Q: So many problems with iTunes Match...

Same issues, tunesmatch was working pretty well over christmas, but in last week nothing updates. its useless now, as neither the iphone or ipad can now get playlists. all I have is a blank white screen where before there were hundreds of playlists. i've also noticed the albums come through but all the album art that was previously there has also now dissapeared.

I have rebooted, logged in an out and tried every workaround i can find online but still nothing. Not sure why I am paying for a subscription that does not work. I get the sense as other countries come online with this program the crush of data is bogging those already subscribing down. Refunds or extensions of year long subscriptions should be offered as clearly what you pay for is not even available.

25 bucks for something this buggy is criminal.

My playlists weren't showing up on my iPhone after I enabled iTunes Match. I did a quick google search and stumbled upon this solution and it fixed my playlist syncing problem!

did you activate "Show all music" in the settings? Maybe your music got deleted by iOS to free up space.

I'm having the same issues witht he album artwork. Apple better be taking notes and better be working on these issues!!!

Just a head's up for people who are having problems with iTunes Match and posting in this thread.  because it is one of the largest threads in the Match discussion forum, it's pretty much impossible for some of us who regularly provide assistance to track everything that is posted in here (it all shows up as "so many problems with iTunes Match" every time it gets updated).

If you want to post here, great.  No argument that Match could stand some improvement.  Apple might well be monitoring the thread and taking to heart some of the valid criticisms here.

But, if you have a specific problem that you want help trying to resolve, you might want to create a separate post with a topic name that lets us know what you need help with.

They offered me a refund. But they would ban me from using it for a year.

Well if they want to play hard ball, they loose.

But really, I can't see them fix all their issues with this before another year, so in a way that's good becase you won't fall again before at least 12 months.

I took the offer.

Exactly how mine is. And after I plugged mine in to sync my ipod screen turned completely white and won't turn off from that so now I think it's broken. Definetely getting a refund for this. I did nothing wrong to it. It is just not working at all anymore.

Same problem here, this is the worst itunes update ever, apple going a bit microsoft!

20%!! I got about 2% of my library matched, and while there's some lesser-known stuff there, the vast majority is mainstream enough to be on iTMS. The service clearly hasn't improved in the last 2 months.

moidah said:

20%!! I got about 2% of my library matched, and while there's some lesser-known stuff there, the vast majority is mainstream enough to be on iTMS. The service clearly hasn't improved in the last 2 months.

It's highly unusual for someone to get only 2% of their library to match. My own overall matching percentage is over 80% and with the exception of some free tracks from iTunes, my music all comes from CDs and vinyl recordings.

Matches of music recorded from vinyl ranges from 30%-100% depending on the album.  Yesterday I got a 50% match on a 1959 vinyl recording of Jackie Wilson, a 95% match of a vinyl recording of Santana's Greatest hits.  A recording from vinyl of Madonna's True Blue was a 100% match.

Admittedly, I've had some of the same problems just about everyone has experienced, specifically a CD matching except one or two tracks.  Sometimes I'm able to confirm that the tracks aren't available for sale in the iTunes store, or if they are, that they are on a "remastered" album, but most of the time I don't have any information that suggests what I have isn't for sale.  Like everyone else, I'm certainly not happy about that.

If you want any assistance in trying to determine why your match has been so poor, I know many of the people who regularly lend a hand on the board would be glad to help.  To start we'd need some information.

You've enabled iCloud status in your view options, correct?  Do you have any ineligible files in the 98% that haven't matched?

You mentioned "2 months."  Have you been using iTunes Match for two months?  What country are you in?  People who just signed up last week when their countries were added have reported quite a bit of trouble we assume is server related.

What type of files you are trying to match (Mp3, WAV, AIFF, AAC, etc. as well as bitrate)? 

What is the source of your music (CD, iTunes Store, Vinyl, Cassette, etc).  How did you get it into iTunes?  Did you rip it in iTunes or in some other app?

Do you have any DRM protected music - older iTunes tracks or DRM that was purchased from some other source?

I had the same problems with my album art, and found that very frustrating as well.

There is a workaround for this, but it consumes a lot of your time, but for now it is the best solution until apple fixes this.

I trie to explain this in steps.

1: search the song that has missing album art on your iPhone/iPad/iPod

2: find the same song in your library on your mac or pc

3: open the song/album info, go to the album art tab, cut the album art out and press done/ok

4: open the song/album info again, go to the album art tab, paste the album art back and press done/ok

5: renew itunes match by going to store -> renew itunes match

6: now look for the song/album again on your iphone and wait a few seconds, and then it will appear.

I hope this helps you out guys, as it did for me.

Time consuming but problems solved.

In my case i found that it only effects the album art that was provided by itunes.

Good luck!

I had an abysmal 8% match rate from cd-ripped tracks that ranged from 128 kbps mp3 to Apple Lossless. Oddly, by converting them to 256 AAC (even those that were already at or below 256 AAC) I could convince most of them to match. I really didn't need to match them since I could just re-rip the lower quality tracks anyway (as if my middle-aged ears could tell the difference!). But by tweaking the files my match rate rose from 8% to near 100%.

My primary computer is a six year old powerbook, but presumably it uses the same algorithms to examine the tracks as current Intel compiled iTunes. Maybe it's a PowerPC related quirk? (Or is the matching done on the server side, possibly making the bandwidth a factor?) I may try ripping a couple of cd's with my ThinkPad and see if it makes a difference. I would think that Apple would want to fix this fast, not only to calm customer complaints, but to save on their storage costs since every non-matched track means another upload to their cloud space.

ive been having the same problems, my playlists are all gone  the only option i have on the my 4s is  add a playlist when i do it vanishes the next day i know its there cause they are all listed on the apple tv its super annoying.im also having a problem where it super duplicates my playlists 1000's of times its made itunes on the computer unusable when i try and delete them i tunes crashes i havent been able to sync my phone with the computer because of this. LAME

Most of my stuff was encoded from CD in AAC 96kbs CBR, for reasons of the amount of disk space available at the time and the size of the library! I have a few files that I bought or got for free from iTMS, but they are all behaving themselves. I am loathe to go through the whole 8 big plastic boxes of CDs out of the garage and re-encode them all just to get more matches, so if I have to live with uploading all my existing media, then OK. I'm happy to experiment for a bit though. Don't have any ineliglbles in the library - cleared them out before the last attempt. No DRMed media.

When I mentioned 2 months, I was referring to the length of this thread has been going and how most of the problems people have been having are still an issue 2 months down the line. I realise that this is still a new service, but the fingerprinting code is run on the client, so server load shouldn't affect the number of matches you get, surely?

I will try to re-encode to 256 AAC trick and first and see if that helps. My iTunesMatch library is in fact a subset of my full library, so a little bit of jiggery-pokery will be required to make sure I don't screw my main lib in the process of fixing this issue.

Many thanks for your help.