How to delete everything in my iCloud/iTunes Match

Go into your filters in iTunes and enable iCloud Download and iCloud Status. Filter your songs by status and it will show you all the songs that have been duplicated. Delete those songs and it should be fine. You could also try a backup restore via TimeMachine by restoring your itunes song library and database.

The problem with the above suggestion is that it will also delete the track listing within iTunes itself, along with all the metadata (playlists, playcount, last played date, etc.)

A better way to go about this, I've found, is this:

Turn off iTunes Match. Quit iTunes.

Hold down the OPTION key while re-launching iTunes. A dialog will appear. Create a brand new library, call it whatever you want ("iTunes TEMP" should do.) Then turn on iTunes Match. It will then download the whole index of songs that have been sent to the cloud (via matching, uploading, or because you've purchased them) in this new library you've created. Then you can simply select all of these tracks, hit delete -- and it will delete these songs from iTunes Match. Your iTunes Match is now empty. Then turn off iTunes Match , and quit iTunes.

Hold down the OPTION key while launching iTunes... and this time, select your original iTunes library.

After you've determined that all is well, you can safely delete that other "iTunes TEMP" folder.

I like this approach, but I would add one other thing that took me a bit to figure out. If you have a large library uploaded, leave your new blank iTunes open for a while. It takes almost as long to eliminate the iCloud library as it took to upload it, but if you close iTunes right away, this process stops.

I would do as above, and resign in, noting that a hundred or two of the 6000 songs would be deleted. But after I left the blank library open for a couple of hours, it was completely empty.

Thanks to Fofer, the approach is great. Also, as hixer pointed out, it does take time (infact there seems to be limitation). But there is a trick to clear your entire iCloud library in minutes. Here is what I found:

When you delete your library from iCloud, the deletion is limited to 1001 songs. These are deleted immediately. You may then update itunes match to see what is still left in iCloud. You will observe that the number of songs after updating decreases by 1001. You may continue to delete and update itunes match until all the music is clear from iCloud. This should take just a few minutes and you need not wait for a long time.

Stupid question, but what is the equivalent of the 'option' button for Windows? 😊

Not to worry - worked out it was 'shift' I needed.

Actually, isn't it the "Alt" key?

'Alt' seemed like the logical option, so I tried it first but it just opens up the iTunes properties box. Then I tried 'shift' and it opened up the above dialog box with the option to create a new library, which I did.

I can confirm what CodeNameG1 said, that only about 1000 songs are deleted each time. I already tried this approach of deleting the iTunes Matches from the cloud via a Temp library. I did not realize that it had not deleted everything. I leaves you with any empty Music folder. You don't realize it has not deleted the entire iCloud contents unless you do an update. So the first time I deleted from the Temp library, then switched to my main library and ran match again. Two days later when it was done I wondered why I still had a mess. Now I think I know. argh.

So I am doing it again, hitting the delete and then updating my iMatch each time, gradually whittling down the index in iCloud 1000 at a time... I hope this time by making sure the iMatch index is truly fully deleted I can build a correct iMatch.

OK - I just went through the process of using the Temp library to reset my match index in iTunes. It did not appear to work. Once I was sure that my Temp library was showing nothing, I turned off Match, quit iTunes and restarted. I then opened the library I wanted to work with and turned on match. The first step library scan went suspiciously quik. To my dismay now all my songs show up with the iCloud status of Removed, with a small number of curious exceptions that say Uploaded. Clicking on the X in a cloud icon on individual tracks generates the prompt to Add to iCloud, Keep Song and Delete Song. This is no good since this appears as a track by track option. I can't go through 7000+ tracks one at a time.

It appears that deleting from iCloud does not exactly set the slate clean. iClouds remembers you deleted them and won't let you batch restore in anyway I can see. We still need a way to completely remove the iCloud index so it does not have any history of the tracks whatsoever so a clean match can be done.

I deleted everything using the 1k at a time method (took ages to delete 10k as iTunes Match was so slow updating once each 1k were deleted) and it appears to be a clean delete... I started the entire upload/match again and encountered no issues with deleted tracks being recognised.

I've done enough replacements to be comfortable in saying that even if you delete tracks, do an update of Match so it's got a copy of your library database without those tracks, that sometimes it can take awhile before the changes really "take". In one case I had to wait a day, but most of the time, it only seems to take a few minutes.

Main thing though is, if you haven't done a manual update after deleting tracks, iTunes Match may take some time to take another look on its own.

I called Apple Support about this and they were very helpful. There appears to be little known at Apple about how to clear out the iTunes matches and start again. After some consultation with the engineers I was advised that the only way to accomplish this was via a special request to the Tier 3 Support Group. They would have to "nuke" my iTunes Match settings on the server. Apparently this cannot be performed by the user and this special nuke request can only be initiated based on circumstances where things are seriously screwed up. I guess I qualified.

Why my experience with deleting from an empty temporary library resulted is tracks listed is an iCloud status of removed is unclear. Maybe if I had waited another day it would have cleared itself. But I called Apple instead. I am now waiting for them to get back to me to say my matches have been cleared and that I can try to run a new matching procedure.

Hopefully as iTunes Match evolves tools will be provided for the user to do this sort of refresh.

Terry North wrote:

Why my experience with deleting from an empty temporary library resulted is tracks listed is an iCloud status of removed is unclear. Maybe if I had waited another day it would have cleared itself. But I called Apple instead. I am now waiting for them to get back to me to say my matches have been cleared and that I can try to run a new matching procedure.

I know exactly why tracks in your iTunes library became marked "removed" after you did that. It is, simply, becaues you "removed" them from the server. I've done this also and was then able to highlight the "removed" tracks in my master iTunes library, right-click and choose "add to iCloud" and the tracks were scanned, matched, and/or uploaded again.

The key question, though, is how long do we have to wait after we "remove" tracks the way you did are the tracks actually purged from the server? I know over night doesn't seem to be quite long enough.

Terry

I have the same problem. How did ou get someone on the phone who could do this. I keep getting directed to email support.

I didn't do anything special to get support for this. I just called the Apple support number - 800-APL-CARE (800-275-2273). After a minute or so dealing with the automated system I eventually got a live person.

BTW- my problem was fixed by their Tier 3 support group. The support rep got back to me after about 2 days and let me know it was OK to do it again, I went back in and re-ran match and everything is OK now. Although my experience working with iTunes match itself was very frustrating, my experience with Apple Support was very good.