I am seeing "gathering information" forever

While the previous answers totally make sense, in my case however they did not help.

The "gathering information" simply hangs forever, no matter what I tried. The files I was trying to match/upload were in no way special/broken/garbled or alike.

For me, the problem appears to be routing specific. My provider's network seems to have problems communicating to Apple's iTunes match backend. What did solve the problem for me was switching to a VPN that used a different route.

So in case you run into this issue, the above really good hints do not solve it and you are on O2/Telefonica in Europe/Germany, try a VPN if available or wait and hope for the route to get fixed.

I have the same problem. iTunes Match has been gathering information for 4 days straight! I only have 5500 songs. I had deleted a bunch of lower bit rate songs to force Match to re-download full versions and now it won't stop.

I have seen similar problems with individual songs in 'Gathering for Information' never proceeding after I have been able to get my whole library into match. Every once in awhile, match will go back and do an update or I will add some music and it will get stuck. What I am finding is it gets stuck on songs it downloaded via match (i.e. matched songs from my library or purchased songs I deleted and redownloaded from match). Perhaps my solution for this case pertains to those with new libraries - I think it is a corrupt file or library entry in iTunes and I found a way to see which file it is stuck on.

On OSX:

- open up Activity Monitor

- Select the iTunes process. It usually shows activity constant around 60%

- Choose inspect

- Select Open Files and Ports

- Watch or scroll thru the list. Eventually you will notice a file name and path for a song to repeatedly flash or show up in the list and disappear. It may take a few seconds looking at different parts of the list to notice the changes as the list updates in real time. If a file contines to repeat, this is the song that is messed up. Remove it from your itunes library and see if match will then work.

If it was a bad file, you can try to re-add it but it will likely fail again. For songs I had downloaded from match that caused this for me, I just redownloaded from match and then it worked. I don't know if it was the file or the itunes library itself that was corrupt.

I created a new library with just the items that are on iCloud but now the issue getting all the downloads again from Match. I didn't think of the import and will give that a try. Thanks.

Thanks, using the Activity Monitor like you explained worked perfectly! I had three songs that kept popping up. Once I deleted them everything went back to normal and the rest of my music was matched. It helps if you stretch the Activity Monitor window as large as you can to see what is happening.

Looking at the activity monitor made me catch up with something I wasn't aware of before. I had a lot of Protected AAC files. Those were the ones popping up in the Activity Monitor. When I checked, I saw that they were duplicates. One was Protected, on was Matched. So I moved the Protected ones to a directory and deleted them from the library. And voila, everything worked...

Brilliant - thanks, tmksnyder!

That fixed it for me, but I also hadn't notice the 'Open Files and Ports' tab before; it may be very useful for other stuff!

Much appreciated!

I've had the same problem for days!!

However in my case the Activity Monitor 'Open Files and Ports' window doesn't contain any song names, and nothing about the list appears to update in real time, suggesting that nothing is happening (though iTunes is still consuming about 60% of processor resources!).

Does anyone know what's wrong?

When I did this I had to expand the 'Open files and Ports' window the full length of the screen. If you just look at the window in the default size you're probably not going to see the error message. Even then once I located the error, the song title was only visible for a split second.

Wow... this really worked... amazing... the culprits for me were a few songs from Barefoot Truth/Threads. Great stuff! Thanks!

Update... A week later... those Barefoot Truth songs appeared again and iTunes was stuck on them again. Have had to repeat the above process. Weird.

Just a thought but maybe you have the "Barefoot Truth" songs on an iOS device and during syncing its copying the bad files back to your Mac recreating the problem. I believe this is what happened to me. Make sure you're not copying the bad files back. I deleted the songs causing the problems. Some I was able to download again from iCloud. Once you have the iCloud version you should be good to go. If that's not possible maybe you need to purchase them again.

I'll update with a trick that may be easier than using Activity Monitor. Make sure your iTunes library has the "iCloud Status" field displayed (right-click on the columns at the top to see possible fields). Sort by that column and find songs that are "waiting." Click one, then resort by name. See if you don't have a "matched" song that is completely identical. If so, delete the "waiting" song. Rinse & repeat.

My theory: this problem comes from syncing an iPhone (or other device) manually and allowing it to "transfer" songs that it thinks are not in the library. I'm willing to bet it's a holdover from devices with firmware designed before Match (so iPhone 4, older iPods, etc).

Thanks for this - I had about 100 tracks marked "Waiting" - all over which were duplicates (even though I have a whole load of tracks actually recognised as "Duplicates").

After I deleted the last one things started moving! All seems well now.