Some uploaded songs don't play on my iPhone

This has nothing to do with encoding or file types or anything other than a bug in MATCH as far as I can tell.

I had an entire album that I loaded myself onto this computer, then I ran MATCH and it updated the status to matched for all songs and my partner and I both put the entire album onto our phones and it worked for both of us. All songs.

Yesterday, my partner was deleting some music from her phone, and accidentally deleted one of the songs. When she tried to download it from MATCH, she received a message

This item cannot be downloaded.

The item you have requested is not available for download.

It still played on my phone no issues. Then in order to try and correct it, we deleted the album from her phone and tried to load it back.

Now, 3 songs out of 11 give that message, and the others downloaded fine.

So I tested on mine. Deleted one of the three songs from my phone, then tried to load it again, same message. Then tried the other two that didn't work on her phone. They don't load now. Then deleted the remaining 8 and loaded again and they worked fine.

I think this is one that Apple has to figure out, because it is not a user issue. It bugs me that there is always an presupposition that it is something users did as opposed to an application issue.

I have been having similar issues while playing songs off my iTunes match. Getting messages that say The item cannot be played. The item requested is not available. I contacted apple and they said it was my internet which is garbage considering it worked fine for months until they recently did an update.

Yeah. It's rubbish at the moment. Something really screwy is happening to ITM. It now sticks on waiting as well as getting item not available for download. Been running it since day it was available but it just doesn't work properly

My problem is getting worse and it seems to involve both matched and uploaded music.

I have a song which was matched, not uploaded and suddenly it won't play on aTV or 4s. I went into iTunes, backed up the music file and deleted it from iTunes and ITM. Then I readded it. Its the only music I've added today and I have good internet connection. 30+ minutesits status showed "uploaded"---not matched as it was before, uploaded. Now it plays.

I have another song which was uploaded which suddenly also stopped working. I've done the same with it. I'll see if it fares any better, once it finally uploads again.

Something is going seriously sideways in ITM lately.

Probably won't help you guys, but I just fixed a slightly different issue where iTunes was telling me that I had songs on my iPhone, but when I went to play them (from my iPhone, through iTunes), I'd get the exclamation mark coming up telling me the song was missing. They didn't show up in my music library on the iPhone at all, just in iTunes.

The way I solved it was to create a new, blank playlist. Then I autofilled this playlist to my iPhone with the 'Replace all items' setting checked.

I suspect the issue had something to do with the 'Reserve space for disk use' setting, which I ended up cranking down to zero KB just in case. Maybe iTunes adds the song IDs to the device before it actually copies them across, then it hits the size limit and stops copying the songs, but keeps the IDs...? Just speculating...

It really worked! Dont know, why, but it did! Thanks...

I'm still facing this issue with my new iPhone 5 and iOS6... unbelievable. And by "this issue" I mean: songs are supposed to be on my iPhone and are shown in the library in black print and without a cloud icon beside them, but they won't play! The music app keeps skipping through the songs until it finds one that will play...

This is not the only issue I'm having with iTunes Match. Another one: every few days or weeks, iTunes on my Mac will - without any apparent reason - show a lightning bolt in the cloud icon and require me to turn iTunes Match off and on again. This is just a slight problem compared to the songs not playing, but still... it's been happening for too long now and Apple doesn't seem to know how to fix it.

For me, the problems by far outweigh the benefits of iTunes Match.

By the way, this is how I "solved" my problem... I disabled iTunes Match on my iPhone. I connected it to iTunes on my Mac and told it to NOT sync music. After that, I noticed that the albums that wouldn't play were still on my iPhone, so I deleted them (by swiping from left to right on the album title in the music app) - by the way, just an hour ago Apple support told me that it wasn't possible to delete albums directly on the iPhone. My iPhone must be different than theirs... After that I synced all my music back to the iPhone using iTunes.

So you have to make sure to remove the "dead" songs iTunes Match left behind on your iPhone before you attempt to sync with your iTunes Library, otherwise it won't work. Now all my music plays perfectly and I'm not inclined to enable iTunes Match again until Apple fixes this mess...

To make matters worse, Apple support still seems pretty clueless about iTunes Match and iCloud and how it's all supposed to play together, let alone what to do if it doesn't. This is my personal experience - obviously there are bound to be some really good people, but I've almost always been unlucky when I called...

I am having the exact same problem. iTunes Match is not working. I have to manually manage the songs in my iTunes library to get them to appear on my iPhone 5.

Here is how I fixed it.

Open the latest version of iTunes.

Choose Store > Sign In.

Enter your Apple ID and password, and click Sign In.

Choose Store > View My Account. You may be asked to re-enter your Apple ID password.

In the "iTunes in the Cloud" section, click Turn Off Auto-Renew to the right of iTunes Match.

I canceled it because it is wasting to much of my time and energy. " everything just works on a MAC" haha hardly.

guys just try this>. it worked

You need to sync your iTunes with your iPhone if the songs are gray and won't play. For iTunes 7 or later, connect the device to your computer. Open iTunes. Select iPhone in the Devices list. Click the Summary tab and select Manually manage music and videos. Click Apply. Even when you have enabled manual management, you can still sync some content automatically.

guys just try this>. it worked

You need to sync your iTunes with your iPhone if the songs are gray and won't play. For iTunes 7 or later, connect the device to your computer. Open iTunes. Select iPhone in the Devices list. Click the Summary tab and select Manually manage music and videos. Click Apply. Even when you have enabled manual management, you can still sync some content automatically.

RuelPaco.. Song are still grey, and when i try to add the song manually itues doesnt let me because I have "Match" turned on.

I just turned off Match.. Added the Song Manually, and its grey on my phone I can't play it.

Hi, I'm exactlly the same, did you ever get it sorted?

Dec