iTunes Match Step 1 is stuck! What can I do?

Same issue here. Running 10.6.8 on a 2010 vintage Mac Pro.

It went through all three steps once, but crashed when I was in the process of downloading matched tracks. Ever since, the progress bar runs all the way across on Step 1 and fails to move to Step 2. So far I've repaired permissions, restarted, done disk repair, signed out of the iTunes store and signed back in. Turned genius on and off and on again (it works); stopped and restarted and stopped and restarted iTunes Match. Let it run all last night. Can't get past Step 1.

I'm stuck on Step 1 Too... The first day when I signed up, monday I think, it was great! Everything worked fine, all my music went up and I had even begun to delete my matched music with lower bit rates. Begining tuesday and now going into thursday when I launch itunes it's been starting the match process again. Been hung on step 1 and genius update for two days now. The music in my library now all says "waiting" even though I can see all of it from my apple TV and iphone. Tried disabling match, deautorzing computer, reinstalling itunes, NOTHING WORKS.. still just hanging... Running 10.7.2 W/ iTunes 10.5.1

I called tech support and after an hour on the phone they said they did not know and to try to "search out" an answer.

thoughts??

Now in step 2. Yay! The process is painfully slow, but appears to be creeping forward. Wish I could see what it's doing, though...

How did it finally make the transition to Step 2? Did you stop and restart? Or did it finally just happen after hours of seeming to make no progress?

I had a similar problem, stuck at the end of Step 1, would not go on. To fix it I rebuilt my library (the .itl file) from the library .xml file. There are instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1451

I assumed it was some problem with my library, and it worked after I followed those steps.

Worked like a Charm Oslice!!! Thanks!! I had actually called and opened up a ticked with apple engineering on the issue. I'll send them this info and let them know it's resolved.

Thanks again!!

Thanks, Oslice. Worked for me, too (up to a point). I've made it out of Step 1 and Step 2, at last. I seem to be missing the 3,000 or so tracks I was in the process of downloading from the cloud when the orignal crash happened. But they're backed up elsewhere if worse comes to worse.

I decided to try the rebuilding route, too. Interestingly, I had my iMac connected to my tower's library and it was slowly making progress through it (75% at about 40 hours, but it was still moving), but I took the plunge when I saw that rebuilding fixed it, even though that meant cancelling that. Tower rebuilt the main library file just fine, but now whenever I try to sync up iTunes just silently quits altogether somewhere along the way. Thinking about trying the other setup again and seeing if that works.

Rebuilt here too, it didn't work for a full scan but after that I was able to right click songs and manually tell it to add them to iCloud. Still taking a long time but at least now I can keep adding in chunks.

Luckily I read your post on stopping it and starting again. So far after restarting on step 3 it appears to be uploading. Hope it continues till it's done.

As far as I can tell, during step 1 it's just reading your library, so if it fails here, rebuilding your library will probably fix it. At step 2 it's processing all of your music files, and talking to Apple over the network. This is bottlenecked by Apple's servers. If it fails here, it's probably failing at Apple. During stage 3 it's uploading files to the cloud servers. For me it appears to be sending files to Amazon (oh the irony), so when it fails or stalls here, it's probably load at Amazon.

I'm watching the iTunes TCP/IP connections, and right now, it keeps dropping the connection to Amazon, so I assume it's overloaded at their end. Restarting the match process works, but it re-does stages 1 & 2, which aren't exactly fast to start with. Re-doing stage 1 is actually fairly fast, but stage 2 is not. Quite why it doesn't cache the results of stage 2 I don't know, but I guess they didn't expect stage 3 to go down quite so easily.

I rebuilt my library, as suggested. iTunes match resumed working. But now iTunes has forgotten all my iPhone apps, all my purchased apps are gone out of iTunes, and all the apps are missing off my iPhone. This has become a MAJOR debacle.

Sort of hard to believe you pay $25 for a service and then you have to, without warning, rebuild an iTunes Library to make it work? My computer completely froze, wouldnt even power down, When i rebooted i got a grey screen and ended up having to take my Mac to a Genius Bar just to get the computer running again (the phone guys couldnt do it). They said it was my Mac not the iCloud/iTunesservice, that this was just a coincidence, but when i got home everything worked fine until i tried the cloud service again. It freezes while examining the library. Fortunately i was able to force quit this time. It would have ben nice if the "Geniuses" would have acknowledged the problem (which i only discovered by googling "iTunes Match problems". I think i'l wait awhile til Apple updates the service and try again or just ask for a refund.

FIGURED IT OUT!!!!!! SIMPLE SIMPLE REMOVE ALL YOUR SONGS OUT OF ITUNES, TILL ITS EMPTY START IMATCH AFTER IT GOES THROUGHT STEP 1-3 DRAG THEM BACK IN...