I am seeing "gathering information" forever

Xian rinpoche's fix worked for me. Thanks! I was dealing with that problem for a couple weeks.

I know this is an old thread, but it's a top hit on google and I wanted to share what fixed this issue for me. I tried all of the stuff above and ended up having to delete my itunes library.itl file. Once I did so, I had to let iTunes discover the music again which was still on the computer, and everything recovered, uploaded and finished properly. Even my playlists recovered!

Good to hear! I'll bet it didn't fix the problem, however. If you sync in the future and answer "yes" to whatever popup speaks to syncing items on your device that are not on your computer, you'll see the problem rear it's head again.

I think the issue has to do with Match songs that are downloaded on an iPhone (or other compatible device), and then synced back to a local computer. Some sort of incompatibilty arises, and the problem comes rushing back. At the moment, I think the only "safe" resolution is not to sync items back to your Mac from your device. Since you can't add a song to a device without using iTunes, and since iTunes pushes to your local computer automatically, this should not pose too many problems.

I was having this problem as well, but it wasn't the initial match that got stuck -- it was after an upgrade to 10.6. I brought up activity monitor, found the file that kept appearing and disappearing and deleted it. iTunes match complete the step without further issues after that.

Thanks for the great insight!

I am having this problem and I'm stuck. I opened the activity monitor to try and search for an offending piece of music, but no luck. I tried identifying a song that is stuck waiting but no dice.

I think I am going to follow the knowledge base article that explains how to rebuild your iTunes library as I fear that something is corrupt somewhere.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

I do believe that Xian Rinpoche is correct in thinking that it's a corruption issue when syncing.

If anyone has any other ideas, I'd love to hear them. I tried ditching some rogue lockfile's but no luck.

I'm pulling my hair out with this.😕

Thanks!

I rebuilt the library as per the above knowledge base article and all is well now with iTunes Match. iTunes did report that there were a few songs that couldn't be found "because they didn't exist". So I guess that is what mucked everything up. But who knows. iTunes failed to iterate the files/songs that it couldn't find.

Hope this helps others with the same problem. I do believe it stems from a syncing issue with my other devices.

Solved it for me. It was a protected MP4. Deleted and it resolved immediately.

This is an old thread but it's the best source of information I found and wanted to share that the "Watch Activity Monitor and delete the song that's causing the problem" worked for me. A few thoughts:

Match had been working for me for a while. Aside from the initial "Corrupt file can't download" errors that seemed to work themselves out, I had no issues. Then I deleted the iTunes cache in an effort to troubleshoot unrelated video syncing to iPad issues. iTunes Match apparently stores info here, and needed to do the 3 steps again.

Before I had let it work all the way though, I synced my iPod classic, and was alerted to the fact that I had purchases (really just one song) on the iPod that were not in my library. Forgetful me, there was a reason in the first place I deleted them from my library and the cloud, but not thinking I clicked transfer purchases.

iTunes Match then hangs like described in this thread. I do the steps involved written above, and wouldn't you know, it's the ONE file that I transferred to my computer from the iPod. I delete it from the library, send it to trash, and the match process completes in under a minute.

Just an FYI, I'm on iTunes 10.6.3 (25) and OS X 10.7.4, so this is inconclusive evidence that the issue is still present in iTunes.

Take all the music out of your Itunes music library but save files. Then reinsert music in little bunches (2-3 albums at a time) making sure the music is coming directly from your computer's music file and not from a USB plug or any other external hard drive back-up.

The Activity Monitor process described here worked for me too. The "files and ports" text indicated one particular album was causing problems. For some reason, this one album with about 12 songs had one copy of each song as an .m4a file and 9 copies of each song as an .m4p file. I moved the album folder from my iTunes folder to my desktop, deleted all of the songs from my iTunes list of songs, put all of the .m4p files in the Trash, added the folder of (now only) .m4a files to iTunes, and restarted Match. It went through Step 1 in less than two minutes and moved on to Step 2... first time in weeks!

Thanks for this fix. It REALLY works. I found 1 bad song in my music library that was keeping "gathering for information" hanging. What a God send when I found your post. Once the song was deleted, everything worked like a charm. All is fixed.

This solution worked for me too. It might take a couple of passes to find the problematic files, but it eventually worked. You can speed up this process in iTunes by selecting File (while holding down the Option button) then Display Exact Duplicates to find duplicate song files.

Xian Rinpoche's suggestion worked best for me. I sorted my library by iCloud status and found an old voice memo that somehow made its way into my library. This file had a status of ineligable. After deleting the voice memo, I was finally able to pass step 1.

tmksnyder - excellent!

Thank you for the advice. It solved a very frustrating problem for me.

I had this problem as well when I moved my library to my Time Capsule. I tried various things mentioned above, but those didn't work for me. I solved it by removing the library file itself ("iTunes Library.itl") from my iTunes folder when iTunes wasn't running. My library and media files exists in the data folder on my Time Capsule. After removing the .itl file, I restarted iTunes. Because iTunes couldn't load the missing .itl file, iTunes didn't show any of my media files. I then selected "Add to Library..." from the File menu, and selected the folder on my Time Capsule that had all of my media files in it. Once iTunes was finished adding all of my files to the library (and rebuilding the .itl file), I ran iTunes match again. It took a while, but it did work. Now I have access to all of my music in the cloud again.