itunes chopping off end of songs now that i signed up for match

I have been having the same problem for a while. It used to pretty bad on the iPhone 5 but it doesn't seem to be happening on the iPhone 5 for me anymore. iTunes 11 on Mac is pretty bad though. Sometimes it will cut like 10 secs off the end of the song, other times it will get about 30 seconds in and then just go to the next track. It happens everytime with the same track. Yet when I go an play the same track on my iPhone it will play right the way through with no problems so the data for the file is obviously there.

What I did do when I got iTunes Match was delete all the originals and re-downloaded the iTunes Match version (higher quality iTunes Store version). I have found deleting the song from iTunes then redownloading it from iCloud usually fixes the problem but with 17,000+ (100GB+) songs in my library it is not a practical solution even if I was to have a superfast internet connection.

I will add that recently I had problems with my iPhone's iTunes Match which meant I had to redownload all my music to my iPhone and I have had no skipping problems since. So maybe redownloading everything is the only option..

This happens on my fathers iPod Classic as well and he doesn't have iTunes Match so as others have said, this is obviously not an iTunes Match issue, but the way iTunes and Music apps on iOS devices are handling the files.

Apple needs to sort this out. It has been going on since 2011 and as a result I am finding myself on Spotify more and more, which is a shame because I really like the new iTunes 11 apart from this issue, but it is a pretty big issue.

I would say a pay service altering our files is a HUGE deal and I wonder why it is not being addressed. For such a customer-centric company this is completely unacceptable! I am very unhappy.

Slight update. I downloaded from the cloud one aof the songs that was cutting off, on my iPhone. It still cuts off even when downloading cloud copy, which theretically is the one I purchased from Apple many years ago. Very concerning.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that the files from iTunes themselves contain some sort of slight corruption. I have one album where I thought all the songs were ending early. I'm revisiting that album and finding that only half the songs are ending early - the half of the songs that matched. The other half of the songs did not match (they were uploaded) and they play fine to the end.

Half match because the album itself is not on iTunes, but half the songs are on a Greatest Hits album by the same artist. The other half are not on iTunes at all.

In addition, even though the matched songs play through to the end when played in iTunes on my computer, the scrubber (the countdown timer to the end of the song) hangs up for a few seconds at the exact time that the song cuts off early on my iPhone, which is at 0:22 to the end. The timer stays on 0:22 for 5 seconds, then immediately skips to 0:17 seconds left and hangs up for 5 seconds, skips to 0:12 seconds left and then counts down normally til the end of the song.

I think the song from iTunes is corrupted no matter how many times I try to redownload it. But somehow the iTunes player on my computer has better error correction than the player on my iPhone.

Okay, here's something weird.

When I play my songs through iTunes on my PC, they exhibit the behavior in my post above. In short, the scrubber acts funny in the countdown at the end (at 0:22 second til the end), but the song does play til the end. AS LONG AS the physical file is present on my PC in either MP3 or AAC format, this happens.

If I delete the file from my PC, but do not delete it from iCloud, then play the song, it cuts off at 0:22 seconds until the end just like it does on my iPhone, which of course only has access to the iTunes version of the song and not the original file.

This is one of the MATCHED songs. I think the file in iTunes that the song is matching to is corrupted in the iTunes store.

Well, if that is the case apple has hundreds of thousands of songs corrupted if just myself has over 100. My best guess is there is a flaw in match that they are or need to address, and fast! Making me quite upset.

Does anyone from Apple even bother to read these posts? It seems like they would have said something by now.

I have a similar problem, not exactly the same but I suspect it may be related.

I use iTunes Match to upgrage my old inferior ripped CDs to higher quality versions, as many people do.

Usually the new high quality Apple files are no problem, but...

Sometimes I'll match a song and download the Apple version and there are audio dropouts with the new download. The audio skips for half a second and then resumes playing.

I've tried deleting the bad tracks from iCloud and rematching them, I've tried disabling 'Allow Simultaneous Downloads' when downloading the Apple tracks, I've tried rematching the songs from other CDs and other sources, but nothing works. The same audio dropouts occur at the exact same points for some tracks.

Anyone else experienced anything like this?

"Does anyone from Apple even bother to read these posts? It seems like they would have said something by now." — The only reliable way to have your complaints actually reach somebody at Apple, is to give feedback. Unfortunately, there is no dedicated iTunes Match entry on the feedback page (nor is there under Apple TV, iPhone, iTunes or iCloud, for that matter). But still, please complain about these iTunes Match issues through one of these pages. I've done it on all four, by the way. Just to be sure.

The Apple Support Communities are for customers only. Apple does probably read them, but I've never seen anobody from Apple actually respond yet. So no, here is not the right place to complain and expect Apple to see it. Let alone do anything.

I will leave feedback, however this incident is not isolated to a few.

I've left feedback and will again. This problem isn't just happening with Match customers - I don't use match and my songs have been getting cut off early the same way. I will never consider buying Match and I did not buy any iTunes gift cards for Christmas gifts because of this ridiculous problem.

Well I just switched to it and I am not happy.

Johnny Appleseed's solution seems perfect, except that I don't have a spare iPod to copy all my files with "convert to 128k AAC" enabled.

I've spent hours trying to figure out how to deal with all the cut off songs in my iTunes library with no luck. With a library of 20,000 tracks and some unknown but significant number of cut off files it's a real pain.

Last night I was experimenting and I wonder if I might have the beginnings of a way forward. I was experimenting with http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ because it can create a list of all the files in your library, including whatever details you want for each file. You can find some example reports here: http://forums.mp3tag.de/index.php?showtopic=1563

The problem is, how do you identify which files in your library are cut short? My theory is that the cut off files are a smaller file size than they should be. But the meta data for each track shows the length of the track as it should be, not the cut short length. So I created a custom HTML report in mp3tag that includes the file size and length for each of my songs. Then I copied it into Excel where I divided the length of each song by its file size and looked for discrepancies. But I couldn't see what I was looking for. No numbers jumped out at me identifying the corrupt files. I think the problem was that the bit rate for each file is different so there is no simple correlation between file size and length.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was some attribute of the meta data of a file that identified that it was a corrupt cut off file?

The only other solution I have is to go to the last 20 seconds of each song in my library to see if the file is corrupt. I sat in bed last night doing this for about half an hour and must have tested a couple of hundred files before my wife kicked me out because the mouse clicking was driving her mad.

Please apple resolve this iTunes Match cut off file problem so I can save my marriage.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if a service we paid for worked and we did not have to code HTML or whatever to make it work?

Not my baileywick.

Hi everyone - this was a solution posed earlier in the thread that I found to be successful. I listen to iTunes for several hours a day at work, and the problem was widespread and has basically disappeared. So please consider giving this a try. (and I can't take credit for this, someone else worked with Apple on this).

I'm on a windows so some of this may vary for ya mac users out there.

First close down itunes

Next go to your itunes music library.

(Turn on show file extensions)

Move iTunes Music Library.xml to your desktop

Move iTunes Library .itl to your trash/recycling bin

Now open Itunes

Go to File -> Library -> Import playlist and then select the iTunes Music Library.xml (which was on the desktop)

Now depending on your library size/speed of computer this can take a few moments

Assuming this works for you, and if you have other products (iPhone, iPad) that you use, you need to delete all of the music files from those devices, and then reload the music onto them. Otherwise, songs on those devices that had issues won't be fixed.

A few other thoughts in case you have questions. I didn't find this to be a Match issue (I wasn't using Match, nor were many others who had this issue), and it also seemed that although the songs were ending prematurely, we didn't find that it was corrupt files, it was more of an issue with iTunes.

Hope this works for you.