So many problems with iTunes Match...

"Once iTunes "touches" the track it will know the file is missing and will display the exclamation point."

This did not happen. It continued to display a status of "Matched" or "Purchased".

Why won't checking the DB file against available files work? That's what it does whenever you click on a deleted file and it reports back with an exclamation point that it can't find a file. It could just run that check the second the user clicks "Update iTunes Match" make sure all files it thinks are present actually are. Whenever it finds a file that comes back as missing on the user's hard drive, it would update the status in iTunes then do its normal update.

I hve over 14000 songs in match, it works fantastic most of the time, but recently I have been experiencing issues. I have several songs saved locally on serveral macbooks, desktops, etc. I started to match my MBP about two weeks ago. Match knows I have songs waiting to be uploaded/matched; my issue is that when attempting to update match in the newest itunes, it starts the first step, might get to checking the local files 1/10 times, and then quits with 4010 error. before the error the cloud next to library works maybe 20 secs after the UI shows it stopped, then the error cuts. I have tried methods this board recommends, I shut down match using option, turn off genius, which requires a sign out, quit itunes, and reopen everything. more or less the previous issue occurs, but this time it gets through step 2 first time, and quits during the 15 song upload i am trying now. Second try makes it through 2nd step as well, to fail in same spot. third try tends to fail on step 2. all further attempts fail outright. i have the same errors cutting on all computers tried, a windows desktop, a MBP, and a MBA. same account for all devices, and there are also an ipad and iphone connected to account. On my MBP, the first time it failed, it left songs unuploaded. I have still not gotten them to upload but they show in songs on devices as greyed out. Not sure if this is what is causing issue or not, but I cannot upload more than 1 song at a time and it takes 20 minutes per with the work to formally restart match. Please fix this issue Apple!

I am not convinced they will.

It's a flawed idea to start with, unless your library consists entirely of iTunes purchases, where you at least have some glimmer of hope that in theory it should work for you.

My iTunes library consists of virtually no iTunes purchases, because on principle I don't buy albums in a lossy format when I can buy them in a superior format (CD) often for less money, then rip them losslessly.

Therefore it should have been really obvious to me that I was bound to encounter loads of problems with mismatched tracks and tracks that won't upload.

And sure enough, I have.

Though at least recently I found a way to clear everything out of the iCloud and start again. I detailed it here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4860636

It helped, to a degree.

Sounds very frustrating. Might be a network issue? I've had to reboot my full network plus computers once in a while to get things moving with iTunes Match as well as a few other "cloud" applications I use. (I don't have anti-virus software so no need to turn it off but I hear that helps too.) Failing that I wonder if you took your "main" computer - whichever one you originally set up iTunes Match with - to a new location...tried another network...if things might improve? If so, that would indicate something may have changed with your setup. Just a thought.

Let us know how it goes.

MajorFubar wrote:

I am not convinced they will.

It's a flawed idea to start with, unless your library consists entirely of iTunes purchases, where you at least have some glimmer of hope that in theory it should work for you.

My iTunes library consists of virtually no iTunes purchases, because on principle I don't buy albums in a lossy format when I can buy them in a superior format (CD) often for less money, then rip them losslessly.

Therefore it should have been really obvious to me that I was bound to encounter loads of problems with mismatched tracks and tracks that won't upload.

And sure enough, I have.

Though at least recently I found a way to clear everything out of the iCloud and start again. I detailed it here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4860636

It helped, to a degree.

Agreed...haven't had any issues with iTunes purchases matching, etc. However they only account for a few hundred of more than 7,000 tracks in our iTunes library. Most are CD rips at 320kbps. With the exception of 30 or so oddball tracks I had to move out of iTunes initially, iTunes Match has been able to handle everything. Some albums are fully matched while others are fully uploaded and yet others have a mix of both. ??? Weird, but it's working on all of our computers and iDevices.

Like you I had all sorts of issues with artwork (a whole other thread). Mismatched covers, lost covers, etc., etc. I'd fix things and all would be good for a while, then they'd disappear or the wrong ones would appear. However more recently I've found that as long as the "custom" artwork I've added is smaller than 1000 x 1000 px (most are 500x500 or so) iTunes Match is finally able to keep them in place. I still have a file full of all of the custom artwork, but things have been good for several months now.

I really hate pulling my hair out over these kinds of things as well...we shouldn't have to. For now things are good with iTunes Match, at least for me.

Hope things smooth out for you too!

I just relized that an alarming number of my songs that I loaded of CD has 15s to a minute gone at the end of the song since I am using Itunes Match. I was matching 3 libraries and all of them now has the same issue. I have 18000+ songs. Now way I can go through them all to see what was damaged and what not. What a joke! and I paid for this abuse!

Hi all

I am a relative newcoming to iPad and thinking of ripping all 550+ of my CDs and uploading them to iTunes Match, so I can see what I have got from anywhere, and play them where bandwidth permits.

This thread however spreads a worry. Is it a worry that would affect me?

I agree with the comment about CDs, however I have run out of space to store them, and love the idea of sitting in the living room and wanting to play an old CD of mine - and I could do it in seconds: plug in 3m Jack to hifi, and away I go, without storing 170gb+ of data locally.

Simon

simon_a6 wrote:

Hi all

I am a relative newcoming to iPad and thinking of ripping all 550+ of my CDs and uploading them to iTunes Match, so I can see what I have got from anywhere, and play them where bandwidth permits.

This thread however spreads a worry. Is it a worry that would affect me?

<snip>

Welcome Simon! I signed up for iTunes Match a couple days after it was released. I have more than 7,000 tracks currently. About 80% of those were ripped from physical CD's and the balance purchased from the iTunes Store plus a few from Amazon.

iTunes Match had its share of issues out of the gate. In my case most were related to oddball tracks or cover art that I had in my iTunes library. The tracks that were "custom" to whatever extent and couldn't be matched to commonly released music from the traditional music industry. Some were low quality (96kbps or lower) others were from local bands, etc. iTunes Match had great difficulty with about 30 or so tracks in my library. Once I isolated and removed them it began working fairly normally. (I still have and can play the unusual tracks, I just keep them out of iTunes.)

There were also times where cover art caused issues, Usually it was cover art that I had found online and added manually and was almost always 1000px x 1000px or larger. Once I isolated those, removed them and replaced them with smaller artwork (500px x 500px or so) things went smoothly again. Additionally some cover art that I added manually would be dropped for something else. An example would be the Beatles Anthology series. There are six CD's with three different CD covers. Now and then iTunes Match would switch covers to the wrong CD's. There were other similar circumstances as well. That stopped a while back and the correct artwork now "sticks". However now and then I'll see the wrong cover art show up for a particular album. Usually the artist is correct, but the cover may be for another CD, say a "greatest hits" CD rather than the actual CD in my library. Manually correcting it usually clear things up.

With respect to sharing content across devices, although problematic early on, iTunes Match now works with all of our Macs, iPhones, iPad and Apple TV.

One oddity that still remains are albums that iTunes Match can't fully, well, match. If iTunes Match can't find a specific track it will upload the one in your iTunes library. That's fine but there are weird circumstances where iTunes Match "matches" say 8 of 12 songs on a common/popular CD but uploads the other four. It's not as prevalent as it used to be but it still happens for some reason. That doesn't affect how it works, but it is strange.

So, at least for us, the bottom line is that if whatever you have in your library is fairly "normal" you shouldn't experience any problems. YMMV of course, but that's been our experience. It was a rocky road early on but things have smoothed out quite nicely now IMO.

Ultimately you should feel comfortable using iTunes Match. It's working for millions of folks now. It's still not perfect and with all of the recorded music available world wide I don't know that it will or can ever be flawless, but for a couple of dollars a month, it's working well for us.

If you do run into any issues, here's a pretty good article about resolving things:

http://www.maclife.com/article/howtos/ultimate_guide_using_itunes_match

Hope that helps. I'm sure others will chime in too.

Let us know how it goes!

Hi

I'm probably wrong for asking this, but have also been looking at Google Music Play as an option.

20,000 songs free, no subscription, however there are a few issues tha tI wonder if others have found.

1) No app for it. So to play it on your ipad, you have to open Safari, login, then look for the track. It's not right there in itunes.

2) the BIGGEST issue seems to be with Album Artwork. So far about 80% of my albums have the "Huey Lewis and the News" album artwork for it. Heaven knows why as I have uploaded ONE track of theirs, and then rest are CD albums.

So maybe itunes match is way better.....???

Also, in itunes..... I have ripped THREE Air Supply CDs, but only about 4 songs are shown on my local iTunes storage. I'm looking in album view.

Cannot find my album. Nor can I find my three "The Carpenters" albums.

It seems to ignore the fact that when ripping a CD, Windows does so by putting the CD files into a folder "The Carpenters" and then a subfolder "album name", which it goes from the CD.

Makes me wonder if when I am on iTunes Match, if I can find anything. Searching for a song is probably ok, but if I want to listen to "Ticket to Ride" CD, how do I, if it hasn't stored it as that?

I have about 550 CDs to rip, so I don't want to be manually doing this.

Ok, I just manually added all the CDs from a separate 'CDs' folder in my Music folder. And it worked.

How do I set it to automatically look in that folder and stay up to date, as clearly it didn't!!

Publicly admitting that you own The Carpenters music is very brave...you are to be congratulated. 😉

You're not actually able to "set" iTunes Match to do anything, you can only turn iTunes Match on or off. iTunes Match depends on your iTunes application for content so there's no need for a separate "CDs folder".

As far as searching for songs, albums, etc. you can certainly do that with iTunes/iTunes Match. I think the issues you're running into are due to the fact that you're ripping and/or trying to store content outside of iTunes. If the albums aren't in the iTunes library, iTunes Match isn't going to find them. Everything needs to be in one place and you should be using iTunes to rip your CDs.

Since you've already added your existing files to iTunes going forward you can simply rip your CDs with iTunes and everything you add will be there, available for iTunes Match.

That said, if you really wanted to keep a separate folder for your ripped CD's (instead of using iTunes) you could tell iTunes where to "look" for that content. This article can tell you how to do that and how iTunes files are set up:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1391

Here are several more articles that might be useful as well...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4914?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4124

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3847

With respect to Google's cloud music storage, you're correct, it's not as user-friendly, but there's nothing that says you couldn't try both services and see which you like best.

Hope that helps!

Hi all

I have a new iPad Mini that I have now setup with my iTunes Match account. Amazing experience for sure and I have been having a blast using my iPad. I feel like a kid again! 🙂 Makes me wonder why I wasted money on a Nexus 7.

Problem is, all the music that I have been streaming from the cloud is not updating as having been recently played and the play counts remain unchanged as well.

This morning on my iPhone, I played a song directly from the cloud and my recently played list on my Mac updated almost immediatly to show the song was played although it showed the song as being played twice. Play count was 2, now it os 4. That bus hasn't been fixed and I'm not even complaining about that.

I just want what I listen to on my ipad to update my recently played list on my Mac just as it does on my iPhone.

Any ideas here? Thanks

The last played date and play counts can take up to 24 hours to update. The first song of the day you play will generally show up immediately, but rest will take a little longer. And yes, tracks played from the cloud on iOS devices will be "played" twice. It's a bug.

Of coures, but I bought my Mini on Thursday. I've been playing music from the cloud on it since then and non of it has updated. I played music on it for three hours straight this morning BEFORE i played a song on the iPhone so the music on the iPad should have updated long before that from Thursday as being played. It still has yet to show up.