Has Apple gone public about the iTunes Match disaster?

Turning off iTunes Match addressed the 2000 playlist duplication on my devices except the iPhone. After a few emails it now looks like someone at Apple deleted the duplicates, but didn't explain how/why they got there in the first place.

Apple has refused to refund my money, so I have taken the matter up with AmEx.

I thought it was a disaster, it's taken me a week of buggering around to get my library slowly rebuilt and uploaded.

That said, I have managed to get everything matched and uploaded using the right-click (Windows) add to icloud function, and now I've even managed to import my old playlists too.

With the state its in at the moment, adding my whole library using the automatic itunes function was out of the question, I've only managed to get it going by building a new itunes library and slowly adding music in chunks.

Even now, after it's all in, if I try to use the 'update itunes match' function, it dies complaining about a network error with genius. 'Genius'!

After all this, the iphone took quite some time to start displaying everything OK. This scared me at first, and I thought all the effort was wasted, but eventually it worked itself out.

Now I can finally listen to anything on my iphone, including playlists over the entire library, I'm pretty stoked!

It's very buggy right now, but still I think it's a great service. Once the bugs are ironed out a bit more it'll be OK for a much broader audience. Right now you have to be OCD and a bit of an IT or music nerd to be happy with it.

Glad you got it working. My library is 19,000+ songs, about 95% in apple lossless format. I had no problem matching and uploading (a great deal of music not available on iTunes), so it actually took 3 days for the match to complete.

I do like that if I'm in the office, and want to listen so a specific album or playlist on the way home, I can choose them and they are downloaded to my iPhone. While I can delete the songs later when I want to save precious space or download something else, I am disappointed with the playlist feature. If you delete a downloaded song or album from your iOS device, it is still in the cloud, and it is still on your Mac. However....and this is frustrating....if you delete a playlist from your iOS device, that playlist is deleted from your Mac! The songs are there, but the playlist is not. If you have taken time to create a playlist, you know how difficult and time consuming it can be to redo it. The way it should work is (1) if you delete the playlist from the phone, it should still be on your computer; (2) if you have a song or songs in the playlist that are also part of an album you separately downloaded, your phone shows it both under the album and under the playlist -- it should still keep the song on your phone when you delete the playlist since it is part of an album downloaded and not deleted.

The playlist delete issue is quite serious...the only way around it now is to manually delete each song in the playlist from your iOS device -- that keeps the playlist on your computer. Just an oversight, I imagine...

I've had a similar problem. iTunes Match was working great, until all of a sudden I got hit with the "thousands of duplicate playlists propagating across all iTunes Match devices" problem. And I'm pretty sure I have way more than 2000.

I'm currently working with Apple Support trying to sort it out, but their initial fixes did not solve the problem.

I'm aware of the AppleScript fixes online here, and have used them, but that's just a band-aid fix that's covering over the real problem (and it only helps with my Mac's iTunes library, not my iPhone or iPod touch).

I have the same problem...I deleted manually in the Mac the play list (it took for ever) but no solution for the iPhone or the iPad - in such situation the Match service is unuseable. i do not see how to get support nor any solution. I'm very disapointed.

My understanding is that with iOS 6, you can STREAM from iCloud rather than download the songs to play. If that's the case, it solves the problem to an extent. I've been toying around with the Amazon cloud drive....I streamed an album I purchased from Amazon to my phone today at work...responsive, no lags (wifi)....pretty impressive. If iCloud can do this, it will solve my problem. I also use the ORB app to stream from my MacPro at home. Works well, but it goes from my MacPro, to the ORB server to my phone, so at first it's slow. Looking forward to iOS 6.

Only XM wrote:

My understanding is that with iOS 6, you can STREAM from iCloud rather than download the songs to play.

No, that function is provided by iTunes Match, iCloud is not required.

yes, that is what I meant! Streaming from apple through match! I look forward to it.