tracks with other normally-synced tracks on the same device 😟 but I came up with a reasonable workaround which I posted here https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3601465?answerId=17507945022#17507945022

Thanks everyone for sharing their help and experiences on this forum.

My iTunes match reset itself! I have to download all my songs again! Rahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyone else get this problem?

Glad that things are working well for rCloudy.

Yes songs play to the end

Yes most albums matched completely, but I am missing about 5%

Yes most albums matched correctly, but again about 5% got moved to incorrect albums

iPhone app is about worthless. It takes about 3 or 4 minutes to start up. Albums are selected to be download but most of the time once I am away from wifi find they most are missing.

Almost 20% of the album art is missing or incorrect. I correct and Match changes it back to incorrect.

Playlist work on Apple TV, but don't my Air laptop (not primary source)

I like Genius and it is frequently missing

Bug fixes which are needed are still missing.

On the plus side, I am able to upgrade some of my older iTune purchases that were at 126, to 256.

I won't be renewing, the other thing it does for me is provide a backup in case of total hard drive failure.

After many hours, and by that I mean many hours of screwing around to fix all the problems of iTunes Match, I have turned it off, don't trust it. won't use it. Still have residual problems caused by my first sync. My advice: Back up your library before you sync. Second piece of advice: Go back to buying CD's. Apple can't reach in and screw 'em up. Very disappointing for such a premium brand.

Almost 20% of the album art is missing or incorrect. I correct and Match changes it back to incorrect. Playlist work on Apple TV, but don't my Air laptop (not primary source)

All of your frustrations are understandable, but for what it's worth, if I read your post correctly, you may have iTunes and iTunes Match running on more than one computer. If this is the case, consider that if you correct artwork on one machine, but not the other, then when iTunes Match runs on the second machine, it likely updates your artwork in the cloud to match what is on the second machine. These changes might not immediately be downloaded to your iOS devices, so might be some time before you see the wrong art reappear on an iPhone or Apple TV.

I understand you might already have thought of this and may have tried making the corrections on both computers with match turned off, then turning it back on. But thought I'd better pass it along just in case. A pain to do it twice, I know, but it may be the only solution at the moment.

Well I don't doubt your personal experiences with iTunes Match but just to offer the thread here an opposing point of view. I have a close to 2000-song library in iTunes Match and it has kept everything in perfect balance; all art work all songs all names all titles absolutely perfect from my original upload and I regularly update from multiple machines and iDevices to iTunes Match and it's all perfect. Apple's greatest invention yet and for me, at least, it works perfectly.

I'm right there with you, except I've got almost 20,000 songs in my library, including over 8,000 it had to upload. No problems at all between 3 Macs and 2 iOS devices,except for a few hour long tracks it wouldn't take. I also had a few really old mp3s it wouldn't take, but I just converted them to AAC and reloaded. I still have 2 HD backups, but for 25 dollars, iTunes Match is a steal for me.

Thanks, all, for the encouraging words. Please know that I love Apple. I rely on Apple and have for years, as it is the core of my recording studio and my personal communication. My wife is a photographer and could not live without Apple. So I am not ragging on them out of spite, more out of disappointment. I too am in the 20,000 song world, and I think my problem is related to one of my iTunes libraries is on a PC. Almost 50% of the songs on the PC had their files corrupted, such that the meta-data on them got all out of sync, and that propagated across the other platforms. This means that when I clicked on Elvis Costello I got Eminem; When I clicked on KT Tunstall I got Concrete Blonde. I fixed all that finally - song by song, read between the lines about what that means in time - but now the songs on my iPhone don't complete, even after I turned off Match and went back to normal syncing.

I have no doubt that there are great success stories out there, and I am happy that you all have found success, really, I wish I had, did not, but do not at all begrudge your experience.... but the reality is that anecdotal success - even if 80-90% - does not make a product market-ready.

I am really disappointed that Apple has not stepped up to respond - my efforts with the store geniuses saw them throwing up their hands, they know there are problems and are not equipped to deal with them. With all the social media monitoring tools out there - and this space is their property - someone in their support center should see this post practically as I type it and respond, but they are absent on the issue.

So you know my solution... walk away from this service, and stay very happy with my other Apple relationships.

Match is a huge disappointment. 24 hours of it and it is turned off on all my devices. I think Apple should refund everyone their subscription fees.

I am totally puzzled by the songs that are uploaded. I have some where the length is different. That I can (sort of) understand.

But I also have many uploaded songs where the length exactly matches what iTunes shows as the length. Typically it will be one song out of an album where the rest of the album matches fine.

When I look a the meta data of this song, it matches with the rest of the album. When I play it, it plays fine. What shows below is a typical example:

So, in the iTunes Store Voo Doo Chicken is 4:39. In my iTunes it looks like this:

Again, it is 4:39 and the rest of the album uploaded. So I look at the meta data for a song that uploaded like Ve:

and I compare it to Voo Doo Chicken:

I don't see any difference and I don't understand why songs like this upload.

Is there a log or information anywhere that specifies why it uploaded instead of matching?

While there are many reasons why a song might not upload (do a search in the forum and you'll get plenty of hits, in a case like yours the answer really is that nobody knows. For one reason or another, the Matching process currently does not match everything that it should, simple as that.

There is no log related to matches/uploads really.