So many problems with iTunes Match...

This service was misleadingly presented as a streaming service which it clearly is not. Sure it's a novel idea to be able to access and add music to my iPhone when I am away from my home computer if I was going to be away from my home computer for a long time, but frankly it just falls flat as the next "Big Apple Roll Out". Now being able to stream all of my music onto my phone wherever I am in the world whenever I wanted to would be a great feature. So couple the fact that this service is not a streaming service with the myriad of mistakes it has made with songs in my library, including rendering some of them unplayable, and it is clear that this product, after many delays and criticisms, was rushed out to silence said criticisms for the delays and it was done so without any concern for whether or not the service would even work properly. This has always been Apple's modus operandi, "We know better than you what you want and we will give it to you the way we want promising a lot but mostly delivering a glitch riddled product or service." Do the right thing Apple and create a refund program for those of us who paid the $29.95 fee for something you promised us that ended up being something that most of us could do without!

if you are going to update the play count column why not also update the last played column over iCloud??

Common sense stuff like that drives me crazy!!

Apple never calls this a streaming service. It has always clearly stated this. It comes close to streaming, but thats it. I have lots of complaints about match, but not that one.

All hope is not lost! You can get your money back. Apple I think is working with folks that want to bail. Here's the letter I got back. I won't list the 15 different things I listed with "issues". How I felt I'd paid to upgrade to a reduced service level. Nope, horse is dead. Long live the horse. I've had 36hrs of fun with the thing and I'm beat. I'll get some rest now and come back in 12 months when they're off on the next bigger better thing and this one is golden. Good luck all!

Dear ******,

Welcome to iTunes Store Customer Support. My name is Rahul and I am glad to assist you.

I am sorry to hear that you are not happy with the new service "iTunes Match" and would like a refund. I know you must be eager to get the charges reversed and I will be happy to help you in this.

*********, after reviewing the circumstances of your case, we've determined that a full refund for your iTunes Match subscription is an appropriate exception to the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions, which state that all sales are final. In five to seven business days, a credit of 24.99 should be posted to the credit card that appears on the latest receipt for the subscription.

I hope that you will be happy with this resolution. If you need further assistance, please respond to this email and we will be glad to assist you further.

Have a good day!

Sincerely,

Rahul

iTunes Store/Mac App Store Customer Support

Please Note: I work Monday to Friday, 7 AM to 4 PM CT

Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you. You may receive an AppleCare survey email; any feedback you provide would be greatly appreciated.

iTunes Match

If you want the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud for music you haven’t purchased from iTunes, iTunes Match is the perfect solution. It’s built right into the iTunes app on your Mac or PC and the Music app on your iOS devices. And it lets you store your entire collection, including music you’ve imported from CDs or purchased somewhere other than iTunes. For just $24.99 a year.²

Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

This was taken directly from the Apple website. While it says "stream and store it on any of your devices". it is not completely clear that you can not do one without the other.

Who did you contact for the refund? I've tried the Apple support page and I am asked for a serial number to the Apple device I am writing about. It's not an Apple device but iTunes Match that I'm trying to contact support about.

Hey! What's going on with this iTunes Match service? It has been a full 24 hours and I still have not been able to fully upload the songs that were not matched, since the process has crashed about four times on my laptop. After many tries, my phone finally stopped telling me that Iwas not registered with Itunes match and I was able to give it a test drive, broken up and all, for a couple of hours. But now, not only has the itunes match option on the phone been turning off by itself, now that I have once again turned it on, only one artist is showing, even with the "show all music" box checked. Also, on my iPad2, the service does not work at all. It shows the albums and what not, but when I try to play something, it looks like i wil play, there's a little loading animation on the song, but instead of playing it just cycles through all of the songs in the chosen album and then it crashes the music app. I have restarted it several times, including restarting the iPad to no avail. Now its crashing the music app on my phone as well. Another thing I've noticed is that iTunes Match managed to split several of my songs; not into different albums, but completely split the song in pieces, whereas it shows the song is 3:30 but only plays 30 seconds or a full minute of the song and then it cycles through the rest and it crashes. Will I ever be able to use this service as advertised, which I paid with my hard earned money?...Oh and by the way, this is completely misleading:

"Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud. Since there are more than 20 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.

I had a word with an apple rep earlier today. Told me that whatever is not matched will be uploaded, unless legally bought CD's come with CRM(or something like that), which means sort of a lock. In that case, iTunes match will not upload to the cloud, rendering the service useless if I can not carry my whole library. This is not mentioned anywhere, at least I did not see this. Now half of my library will not make the cut, and the half that was matched does not play. I think I will be keeping my noble 160gb ipod classic and request a refund for this epic fail. I wish they wouldn't make you pay for a Beta version of a product...Bad move Apple!.

"

I have an update. As for the jumbled artists/albums. I fixed mine up.

Apparently iTunes match sorts from the Album Artist, not the Artist. THe album artist column is hidden by default in itunes, If you add that column, chances are you'll see it doesn't match you "Artist" column on every album. That's the problem.

Anyway, I used MediaMonkey and a script I found to copy every Artist entry to the Album Artist field. (This assumes I've already cleaned up all my "Artist" Tags so iTunes groups the albums correctly) I re-checked that there were no albums with multiple artists (because I want them all grouped together, I gave them one artist name, ie: "X Soundtrack" or something. I then hit Update iTunes Match, then disabled match on my phone, rebooted, and reenabled it. Now my entire artist section is 100% correct.

For some people this isn't a good enough fix because they like they're albums with multiple artists to list those artists correctly. I don't know what to tell those people as it seems to be a limitation of the algorithm used to organize in itunes. For most people this will fix your issue. It takes time to manage your library, but once done it should be perfectly sorted on your device.

lancerguy wrote:

I came here looking for a solution to the artists being all jumbled up on my iphone. However, what I've found is a bunch of people complaining that it doesn't stream.

Well, that's just one of my complaints. My question actually got my phone call routed to a specialist who took a night to research the question before getting back to me.

Searching through these boards, there are a lot of other folks who had the same impression that the Cloud would offer streaming alone. Seems like a reasonable hope, since many people have large libraries of music and devices without enough memory to hold it all.

As far as 'cache' use of the memory, the specialist I spoke to says that just isn't true. The "streaming" is actually the music being downloaded into the memory of the iPad. Who needs that headache of deleting music again and again?

mikeindc wrote:

Apple never calls this a streaming service. It has always clearly stated this. It comes close to streaming, but thats it. I have lots of complaints about match, but not that one.

The wording of the promotional material wasn't quite so clear. This was taken from their website: "Once your music is in iCloud, you can stream and store it on any of your devices. Even better, all the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality"...also "Play back matched songs from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality."

If it wasn't meant to be promoted as a streaming service, then why all the hype of the high quality of the playback?

Also, that's not the only issue. There's the mayhem it creates with the contents of our music libraries. Even after eliminating Match from my devices, completely reorganizing my library main source on the iMac, and syncing it up with the iPad, my albums on the iPad are still terribly splintered.

Like so many I have found my carefully organized playlists completely messed up. I did not spend hours carefully organizing playlists so that with one sweep of the iMatch hand everything I have done could be undone. Playlists are missing songs. Albums are missing songs. Songs are either partial or no longer playable at all. All this so I could spend $24.99 to fatten the wallets of the post-Jobs Apple fat cats. And there is no streaming no matter how some try to word it. It is download, store and delete. Sounds like what I used to do before iMatch... FOR FREE!!!

Streaming is when you download a song and play it at the same time. Apple just offers the ability to store it as you stream it. It happens to be an ability you can't turn off. It CLEARLY streams.

Definition of streaming (google it)

2. (of data) Transmitted in a continuous stream while earlier parts are being used.

AKA, the song is transmitted in a continuous stream to you while the earlier parts of the song are being played.

STREAMING! OMG, by definition! One more time, this is...STREAMING...BY...DEFINITION. Read the definition, consider what's taking place on your iDevice.

Then, while streaming...it SAVES THE SONG, WOW! It's funny, this is a completely logical part that is meant to save bandwidth but this is the part people are complaining the most about. <--- The way your buddy Jobs would have wanted it, saving you bandwidth even though you have no clue what the **** you're doing.

Steve Jobs is completely rolling over in his grave right now over this cluster f**k. The only thing Itunes does for me right now is crash. So much for "it just works"

I agree with afett, if Steve Jobs were here to see this software I'm 100% sure he would say it was complete sh*t and would never have let it go into public release as it is. The idea of iTunes Match is great, the execution of it to this point is very flawed. My experience with it to this point is:

1. I pay Apple my $25
2. I match/upload my wife's library - 5K songs takes forever
3. I match/upload my library for just my new iPhone - 600 songs
4. I notice that some of my album art is now missing in iTunes and some of the tracks are not sorted as being on the same album anymore. I fix this and move on.
5. I turn on Match on my iPhone and set show all music off
6. In the music player I see just my songs. However, iTunes has changed my alternate album art for a few albums back to the default.
7. I play an album stored locally on my iPhone which shows album art. I switch views so that the album art is showing instead of the tracklist and it now shows the music note image as if there was no album art.
8. I turn the phone horizontal and go into coverflow. Yep, the album art is there, but so is every album in my wife's 5K track library even though I have show all music turned off
9. I disable iTunes match on my phone and in iTunes and resync. Thank god everything is back to normal.

So within 10 minutes of trying to actually use the service I find three alpha release type bugs that are annoying and unacceptable to me in a product I'm paying for. I'm sure Apple will iron out the bugs with this and then I'll be happy to sign back up but I'm not interested in paying for the service while they are doing that. People who got a refund - what channel did you use in order to get that ball rolling?

I wasn't even asking for a refund, but the specialist to whom I spoke AGREED with me that language on the website appears to offer streaming without downloading (though he did say it wasn't the design of the product...yet). He was the one who brought up getting a refund to me.

Much to the chagrin of a few people on this message board who are defending Match as not being a streaming serivce, Apple acknowledged to me that it's messed up (considering also the jumbling of music libraries).

Don't you find it interesting that Apple is so easily considering giving refunds on this?