So many problems with iTunes Match...

As a very long time unix user, the lack of any form of log related to this both puzzles and offends me.

You would think by now that a process as error prone as this would have a log just to help with troubleshooting. Of course, Time Machine doesn't any kind of decent logging either, so I guess its a pattern.

I know where you're coming from, but, really having logging for the matching process would not be much help to an end-user since there is (almost) nothing that can be done to positively or negatively affect what is or isn't matched. We have no control over it from our end. The information might be interesting, but that's about it.

I haven't looked myself, but have you looked over what Console might be recording?

The system log isn't much help. Just for grins I re-encoded this song to 320kbps AAC and tried to match it (twice). My network is fine so I guess either this song is crashing something or iTunes match is overloaded today. The new version stays in a status of waiting.

This is what I got:

sudo tail -f /private/var/log/system.log|grep -i iTunes

Feb 25 11:57:16 mystic iTunes[44108]: _AMDDeviceDetached (thread 0x11a13b000): Device 'AMDevice 0x7fb9ac1217d0 {UDID = 307e0a3b8a5618725710d847b1ffc4b4aa429944, device ID = 40, FullServiceName = d0:23:db:27:4c:fa@fe80::d223:dbff:fe27:4cfa._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}' detached.

Feb 25 11:57:16 mystic iTunes[44108]: _NotificationSocketReadCallbackGCD (thread 0x7fff7cb65960): Unexpected connection closure...

Feb 25 11:57:33 mystic iTunes[44108]: _AMDDeviceAttachedCallbackv3 (thread 0x11a13b000): Device 'AMDevice 0x7fb9ac3547e0 {UDID = 307e0a3b8a5618725710d847b1ffc4b4aa429944, device ID = 41, FullServiceName = d0:23:db:27:4c:fa@fe80::d223:dbff:fe27:4cfa._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}' attached.

Feb 25 11:58:01 mystic iTunes[44108]: _AMDDeviceDetached (thread 0x11a13b000): Device 'AMDevice 0x7fb9ac3547e0 {UDID = 307e0a3b8a5618725710d847b1ffc4b4aa429944, device ID = 41, FullServiceName = d0:23:db:27:4c:fa@fe80::d223:dbff:fe27:4cfa._apple-mobdev._tcp.local.}' detached.

Feb 25 11:58:01 mystic iTunes[44108]: _NotificationSocketReadCallbackGCD (thread 0x7fff7cb65960): Unexpected connection closure...

I thought about it for a minute though, whether they could at least tell us they just don't sell the track, but truth is, since we know the matching process will successfully match songs where the metadata got messed up and it shows up only as "track 01" in our libraries, it really comes down to trying to find a waveform match, which we've all talked about a lot.

So they pull some portion of a track from our library, try to find a match in the store, but whether it's for sale in the store or not really from the perspective of the Match attempt is irrelevant.. It just can't find a match and that's that.

Where they certainly can provide additional information that would help us though is in the area of tracks they can't even process. A log of ineligible files, broken down based on category of ineligibility could certainly be generated, along with something as simple as "do you want to have iTunes make eligible copies?" Same for "iTunes Match does not support music videos purchased outside of iTunes." and "iTunes Match does not at this time support audio books."

And of course the big one, "iTunes Match has detected a corrupted file. Would you like to skip this file?" And at the end of the session. "iTunes Match was unable to process the following files. They appear to be corrupted. Do you want to delete these files from your music library?"

I know, it probably takes an iTunes upgrade to get there. Here's hoping it's in the works.

JiminMissouri wrote:

Where they certainly can provide additional information that would help us though is in the area of tracks they can't even process. A log of ineligible files, broken down based on category of ineligibility could certainly be generated, along with something as simple as "do you want to have iTunes make eligible copies?" Same for "iTunes Match does not support music videos purchased outside of iTunes." and "iTunes Match does not at this time support audio books."

And of course the big one, "iTunes Match has detected a corrupted file. Would you like to skip this file?" And at the end of the session. "iTunes Match was unable to process the following files. They appear to be corrupted. Do you want to delete these files from your music library?"

I know, it probably takes an iTunes upgrade to get there. Here's hoping it's in the works.

I was commenting on the very narrow idea of whether an song gets matched or not. However, this info would all be very helpful and are things I've been thinking about as well. Here's hoping Apple is thinking along these lines. Although we probably wouldn't see advanced features like this for a while.

I was commenting on the very narrow idea of whether an song gets matched or not. However, this info would all be very helpful and are things I've been thinking about as well. Here's hoping Apple is thinking along these lines. Although we probably wouldn't see advanced features like this for a while.

Not sure if from a programming perspective some of these kinds of features would be all that difficult to implement, though that's coming from someone who knows nothing about programming. Not sure that some major changes couldn't come fairly soon either, given that Match has been out for quite awhile now. Other than a December iTunes update that purportedly included some Match 'enhancements' (not sure what they were actually), things have been pretty quiet on that front for quite some time.

Ryan Hargrove wrote:

* Furthermore, when I had iTunes Match enabled on my iPhone, it often took 10 to 20 seconds to load a song and the phone would sometimes become unresponsive when I attempted to skip tracks. I don't care if this is an issue with the player (versus being a problem with iTunes Match). The bottom line is that this problem does not occur if I sync my music with my iPhone the old way. I know other people have experienced this problem as well. I, myself, tried to troubleshoot this several times by turning iTunes Match off, clearing my phone and resyncing, turning iTunes match back on, etc. I still had the same problems on my phone over and over again.

this is the most annoying problem for me, guess what, i alway listen to music skiping songx to find the one that i would like to hear in the moment. If you do this, even if you let the son play for five seconds while skiping, it will download the song on the itunes app. What!!!! try it , it alway freeze up, skip 8 songs , and then go to itunes app , all are there for downloading. BIG FAIL.

if yo skip 20 Songs they get on the download list in itunes app even if you get out of the music app, the will finish downloading later, so you got a slow internet connection , and you don't know why. Big Fail

I will be nice if i stop playing a song, i stop downloading and stay only with the part i play.

Glad I read this forum before signing on for iTunes match! Going to wait a while and see what happens once the dust settles. Guess I'm back to Spotify...

i've used match for awhile with several hiccups along the way but for the most part it hasn't been too terrible. about a month a go though i added a couple albums to my library (not through itunes but ripped cds) and they STILL have not showed up on my 4s. I've tried turning off Match on my phone and then turning it back on and that didn't work. the songs show up and play in iTunes perfectly fine. i tried using the cable and sycning the phone directly and that did not work either.

anyone else having a problem like this?

It is still worth the $30 for a year.

I'm absolutely disgusted with iTunes Match - sure it's only $30 but I paid it to have a service that does what it says. Aside from reliability issues, the killer for me is how it kills playcounts. In my case I have a smart playlist that tells me which songs I haven't played this calendar year - as I play songs the playcount correctly decreases - until the next time I open iTunes and it jumps a couple of hundred for no reason. I've done everything I can think of and I honestly give up - I've turned off iTunes Match until I get an inkling it syncs like it's meant to.

Absolutely. I don't listen to my iPhone a lot, relatively, but when I do, I'm moving around. Usually I walk across campus, which has great 3G coverage and wifi hot spots, but match is still unusable. Unless I download an album to listen to before I start walking, I will be innundated with silence as itunes match attempts to download a song I may want to skip. It is such a failure and unusable in such a situation. I'm going to miss having the option to have all my music on my iphone, but having a responsive and fast music app that can actually shuffle songs is so much better. I turned off itunes match last night.

I've been using iTunes Match since early January. It's been great so far, I spend about 2 hours in traffic and it streams over 3G with no problems.

The cover art "bug" is annoying, because it starts playing the song before it downloads the cover art, but eventually it does come up. It's like it prioritizes the song over the artwork.

All artwork shows up for me, but it takes some time. Right now I'm on a 15Mbps Wi-Fi connection and it takes 4-6 seconds to load artwork, which is rather long. On 3G it takes quite a bit longer.

I have also found out that it won't download cover art if the device's screen if "off". It took a long time before I realized that, and I was really frustrated. Now that I know of the "workaround", it doesn't bother me at all.

I have 9920 songs in my library and I live in Brazil. My iPhones and iPad are not jailbroken, and are running iOS 5.1.

Been using it now for a couple months and it finally started to work. My biggest complaint though is that they need an easy way from the Music player to hide and show songs that are stored in the cloud. Sometimes I have a slow connection and only want to listen to music that's stored local. And also they shouldn't show the songs that are in the cloud when you don't have a connection at all or are in airplane mode. It's annoying when I'm flying that I have to scroll through all these songs that I can't even listen to.

This is possible!

Go to Settings -> Music -> turn off "Show all music"

Now if you go to the music.app you will see that only the numbers that you've downloaded are there and vissible.

You can still search your hole library of songs by typing in te name of a song or album that is in your iCloud library in the search bar at the top inside the music.app.