So many problems with iTunes Match...

I cancelled subscription in September and requested a refund. I got back quite a bot of the annual fee.

It never worked for me. Albums we spit up, art work changed and some tracks from albums vanished entirely.

I have rebuilt my collection now and fixed all the art work, reinstated missing tracks and put albums back together again.

Not an easy task with ITunes 11 which makes managing albums very difficult. I have learned about the compilation tick box and have been assiduous in putting it right.

I miss album flow and do not understand why it was retained on iPhone version and not on the full version. When searching albums it is infuriating you get those silly little boxes under search when what you want is the album on its own on the page.

I am still having the odd problem with albums splitting and single tracks appearing when synching.

Bottom line is that i no longer trust the product and am very wary of what I do. I did however download the latest update but there is no perceptible difference and what was once a singularly wonderful product has been reduced to rubbish....for this user.....There must be someone out there who has no problems with match and iTunes 11 and if here is what is your secret.

Meanwhile plans to buy a mac at Easter are very firmly on hold.

I just wish apple would fess up and talk to us via these forums about what they have found and what they will do. The silence and ignoring of the problem is the worst kind of corporate arrogance. If they keep it up they will soon have the best looking and worst performing products on the market and as anyone of a certain age will tell you.....

looks aren't everything..........

binman62 wrote:

I cancelled subscription in September and requested a refund. I got back quite a bot of the annual fee.

Since you are no longer subscribed to the service you should probably post in the iTunes for Mac forum since what you are experience has absolutely nothing to do with iTunes Match.

The Final Solution to iTunes Match Issues (If you have a clean backup for your iTunes library.)

Your worries are at an end. Your labors are about to begin.

Problem: iTunes Match promises a wonderful service: accessing your entire iTunes library from anywhere with a WiFi connection. Since I live abroad for extended periods, this would obviate the necessity of shipping CDs for my sojourn. However, iTunes Match will never, ever provide that service, because it vandalizes carefully tended music libraries, making searches impossible and fragmenting albums, among many other annoyances.

Solution:

1. Shut of iTunes Match.

2. Use your backup - hard drive, CDs, or DVDs - to create a new library. Download purchases made since the backup by going to the iTunes Store and clicking on Purchased. Click on Not in This Library. Download all the new music.

3. Pefect your library: Download missing album art from Amazon or other online sources. Repair fractured albums: you can do this by copying the album name, and pasting it in the other partial albums. If you still have more than one album, copy and paste the same artist listing into each. In 95% of cases this will do the trick, because the problem stems from inconsistencies in the labeling of various tracks in an album - a killer in opera and cantatas, because different vocal artists appear in shifting combinations.)

4. Your new library is now nearly perfect, unlike the hopelessly scrambled iTunes Match library.

5. Create your own cloud server. I chose Air Playit, a free app, for this purpose. You are now your own iTunes Match, with a pristine library that you alone can modify.

6 Ascertain that everything in your old library is in your new one, then backup the old to an external hard drive (or not). Then delete it from you computer. (Why waste drive space on garbage.)

7. Never turn on iTunes Match. Never, ever.

I decided to try iTunes match 5 days ago, using the newest version of iTunes on a PC laptop running Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. Like pretty much everybody in this thread, I am frustrated and disappointed with it as well. Here's my laundry list of complaints:

1) It is laboriously slow. My library has about 6500 songs. It matched about 4300 on the first day. But after 5 days, it has only managed to upload about 600 of the remaining songs it can't match.

2) It is a mysterious memory/CPU hog. I have 8GB RAM and a 2.53 GHz processor, but while it is working, I can hardly do anything else on the computer, even though I've checked the performance through my "task manager" and I have plenty of room to move while it's working.

3) As far as its claim that "you can continue to use iTunes while iTunes Match is in progress"? Yeah, right. The music skips during playback like a turntable in an earthquake.

3) There seems to be no option to have it not start matching automatically whenever I open iTunes. So it always starts automaticaly, and then it can take minutes to try and shut it off because of how it makes my computer freeze up and become unresponsive.

4) It is significantly flawed in its matching functionality. Many of my albums have one or more songs that couldn't match, and the song order on several of my albums has been changed.

5) This is something I should have known and considered from the outset, so I'll warn you about it, too: when I'm out and about with my iPhone and want to access my library, I am completely dependent on the strength of my wireless service, which, for my carrier (Sprint) is still in need of plenty of improvement in Chicago and hasn't even begun to be improved in the city where I'm moving in two weeks (Seattle).

With the exception of #5, I hope Apple can work out these kinks sooner than later.

I've cancelled my renewal of iTunes Match. When hundreds of files that say "Matched" or "Purchased" won't play and instead prompt me to locate the files locally, it's not much of a "cloud" system. Been using Macs for 30 years and this is just shoddy execution. I can no longer listen to some of the music I have on my iTunes Match account unless I put it back on my laptop, which I removed them from because I need space. Ugh. I wish this worked the way it's supposed to.

Marketing Jedi, the reason you're having the trouble you are is because you improperly removed the files from your computer. You deleted them from the file system but did not remove them from the iTunes library. So of course iTunes can't find the tracks. To fix this problem simply highlight all the track in the iTunes library right-click and select "delete." Do not hide the tracks in the cloud. You will now be able to stream the tracks from the cloud.

First, a HUGE thanks for that advice. It worked like a charm.

I think it's a less-than-desirable user experience when someone can't play a track that says, "Matched" or "Purchased". Would it be too hard for the Match team to run a library check and solve this automatically whenever the user clicks "Update iTunes Match" so that this doesn't happen to people who realize there's a problem and click to update? That would avoid this problem entirely.

I'm not trying to be intentionally insulting, but the problem you experienced was caused by user error because you deleted the files from the file system, instead of from within iTunes. It has nothing to do with iTunes Match. In fact, if you did not have iTM enabled and had done the same thing iTunes would have reacted in exactly the same way.

When a file is deleted but not removed from within iTunes, the application still has a pointer in the library DB file pointing to the original location of the file. If the track is deleted from the computer outside of iTunes the software simply has no way of knowing that. So there is really no way for iTunes to "run a library check" because the library would have been fine, but the file would have still been missing from the file system.

If it makes you feel better to stick a label to this and call it user error instead of acknowledging that this could confuse users, be my guest. Technology should adapt to how users work, the user shouldn't need to adapt their behavior to the technology. I will delete files form my file system the same way I've always deleted them - from the Finder. What if the user doesn't want to delete them from iTunes for fear that they will be deleted from the cloud as well if they do?

I know exactly what happens when iTunes can't find a file locally because it's been deleted. Without Match it shows an exclamation point indicating that the file can't be found and asks you to find the missing files - exactly what I would expect it to do. The difference here is that the files are shown in iTunes looking perfectly normal as matched or purchased, an indication that they reside on a cloud server and are ready to play. This could be easily solved by having the "Update iTunes Match" menu item check the library for missing files before syncing. The first place someone is going to go when they're concerned about what's on the cloud is likely to be that function, which updates their Matched songs.

I think "Update iTunes Match" shoudl be a true update that verifies the availability of files in the user's library and their cloud-based files so that everything is in sync. It's not rocket science to do that. Is that really too much to suggest? I also think they could have a label that indicates a song is stored both locally and on the cloud. I suspect that I'm not the only iTunes user in the world who is going to have this issue.

If you are referring to my post, there was no user error. I uploaded my library as per instructions. This led to disaster.

The one smart thing I did was back up my iTunes library frequently to a dedicated external hard drive and DVDs.

The one dumb thing I did (actually, spending dozens of hours loading hundreds of CDs into my iTunes library and turning on iiTunes match was much dumber) was try to correct the chaotic iTunes Match library. That was a total waste of time and effort.

I didn't actually delete the wildly defective iTunes Match library. I backed it up to a hard drive. Who knows if and when I might need it In two or three incarnations, at the earliest, I suspect.

It sounds that your experience with iTunes Match was better than mine. I am happy that Apple has provided you with a good experience.

de crise en catastrophe wrote:

If you are referring to my post, there was no user error.

No, I was not replying to your post.

Apple has, without drawing attention to it, acknowledged the unmitigated disaster perpetrated by iTunes matched by permitting redownloading of purchased tracks. They learned of the problem, and made my solution possible by allowing us to re-import music. This allowed me to rebuild my library.

Marketing Jedi wrote:

If it makes you feel better to stick a label to this and call it user error instead of acknowledging that this could confuse users, be my guest. Technology should adapt to how users work, the user shouldn't need to adapt their behavior to the technology. I will delete files form my file system the same way I've always deleted them - from the Finder. What if the user doesn't want to delete them from iTunes for fear that they will be deleted from the cloud as well if they do?

I'm not saying it would not be confusing. I'm saying you incorrectly deleted the file from the file system. You can not delete music files from the file system and expect iTunes to be able to know that. To correctly delete music tracks, and have iTunes keep up with that action, the tracks must be deleted from within iTunes. This is way the software works. To not hide a track in the cloud simply do not check the option is the dialog box.

Marketing Jedi wrote:

If it makes you feel better to stick a label to this and call it user error instead of acknowledging that this could confuse users, be my guest. Technology should adapt to how users work, the user shouldn't need to adapt their behavior to the technology. I will delete files form my file system the same way I've always deleted them - from the Finder. What if the user doesn't want to delete them from iTunes for fear that they will be deleted from the cloud as well if they do?

I know exactly what happens when iTunes can't find a file locally because it's been deleted. Without Match it shows an exclamation point indicating that the file can't be found and asks you to find the missing files - exactly what I would expect it to do.

And it works the same with with iTunes Match enabled.

Marketing Jedi wrote:

The difference here is that the files are shown in iTunes looking perfectly normal as matched or purchased, an indication that they reside on a cloud server and are ready to play.

No, that's not what is being indicated. All that indicates is that the track hasn't been played since the file was deleted from the file system, hence it does not have the exclamation point. Once iTunes "touches" the track it will know the file is missing and will display the exclamation point. The same way it behaves without iTM enabled.

Marketing Jedi wrote:

This could be easily solved by having the "Update iTunes Match" menu item check the library for missing files before syncing. The first place someone is going to go when they're concerned about what's on the cloud is likely to be that function, which updates their Matched songs.

How would this work? If iTunes has not "touched" the track since the file was deleted then iTunes can't know the file is missing because the library DB still contains the pointer to the file, which is now missing. Simply scanning the library DB file won't work in this case. I'm not saying any of what you suggest is impossible, but it's not practical. Which is probably why Apple hasn't done it in iTunes before now.

de crise en catastrophe wrote:

Apple has, without drawing attention to it, acknowledged the unmitigated disaster perpetrated by iTunes matched by permitting redownloading of purchased tracks. They learned of the problem, and made my solution possible by allowing us to re-import music. This allowed me to rebuild my library.

Actually, we could re-download purchased tracks long before the debut of iTunes Match.

Yes, since June 2011, when match was first announced I believe.