iTunes Match doesn't match every song on an album

That's weird, I have that one (with 11 tracks) and all matched.

I have a theory about this. I purchased the original CD about a year ago when it first came out directly with Cake in the US. I live in the Netherlands and Cake is not really know around here. Could it be that Cake is not in the local NL matching database, but only is in the US matching database? Still, it is available in the iTunes store here, but perhaps that uses a different source than the Match servers?

AndreNL and Mike Connelly, if you know the approximate date you ran Match on this album, as well as if it was during your first Match session, it might be revealing. I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing AndreNL did his fairly recently, like last week, and Mik Connelly did it some time back. Last week I'm willing to point the finger at server overload resulting in some glitch during match that defaulted a lot of albums to upload (kind of stupid, since all that would do is add to server overload, but still . . .)

Yes, I did the matching last week and it was also the first matching session. iTunes Match is only available here since last week. I subscribed to it the next day so yes, it was probably very busy on the servers.

I just tried to re-add the songs to my library, but another phenomenon happened. First I deleted the songs making sure the 'delete from iCloud' box was ticked. Then I updated match making sure everything was in sync. Then I re-added the songs which caused them to get the 'waiting' status. Then I ran update again. Funny thing was it was done pretty quickly, nothing got uploaded, but still the songs now indicate 'uploaded'. Probably some caching thing. I will wait a day before re-adding and let you know tomorrow.

Hmmm, looking at it again, my theory does not appear to hold. I have other Cake albums that do (partially) match...

I have a theory about this. I purchased the original CD about a year ago when it first came out directly with Cake in the US. I live in the Netherlands and Cake is not really know around here. Could it be that Cake is not in the local NL matching database, but only is in the US matching database? Still, it is available in the iTunes store here, but perhaps that uses a different source than the Match servers?

If it's for sale in the Netherlands, it should be available for matching. That is, unless as I mentioned, there is some agreement related to Match that is separate and apart from the agreement allowing it to be sold through iTunes. I'd be surprised if this is happening, but if there are such agreements, Apple would be wise to add something to the disclaimer about it.

Then I ran update again. Funny thing was it was done pretty quickly, nothing got uploaded, but still the songs now indicate 'uploaded'. Probably some caching thing. I will wait a day before re-adding and let you know tomorrow.

Yes, this is a common problem and appears to come and go. At times you can pull uploaded tracks and resubmit fairly quickly. Other days it seems to take forever. If you catch a "bad" day, yes, the servers just re-link to the originally uploaded copy. This is why when trying to resolve certain kinds of problems, it's easier to work with albums that haven't been uploaded yet.

I've seen evidence of songs matching in early December which, if I retry today, will not match. And vice versa. So there could be some validity to this. Apple may be tweaking their matching process over time, but that doesn't mean it works "better", maybe just "different".

HI roebeet. Sounds like if you get a match and that's what you want, better to leave well enough alone!

I treat my Matches like gold! 😁

totally off-topic, but check out the AAPL chart in after hours. They blew the doors off all estimates and are up HUGE. currently trading north of $454 a share!

OK, yes, I own stock, my wife owns stock and right now I wish all my cats owned it too.

Apple, do you need a systems admin? 🙂

But the $25 isn't beta ... I paid full price so I expect full support. If a song isn't playable in iTunes, they each song should have an icon to say so BEFORE ripping. Maybe it's just that 14 people filed a petition finding the song offensive to martians thus they pulled it even though 10,000 are screaming for it .... that's how Apple rolls.

Roxiepop wrote:

But the $25 isn't beta ... I paid full price so I expect full support. If a song isn't playable in iTunes, they each song should have an icon to say so BEFORE ripping. Maybe it's just that 14 people filed a petition finding the song offensive to martians thus they pulled it even though 10,000 are screaming for it .... that's how Apple rolls.

And you hit the nail on the head with "support". I've had the service for two months, and even though I am very happen with it overall I am concerned with the overall support of the product, so far. This is especially noticable with the last two outages when new countries were rolled out, and yet their support structure had no clue what was going on. I want to see the problems fixed, but it's frustrating when you call them and all you get is "did you reboot the PC or turn off / turn on Match"? These problems should have already gotten to their engineering areas and should at least be acknowledged.

I'm actually going to put them to test on Saturday, when I go visit the Apple Store. Bringing my laptop with me all setup to show them my explicit tracks changing over to clean, and my mono tracks flipping to stereo, and then I will ask "what do we do about this?". The problem, as I see it, is that Apple is still a hardware company at heart so this is really new territory for them.

overall I am concerned with the overall support of the product, so far. This is especially noticable with the last two outages when new countries were rolled out, and yet their support structure had no clue what was going on. I want to see the problems fixed, but it's frustrating when you call them and all you get is "did you reboot the PC or turn off / turn on Match"? These problems should have already gotten to their engineering areas and should at least be acknowledged.

Well, I can confirm this. Shortly after the roll-out here in the Netherlands I contacted iTunes support by phone regarding these issues. The guy on the phone didn't know what was going on and was clearly not instructed. It was a useless conversation (at €0,10 per minute) where the caller (me) appeared to understand better what the issues were than the support employee.

I'm disappointed in Apple, which doesn't happen that often by the way. Allthough I still think iTunes Match is a great service (it works for 60% of my library), it still gives the feeling to be in beta, support channels are not up to speed, yet I'm paying the full price...

I'm reporting to Apple a pretty poor match rate. Against both good ripped CDs which I own, and music purchased from the iTunes store. One example, which makes no sense. Jeff Waynes War of the Worlds. Ripped as 256 AAC. It's a two CD album. Matches tracks 1 & 2 from first disc, and tracks 1,2,5 & 6 from the second. Totally bonkers. And this kind of thing is all over my music collection having matched over a week...

Here is my solution. First, the albums that didn't match also did not have album art. I tried "liking" one song on Ping, and got an error message that the song does not exist in the store.

I copied and pasted the metadata for the entire album from the iTunes online. Now the album art was found. Then I deleted the album from the library and from iCloud(without deleting the files). Then I dragged the folder back in iTunes and voila - matched.

PeterS wrote:

I'm reporting to Apple a pretty poor match rate. Against both good ripped CDs which I own, and music purchased from the iTunes store.

In general, music purchased from the iTunes store shouldn't "match." It shoudl be identified as "purchased" which is not the same thing because store purchases do not count against the 25K track limit. I say "in general" becuase there are reasons a purchased track might be "matched" because, for example, it might no longer be available on the store, or it may have been altered on the back-end in some way that makes it no longer the same tracks you originally purchased. As a rule, anything that is in your purchase history (if you are in a region that has iTunes in the Cloud available to you) should be identified as "purchased" rather than "matched."

What do you mean by "copied and pasted the metadata from the iTunes online"? Only title, artist and album or more specific? Hope this will work for me!