So many problems with iTunes Match...

It's very nice for you that you have no problems with iTM. But that is no reason to be condescending. I know very well what iTM is intended for and I know how to use the service since I beta tested it and have been helping people on this forum since it's launch. I can say definitely that some features of the service simply do not work, such as syncing last played dates between devices. For those of us who rely on this info this is a big deal. If you don't rely on that information for your listening, then no problem.

The service isn't perfect and Apple has really been remiss in fixing the problems. But hope that will change soon because I really do enjoy having access to my full music library from almost anywhere.

Hey Michael,

Do you know if the issue where the song would skip to the next one half way through was resolved in iOS 6.01? This would happen only in iPhones and iPads (specifically I have an iPhone 5 and iPad 3), ie. in my MacBook Air the same songs that skip on the iphone and ipad would stream just fine from iTunes. I got a refund around a month ago because they didn't come up with a solution for this issue but if this bug was fixed I would love to get iTunes Match back. Any insights in this would be much appreciated! Thanks :).

I can't speak to that particular issue because I've never had the problem.

I've had this same, very frustrating problem. More frustrating was Apple support's lack of concern about this issue.

Of 672 albums in my lib which are available on the iTunes store, 117 of those albums (17%) matched most, but not all, songs on the album, typically failing to match just a couple songs per album. So now when I download an album I get a mixture of 256kpbs songs matched to the iTunes store and 128kpbs songs I imported and iTune Match uploaded. Ie. iTunes Match is not a reliable way to upgrade your lib to 256kbps, in spite of this being a selling point.

I've gone round & round with Apple support on this, they insist this is normal/expected behaviour and that nothing can be done to mitigate the problem. They say that, hypothetically, an artist might have replaced just one or two tracks on an album, in which case just those one or two tracks might fail to match, and this is normal behaviour. They won't say that this is known to be the true for any of my fail-to-match problems.

Well, sure, hypothetically that could be the case -- but I think a more plausible explaination is that their matching algorithm fails more often than it should and they could/should try to improve it, but that's a possibility they refused to conceed.

Match was working great for me until the last few months. Now the match process just continually repeats itself never uploading non-matched files. This is on an up-to-date mountain lion install on a 2011MBP. I've seen similar posts and no solutions and will not be renewing match when it expires tomorrow.

Fair enough, 'match' is certainly not a great service for all.

Sorry for those of you having problems with Itunes Match, it works fine for me but I use it for my ATV, When I do get my Ipad I just won't use ITunes match because aac files take up too much room on your device anyway. But, AAC files are just fine for ATV..

Match was working great for me until the update to ios6.01. Now not all of my music shows up in my phones list. Songs that used to show up fine are not there and return no search. Is anyone else experiencing this? and does anyone know of a solution. The songs show up on the ipad, just not on the iphone. i'm truly baffled.

I didn't have trouble when I first started using iTunes Match. In fact, it was working great, even uploading almost all my music (only a few obscure songs I got from somewhere didn't upload). Lately, however, it has been extremely horrible.

- It's very laggy when moving through lists (artists, albums, songs). Sometimes it locks up and either crashes or i'll have to exit the app and reopen it. I'm on full strength wifi.

- Even on full strength wifi, it takes a long time for a song to load, if it loads at all (more on this later)

- Songs skip or just stop playing (even when the timer is still going). Moving the playhead back to the beginning doesn't help at all. Pausing the song and hitting play after some time doesn't help. Again, I'm on full strength wifi.

- Sometimes, like last night, it will just stop working. Once again, I'm on full strength wifi and I'll wait over one minute for a song to play and nothing happens. I'll switch songs, even albums, and nothing happens. Restarting the app, the phone, disabling and enabling iTunes Match doesn't work. Eventually it will just work like it started to do this morning (is that what Apple meant by "it just works"?) or I'll sync it to my computer and that sometimes takes care of the issue.

- About a month ago my iPhone was prompting me that my subscription was up and I had to subscribe again even though my subscription isn't up until middle of next year. I could not access my music at all until I got home. This happened multiple times throughout the month. One time it just came back as soon as I was on the same wifi network as my computer (which was on). Another time I had to sync my phone again.

Yes, I did restore my phone, but it's still happening. I might restore my phone again, but honestly I'm just getting tired of this. Why am I paying money for something that causes me so much frustration and doesn't do what it was supposed to do? I'm at a tipping point. I might just go back to syncing the music to my phone and forget Match altogether.

It's a great idea, but the execution is very poor. Thanks for listening to my rant and everybody who is having issues with iTunes Match has my sympathy.

I have exactly the same problem. itunes match systematically try to update as soon as it goes into music, when it comes to listening to the album list, and all this without updating the latest albums added to the cloud.

And I do not mean you infinite time it takes each time for no result

**** update 6.0.1

I agree. This service is a piece of crap. That's why I got my refund. First of all, barely anything matches. It wouldn't even match songs I purchased from itunes back in the day when they were 128k songs. I mean come on apple, I bought the songs from you, how can they not be matched. Secondly, a lot of my explicit tracks got turned into edited songs when they got downloaded. This issue still has not been resolved, as there is a gigantic thread about this issue that grows bigger everyday. Geese Apple your real quick to take everyone's money and you won't even acknowledge that there are issues. As we can all see apple is not very good at the whole "online streaming thing". That is why mobile me was a failure and a lot of people are still having issues with icloud. But they still make really well built products and that is what keeps us coming back for more.

I sure wish I had read up on these problems before plunking down my cash for iTM last night! Oops.

I too am unable to get it past step 3.

I wondered if Apple is even paying attention to this forum, until I tried clicking on the link at the top that says "Branched to a new discussion" and then told me I was unauthorized to view the page. Maybe Apple has created a mirror to this page that's only accessible to employees, in order to shame the iTunes Match team on the monster they have created?!

I certainly hope so. Apple has long surpased its reign supreme on software design when Spotify does a better job than its own internal team.

A little response to customers after 31 pages of problems have been reported would sure go a long way towards customer service, Apple.

Oh... and when are you going to release a new Mac Pro model? Will it have thunderbolt? It seems pretty ridiculous that the Pro model doesn't have the one feature that pros have been asking for years... and it sure seems like you've abandoned your base in pursuit of profits, Apple.

Grrrr.

I don't understand you people. All you do is complain, I am using Windows 7 and ITUNES Match with Itunes 11 and it has been working just fine for me. It may not match all of my songs so who cares. But it will match at least 75% of them and have never had any issue uploading whatsoever. It must be a mac problem.

The irony is not lost on me that iTunes Match probably works better on Windows than Mac.

I had several EMI-Capitol tracks from years ago match to vastly inferior-sounding versions. Dean Martin "Everybody Loves Somebody" - his biggest hit - sounded great when I ripped it from CD but the matched version from iTunes sounded like it was dubbed from an 8-track. Strangely, the iTunes store has the same album for sale and the audio is high quality. Other cuts from EMI labels sound like needle drops, straight from old vinyl albums. Why is this? Is this because the copyright has expired in other parts of the world and iTunes is matching from, say, China or Europe where anything goes?