iTunes Match Step 3 Stuck

Is that from an article or your own experience?

My main iTunes library is on a old PPC machine running 10.5.8, and iTunes Match has required a TON of handholding for a relatively small library. This is in addition to the problems other have been reporting (matches failing, oddly uploading some podcasts, etc).

Just to add a few more data points to this:

I have had a very difficult time with Step 3 failing with the last ~150/6000 songs in my library. In my experience:

It is not a firewall issue

It is not a bit rate issue

I suspect it MAY be a bug in iTunes for PPC machines and/or System 10.5.8. In my case songs that would hang iTunes would upload just fine when added to a different machine running 10.6.8 and uploaded to iTunes Match from that machine. No bitrate conversion was required. These files would not load to iTunes Match from a PPC machine but loaded fine from an Intel machine.

Also, when my PPC machine was getting stuck, it was not getting stuck with any particular song file, the only file open was the iTunes Cache.db file, and rebuilding that cache file did not solve the problem.

Also, the "Add to iCloud" context menu option does not appear to be available from 10.5.8.

UPDATE: I had all but given up on this problem. Was just going to let Match sit there until an iTunes update is released. Out of sheer curiosity and coincidence I went and checked that statuses of all the remainging songs left to be uploaded (labeled "Waiting"). To my surprise they had all been uploaded. I don't know how this happened since I had "stopped" iTunes Match a couple of days ago. So, at least for me this problem solved itself. I don't know how. I don't know why. For this I am grateful.

I was trying to upload a 7000 song library to itunes match. I was experiencing many of the things that were described here. I tried many of what was described here. What finally worked for me was I took the hard drive that I had my library on to work where I have a T1 connection. I instructed itunes to open the library on the hard drive and everything went beautifully. In 2-3 hours, everything was done.

This really makes me think that it was the internet connection. At home, I have a relatively fast connection with Charter Cable. But almost everything that others were describing was happening to me. But not on my fast ethernet connection at work.

How to solve stage 3 lockups, yes it does work been doing it myself.

Stop match.

Choose an album that has tracks waiting, delete the whole album but keep files.

Add files back into ITunes then highlight the whole album.

Right click and go to add to icloud. Bingo it loads the album to the cloud.

Before you ask, yes you have double the tracks, but when it uploads the old ones go.

same here in Australia - it uploaded a few hundred tracks, is now stuck on Daft Punk for last few weeks - I'm pretty sure its an Apple problem, not connection or firewalls or anything else.

please sort it out Apple.

try this.

go to iTunes - click on music - then click on 'time' to sort from longest to shortest song.

some of my 'songs' are over 1 hour long e.g. particularly on albums that have continuous play, iTunes is not recogising them as tacks.

my iTunes match looks like it is taking a long time to upload these and hence, looks like it is stalling.

not sure if this is whats going on, but maybe.

You are a legend! Thanks very much - this will allow me to upload the remaining tracks and identify any that have problems.

I concur. I also have PPC and intel macs and the problem is with the PPC.

Thanks sapintel,

The tip about using the Activity Monitor to inspect the iTunes process and then using the "Open Files and Ports" view to see which song was hanging up the iTunes Music Match upload process worked like a charm. I was able to spot the offending song title and file location after scrolling down through the "Open Files and Ports" window. I removed that song, restarted iTunes and the process was able to complete all 3 steps within just a few seconds.

Thanks again.

• - Initially I had problems with step 3 freezing after only 1 song had been uploaded (although at times it was just a large file that took time to upload). After trying the below (suggested in this order) any issues seemed to be resolved and I am now the happy owner of 13,000+ songs in the cloud (around 5,000 of which were uploaded)
• - Steps to follow if step 3 freezes:
  1. Update to the latest version of iTunes (recent updates have included fixes for iTunes match, so I would suggest doing this first if you have issues uploading)
  2. If the above doesn’t fix your issue, you can delete out your whole library and re-load it: I had to do this a couple of times and each time it then proved better at uploading the remaining tracks
  3. If neither of the above work then you can delete out the whole library and re-add certain albums (and try adding each album to the iCloud one by one)
• - iCould statuses and my interpretations:
  1. Matched: matched with the same song in the iTunes catalogue and no need for upload, but available in the iCloud
  2. Uploaded: not matched and therefore uploaded to the iCloud
  3. Error: this looks to be files that haven’t uploaded correctly, possibly due to timing out (due to size) but also other reasons – sometimes adding this again to iCloud fixes this issue (once the majority of your catalogue has been uploaded), but at other times the file just does not want to upload and there were certain tracks that I had to re-purchase from iTunes in order for the file to be available in the iCloud
  4. Waiting: iTunes match is waiting to match/upload the file – usually this will be one that is waiting to upload and will do so once the catalogue has been checked
  5. Ineligible: this either relates to
     • the file size (more than 200MB)
     • or the bit rate (less than 96kbps. Hopefully not many files will be this low quality: for me it was 5 albums from thousands)
     • or if the files in your library were purchased with another iTunes account that hasn’t been authorised on your computer (once authorised, these files can be matched)
     • or the file is a (music) video

Do you know what data is lost when deleting iTunes library & reimporting it with the xml file? ideally I don't want to lose playlists & ratings mainly..

Only thing that worked for me : http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Now iTunes Match works like a charm.