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dViper Author

Level 1

0 points

So many problems with iTunes Match...

So far my experience with iTunes Match has been horrible. I keep getting a ton of unmatched songs that absolutely should be matched, and lots of upload errors.

For example, the album "Houses of the Holy" by Led Zeppelin.... http://i.imgur.com/RscRg.png

After toying around with it for a while, i found that sometimes using iTunes to create an AAC version of a unmatched song, the newly created AAC version does get matched. Not sure why this is, as the original unmatched files are 320bit MP3s.

Another issue I've found is that albums are not sorting correctly on my iPhone with iTunes Match active. I use dougscripts in iTunes to copy the release year of all my albums into the "sort album" meta data field. So that way on my ipod or iphone albums are sorted chronologically. Through iTunes match, none of my albums are being sorted correctly. Its not even that they're sorted alphabetically instead of chronologically. They're just listen in what seems like a completely random order.

Yet another MAAAJJJOOORRR complaint is with the album art. I am very meticulous about my album art. Every album in my library has album art displayed. My first step in getting album art is trying to get album art through iTunes. Most of the time this works fine. For the ones that dont, I just search google images and copy and paste the album art in... What I'm finding though, is that all my albums with album art gotten through iTunes, is not showing up on my iPhone when using iTunes Match. But albums where I had to paste a image in to iTunes, those do show up on my iPhone. This is not 100% consistent, but pretty close.

Overall I am very disappointed with iTunes Match so far. The Apple philosophy of "it just works" certainly does not apply to this product.

Im going to wait it out another couple of days or a week or so, and if things don't get better, I'll be calling in asking for a refund.

iPhone 4S, iOS 5.0.1

Posted on Nov 14, 2011 11:12 PM

629 replies

Jun 30, 2012 2:03 PM in response to PaulJacobCruz

Couldn't agree more. You should at least complain/ask Apple. I know I'm happy with it. I've got a little over 10 thousand songs and I have experienced problems with covers, but it's been stable for quite a while now. I have added new ripped songs to my library and they have all been successfully either matched or uploaded.

I know I'm renewing the service next January! 🙂

Jun 30, 2012 2:12 PM in response to PaulJacobCruz

...except getting your money back from Apple isn't simple.

Their initial response is to refuse a refund if you cancel the service. Eventually, after many emails I got a refund. My position was the service wasn't fit for purpose given all the issues I encountered, and not providing a refund contravened UK sale of goods legislation.

Jul 1, 2012 3:41 PM in response to dViper

Itunes Match worked for the most part but it also had a problem if mixing up albums purchased from iTunes. I hs this problem with some Kiss and Led Zeppelin albums. See the screen cap below. As you can see, it renamed Love Gun to the Very Best of kiss but used Love Guns artwork even though some tracks are clearly still marked as the Very Best Of Kiss and just plain deleted some Love Gun tracks.

Starhawk

Level 1

5 points

Jul 3, 2012 9:49 AM in response to dViper

I just bought 7 albums straight from Amazon and imported them into iTunes Match. Typical results:

7 Albums

95 Songs

65 Songs Matched

30 Uploaded

Album 1 - 5 of 15 matched

Album 2 - 12 of 12 matched

Album 3 - 4 of 13 matched

Album 4 - 18 of 19 matched

Album 5 - 3 of 13 matched

Album 6 - 12 of 12 matched

Album 7 - 11 of 11 matched

😟

All recently released albums.

Jul 3, 2012 2:22 PM in response to Starhawk

I got the Ryan Adams $8.99 deal from Amazon, which was released on the 2nd of this month. I tried Matching these songs and my Match levels were much lower than I expected (something like 25%). You'd think they'd be exactly the same, but iTM doesn't think so.

This isn't the only time I've seen this with NEW releases I've tried to Match from Amazon to iTunes Match. I've had better luck with older releases...not sure why this is.

I also see that the "Sending Information to Apple" problem has cropped up again. My one album matches are back to 20 or 30 minutes to complete vs. 1 or 2 minutes from April. Ugh.

Jul 3, 2012 2:29 PM in response to Community User

I never had a huge problem with it matching tracks, especially with those no longer sold in the store such as the Complete Depeche Mode or the Complete U2. My problem has been with iTunes deleting tracks from albums as I posted in the screen cap two posts up.

Jul 13, 2012 7:39 AM in response to dViper

I'm in Australia and I can't play music videos on my iPhone 4 since getting Match - I get a message saying that the item is over 50MB and I need to connect to a Wi-Fi network or use iTunes on my computer to download it.

Songs also take 30 seconds to start, and stop in mid-play.

Jul 13, 2012 9:23 AM in response to dViper

I too am very disappointed with Match. It was supposed to save time and assure quality--instead, it's been an enormous waste of time, like an accounting program that often works, but almost as often doesn't. The abysmally low rate of matching is, in my opinion, truly extraordinary and inexplicable. Should I instead be happy that Match does anything positive at all (60% or so matched, out of maybe 98% of tunes in the iTunes store)? That would be a very charitable way of looking at it, but only if one has extremely low expectations.

Would one be happy with any other program that delivers proper results on some cognitively trivial but quantitatively enormous problem "way over half the time!"?

If Match had been advertised as simply a way to employ masses of impaired Apple servers that had special needs, then we'd probably consider the results cute, even inspiring (at first). But instead it was advertised as a way to remove--not dramatically increase, but remove--the hassle and insecurity from storing and use a large music library, and on that score it does not get a passing grade, not in my experience or apparently the experience of millions of others.

(NB that nearly all of my music was not purchased via iTunes; if one's entire library is purchased from iTunes, Match will probably work well for you.)

Jul 13, 2012 9:42 AM in response to Labyrintho

You have succinctly stated exactly how I feel about iTunes match. I though it was a way to keep me from having multiple and separate backups of my music library with the added benfit of accessing all of my library via mobile devices. After two weeks of trying I gave up and turned it off on everything. A total waste of money and so not Apple. Why is it they don't get that iTunes match either doesn't work at all or work well from what seems to be a large number of users?

Jul 13, 2012 9:46 AM in response to dViper

can anyone tell me ? what is this OTHER in my itunes ,, it occupies 5.6 GB of space in my iPhone ?

Jul 27, 2012 4:26 PM in response to dViper

Does anyone else have a problem with Siri not playing any songs not downloaded to the phone? It will play iTunes Match songs that have been downloaded, but not ones that are still in iCloud only. The spotlight search seems to find them ok. It's very frustrating. Siri will spin its wheels for a few seconds and then report that there's a problem.

Jul 28, 2012 11:50 AM in response to SingingFriar

Guys, it's still on beta. Stop complaining for god's sake.

Jul 28, 2012 12:59 PM in response to PaulJacobCruz

iTunes Match is not in Beta any more, in ended beta OCT 27 2011.

I used iTunes Match since beta, never had a problem, now I do after updating to Mountain Lion, did a clean install, cannot get my computer to ever finish the Step 3 process.

Jul 28, 2012 1:18 PM in response to whitewater2

My bad.

Jul 28, 2012 1:56 PM in response to PaulJacobCruz

eh, no worries. Its acting likes its in beta 😁

Never had a problem until I clean installed Mountain Lion on my MBP. Once I got everything up and running, library back into the computer, I tried to turn on Itunes Match and now have this endless loop.

12,800+ songs, visible on my Apple TV, iPhone 4, Ipad 2.

I have done the following;

- Turn off Itunes Match/Genius

- Turn Genius on, waited, then turned Match on...fail MBP

- Turn them all off, signed out of store..turned back on both...fail on my MBP

- Reinstalled iTunes, tried all the same...fail..

I can download songs from Itunes Match when its not updating Itunes Match, so very weird.

So many problems with iTunes Match...