Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Any official word from the company about this major embarrassment? Or are its PR and Legal departments advising Apple to keep it hush hush?
iPhone 4, iOS 5
it works for me so i guess its 99% a disaster
Make that 98%. I retract my earlier criticism. iTunes Match is fantastic. Waiting 4 days for the upload was a pain, but it finally completed, now works perfectly, and I have almost instant access to 13000 songs on my iPhone. It is really great.
It's the greatest thing since sliced bread -- when it works. The matched songs are available on my phone, all 19,000 of them. But the upload process is buggy.
In the Windows version of iTunes, when I right-click on a song whose iCloud Status is "Waiting", there's no "Add to iCloud" option. So I can't even do them a few at a time. So there's no way to figure out which ones it doesn't like.
I've only got DSL at home with a maximum upload speed of 384 Kbps if I get lucky (the result of living a few feet too far out of reach from all local cable providers), so I plan to see how well it moves when I Match a copy of my library at my significant other's house with his screaming fast connection. I've got 1200 files that were not matched and now pending for upload. It took 3 days to upload less than 500 songs, so I've halted the process for now.
Fingers crossed.
davidespinosa wrote:
ITunes Match is is 100% absolutely a disaster. It should never have been released with major bugs.
Uploading certain songs crashes the Windows version of iTunes.
This problem could certainly have been detected before release -- it's not hard to find people with large libraries.
The bug is major because there's no workaround, and it renders the product unusuable. It's not just in a feature you that you can avoid (unless you avoid Match altogether, of course).
Apple will fix it eventually. But it would be nice if they would issue a statement apologizing for wasting everyone's time.
You should immediately stop using it then.
zipflash wrote:
Make that 98%. I retract my earlier criticism. iTunes Match is fantastic. Waiting 4 days for the upload was a pain, but it finally completed, now works perfectly, and I have almost instant access to 13000 songs on my iPhone. It is really great.
It's working great for me and a guy I heard about in Idaho, so we are at 96% now
I am not sure if it is working or not yet. My main library is not showing any signs of disaster and on my laptop lots of my music has nice little clouds next to them and when I play them they just work. I haven't played with my phone or iPad yet. Been too busy.
As far as Match being a disaster I think that statement is false. I love how people are counting themselves as 1% of the mass... LOL I know its a joke but it is funny. Obviously in a problem based forum we will see the problems but that doesn't mean its a disaster and expecting Apple to apologize is pretty unrealistic. There are a bunch of us that would ask... apologize for what? Giving us a great cloud based music storage system?
I suggest you give it some more time or as was mentioned earlier, turn it off on all your devices and sync the old way.
Obviously this is a major bug for you, specifically, and probably for a small percentage of others, but your logic is faulty when you assume that this must be a major bug for Apple. Every software used by a sufficiently large population of users on different hardware is going to have bugs for some users. You're also making a faulty assumption that the problem exists because you have a large library of music. I have a couple friends with huge libraries and it is working fine for them, so it doesn't seem that this is an issue of volume so much as specific configuration, either of your library or your machine.
If you got in touch with Apple and let them know what exact issues you're facing and what your system looks like, it would help them to start to work up a profile of the errors and tackle them for the good of all. If you're unhappy with the service, asking for a refund certainly seems reasonable and I hope they will take care of that for you, forthwith. And as someone above suggested, turn it back off for now.
Best of luck, David.
Rod410 wrote:
Its still in beta. this is not the final product so of course you are going to have some issues. i uploaded 13,000 songs and it works fine for me. it took a day and a half but it works. just give it some more time.
Not in beta, I think there was mistakenly a "beta" tag briefly when it first went public but that was a mistake. If apple wanted to release it as a beta they should have made the public beta version free and charged when it left beta status.
I'm glad it's working without incident for a few people, but others are having major problems and there are a number of bugs that appear to affect all users, with no way to fix them.
It is rather amusing to be reading from the apologists, some of whom even insist in calling the (paid) service "in beta". I am of course spent on this topic but will try to take it for another spin. I am genuinely happy that the iTunes Match scheme seems to have worked for some. As I have written here and elsewhere, I will soon be getting my refund and Match is in off mode for me. It is always possible that some of us were not part of the target audience for this. I may be offbase but I am thinking of the teenage and younger crowd that I am sure Apple is after. The ones raised with online digital music at their fingertips. Presumably this is also the Lady Gaga crowd. And I write this with utmost contempt, for no one could pay me enough to listen to that crap, let alone have any of it live in my music lib. So what I am trying to say is that iTunes Match may have been designed with these folks in mind, certain that a good amount of these folks' music would find a match up in the cloud. But my story is a little different although not that unusual in reality. The vast majority of my music collection (~7,000 tracks or 40.71 GB, so nothing outrageous) comes from ripped CDs of my own and most of it is classical (gasp). So little of it got matched meaning that the vast majority had to be uploaded. Since this is such a crucial step in the process (albeit a onetime scenario, true), it is evident that Apple engineers looked the other way on scenarios like mine. But not only that. They also looked the other way without telling us about minimum upload connection requirements. Had I known I would have first done a little advance research about my upload connectivity speed, helping me decide whether to pursue this or not. It turns out my paltry WiFi just couldn't cope with the load, causing me to literally waste anywhere between 3 to 4 days of unnecessary effort to no avail. And no, I don't have access to a sexier connection anywhere else. Apple negligently took away my right to participate in this service. And it mocked those of us who don't give a **** about mainstream pop. I think this encapsulates the affront by Apple of having released this product in a bug ridden state and with little to no documentation about network connectivity requirements and other expectations.
There is no negligence involved in a service that just isn't right for you. There is even an old cliche "you can't please all the people all the time". So you're not pleased. Get a refund and turn it off. I hardly think that Apple is mocking you or your musical taste. That's a bit paranoid. The honest truth is that your tastes, as described by you, are not "popular", sometimes referred to as "profitable" to pander to. So you know... relax. The world isn't out to get you.
2 days ago I would have also called it a disaster - at least for me it was. I had over 13,000 songs in my library and even though iTunes said they were all matched or uploaded, many were grayed out and I could not download them from the cloud onto my iTouch. Somehow that all changed last night. All of my tracks are now there and with only a few exceptions, all of the artwork is there too. Maybe with so many people using match during it's first week, the system is just slow and is taking a while to catch up. Now if they would just add a forced upload option, I would be thrilled. I'd even be willing to pay extra for the added space it would take up on their end.
ill say it again. its only $25. you are not going to lose any sleep and your world is not going to end over it. and to those that say that $25 is alot of money to some people, you are right but it must not have that much if you decided to spend it on something that is not a necessity. the product has not even been ou for a week and people want it to be perfect. its going to have problems and issues for a little while but they will release a update when they work out all of the kinks. relax its not that serious.
You don't seem to get it. The paid, albeit optional, service should be as right for me as for anybody else who chooses to subscribe to it. There is no paranoia, only disgust and disappointment from an experience gone terribly awry.
Funny to be reading two back-to-back admonishments to "relax". For sure, it's not the end of the world. But what's funny is that the admonishments come from two folks who appear to have had a positive experience with Match, thus they preach from their position of "privilege". And that's just too bad because they are failing to understand that others like me were left in the dust through no fault of their own. That off my chest, think I'll relax now.
Has Apple gone public about the iTunes Match disaster?
