iTunes Match doesn't match every song on an album

The fact is that this post is 6 years old and the problem still exists. iTunes Match is a failed service. Well over 50% of my library isn't recognized. Yet if I uploaded any of these songs with a video to YouTube or Facebook it would be flagged in a second.

I have an extensive library and to fix this would require that I re-rip about 17,000 songs. I honestly regret purchasing the service. It is half baked. I'll go with Amazon and Google as the iTunes Match service is simply not reliable.

I TOO would like to know the answer to Mark's question & have been searching the forum so far with no avail :-(

Match is matching less than 50% of the songs purchased from iTunes. This is not what I expected. Match has been a big disaapointment as has been the iCloud. Looks like Apple still doesn't get the cloud and how it should work. Nice interface but nothing to back it up.

I seem to be doing better then everyone else, I have a 77% match rate, of the other 23% at least 60% I know are in the iTunes store, and I too have albums split between matched and uploaded. I just keep telling myself this is still only beta, one of my co-workers was part of the developer per-view, and said that the match rate was really bad for him but got better everytime they reset it.

I was looking for info regarding this issue as I have it myself. Just noticed that there is an 'Update iTunes Match' tab under the Store tab in iTunes. I think I will try that and see if it fixes or improves anything

Dr.Rico,

I tried that (Update iTunes Match) yesterday,.. but didnt see any changes to the album songs matched vs uploaded issue being discussed in this thread.

If it did change anything, it didnt change ENOUGH for me to notice.

Perhaps, I will give it another shot.

There seems to be another thread about the issue now, here is the link:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3494175?answerId=16762836022#16762836022

On that thread there is an article from MacWorld which states this:

Songs that are uploaded instead of matched may not be your fault

When iTunes Match can find a copy of your song on Apple’s servers, it doesn’t bother uploading the song file; Apple already has a clean, well-encoded copy available. When iTunes Match can’t match your song, that song gets uploaded to your iTunes Match cloud storage instead.

The Beatles's She Came In Through The Bathroom Window just won't match in our testing. We believe the issue lies on Apple's end.

So, Beatles fans, if you check your Abbey Road album in iTunes, you may well note that every track is listed as Matched save for one: “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window.” We’re not psychic; rather, we’ve simply noted across various Macworld editors and friends that—for reasons unknown—that track almost never matches properly unless you bought it from the iTunes Store. (One person in our experimentation did successfully get a ripped copy of the song from a Beatles box set to match successfully.) We’ve found numerous examples of other songs from all sorts of artists with the same issue: For a given album, some tracks will match and others won’t. Since it’s frequently the same song that doesn’t match for different folks, it’s likely that the matching problem is on Apple’s end. We’ve asked Apple for clarification on why the Bathroom Window issue exists, and on whether songs will automatically switch from Uploaded to Matched once Apple corrects any issues on its end, and will report back once the company responds.

link to the full article here:

http://www.macworld.com/article/163676/2011/11/secrets_of_itunes_match.html

Apple must be working on the matching algorithms behind the scenes because my ripped copy of SCITTBW was correctly "matched" and not uploaded.

I was able to resolve all problems I had with my library. I only have just under 3000 songs but I ran into all of the same problems discussed in these threads. The first thing to do is to right click the column headers and add the iCloud Status column. This will tell you why the little cloud with the line through it is showing for a particular song. I found two different reasons for all my ineligible songs:

1) it was a duplicate of another song, in this case the iCloud Status will say Duplicate (therefore you can just delete it because it has already been matched or uploaded). If you are concerned that this isn't true then just go to the album in question or search for the specific song and you will see two versions.

2) It was encoded in something other than what iTunes will accept. In these cases I just right clicked on the song and selected Create AAC Version. Once the new version is created, right click it and select Add to iCloud. You can then delete the other version once it is uploaded.

With regards to the Music Video problem many of us are having, iTunes will not upload or match any music videos that were not purchased from iTunes. This is an obvious problem and oversight since there is no other way to sync them once you enable iTunes Matching. My short term fix (hopefully will be short term anyway) was to select all the music videos that were not uploaded to iTunes, right click and select Get Info, select the Options tab, then change the Media Type to TV Show. This puts them all in my TV Shows section of iTunes and I can sync them with my iPad and iPhone using this. Not perfect, but it is a usable workaround.

Hope this helps some of you, ciao!

Steve

I had the same problem with London Calling by The Clash. If your files are ripped from the 1987 CD release, it chokes on half the songs (Spanish Bombs through The Card Cheat). If your files are from the 25th Anniversary Edition (2004) or 30th Anniversary Editions (2009), they ALL match.

I've seen this with a few albums that have had recent CD reissues. Slight differences in track times make all the difference.

Hey Steve

thanks for the suggestion - I am looking at the status bar - but I'm stuck - since when I right click I'm NOT given the option of converting to AAC - only to AIFF and wehn I do that the message is "could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats" - and this seems to apply to ALL of the 400 files that did not transfer - help!

Here's the clue to why these particular files having been "matched" or "uploaded." If iTunes is not authorized to play these files they will not be included in iTunes Match and will be classified as "ineligible." Do you know what iTunes Store account these files were purchased with? Alternatively, you can burn them to a music CD then re-import them.

Hi Michael - I'd be surprised if that was the reason - since I bought all the files myself from itunes on my own account - so they are all authorised. There are 400 files not matched - I suppose I could - are you sure that reimporting them would work? thanks for the suggestion

Unfortunately there is no certainty that burning to audio CD and re-importing them will work, but it couldn't hurt.