30% of songs in Status "Waiting" iTunes Match problem

Robert,

Thanks for your information. Here is my follow-up question:

"Will I be able to tell the difference between an AAC 256 kbps file encoded with the latest iTunes version?"

The size of the AAC/256 file is approximately double the size of a MPEG-1 Layer 3 file at 128 kbps.

Tom

Tom,

This should answer your question... [the number listed is the Perceived Audio Quality]

AAC 256 kbit/s: 8.83, iTune 7.6 AAC Encoder,

http://soundexpert.org/encoders-256-kbps,

AAC 128 kbit/s: 5.00, iTune 6.0 AAC Encoder,

http://soundexpert.org/encoders-128-kbps,

and for comparison...

AAC 64 kbit/s: 3.56, Apple QuickTime 6.3 Encoder,

http://soundexpert.org/encoders-64-kbps,

Robert

Had the Waiting issue for me. What fixed it was adding the "Kind" category in my Library and organizing songs by Cloud status (click the Cloud button at the top bar of iTunes). Now you can see all the Waiting songs grouped together, and the kind of file it is (mpeg, AAC encoded, etc.). Apparently, some file types can't be uploaded. In my case, they were MP4 files that were audio only, but that format is used for digital video as well, so iTunes Match was getting hung up on it. I right-clicked those files and created an AAC version of them, then updated iTunes Match. The other files that were regular .mp3s and in Waiting status were then uploaded fine.

So basically:

1. Organize songs by Cloud status.

2. Show the Kind of each song.

3. Check to see if any of the files are an MP4 or in some other unusual audio format.

4. If there are, make those AAC or MP3 files by right clicking and selecting "Create a ___ version".

5. Go to Store and click Update iTunes Match.

Hopefully those steps work for you guys.

These are exactly the steps [but in fine detail] documented in my previous posting of 28 March 2012.

These Notes were in turn based on the previous compact post by Andbaum on 25 December 2011 (Christmas Day!)

Glad you are now in the clear.

Incidently, and strangely, all of my "Waiting" iCloud Status Songs were already AAC.

But recreating the AAC Version fixed them for me.

Robert

Robert,

I went to the linked SoundExpert site and read details about encoders and partipated in several tests. Thanks for the helpful reference material.

My 2700 item library is now in the iTunes cloud. Most of my matched items are at 128 Kbps but I don't think there is an audible difference between 128 and 256 Kbps such that I'd take steps to replace items with the higher bit rate.

Tom

I hate being a 'me too' but of my 24,000+ collection I have about 50 songs in the waiting state. I joined iTunes Match the day it was available in the US. The majority of my songs were matched. About 500 had to be uploaded. The orphaned songs all belong to CDs that were matched or uploaded except for the orphans. Some of the orphans were purchased from the iTunes store - but are no longer available there. Looking through the songs individually it is obvious that they need to be uploaded, there are no matches presently. I am under my limit. I have periodically rebooted the computer, quit iTunes, turned off iTunes Match, and even re-ripped a couple of the songs.

In the bigger scheme of things it is a mosquito bite and not a massive fail but it does irritate me.

EUREKA! I have found a very easy fix - I really hope it works for everyone.

Ladies and Gents,

I have posted this as a reply elsewhere - it is essentially a very similar solution to the one where you remove your MP3 and replace with an AAC conversion. However, I found a less time-consuming way which doesn't involve converting, losing MP3s and I think is quicker. It worked for me... Good luck and thanks for the steers from everyone above which helped get me here...

Having been faced with this waiting issue since I paid my good money for iTunes Match, I've not been too happy. Of my ~14000 songs, less than 7000 had matched. Until now. And mostly thanks to the other people who have posted on here and got me going in the right direction. And luck, of course!

First off, I tried all the 'standard' fixes listed above, turning off and on, etc, trying to force the match. And whilst secretcove's fix looked pretty good, unfortunately all of my music was already in the iTunes folder, so this was not the answer for me. The only thing I didn't try was converting all of my MP3's into AAC's. The fix sounded great and I know has worked for many, but I'm sure I'm not alone in not wanting to lose the highly transportable MP3 status of my music library. Yes, converting to AAC to get it matched on iCloud would have the music easily accessible on my iPhone and iPad, but what about when I want to put a 100 track playlist onto an MP3 CD to listen to in my car? That would be permanently impossible once I had converted to AAC, so that fix was not for me.

Anyway, I noted today that some albums where I remember in the past adding only certain tracks, and then later on adding the rest to my library were half 'Matched' and half 'Waiting'. So, whilst secretcove's post above didn't fix the problem for me, it gave me an idea. First, I deleted and then re-imported the 'Waiting' tracks. Updated iTunes Match. They matched.... Brilliant! So now just to find all those CDs and spend two days doing it for the rest of them, right? Wrong... Here is the quick and easy fix which really uses minimum effort, but has totally solved the issue (for me):

First, do a backup to Time Capsule if you have it running, or at the very least copy all of your music to another drive. (One wrong mouse-click using my solution could end in tears...). Also, ideally ensure that you have all of your iTunes music in the music folder which iTunes automatically chooses for you (though I am sure this would probably also work if you kept the files somewhere else).

Then....

1. With your whole library selected in the left hand sidebar, right-click on the column headers and from the drop-down list, check 'iCloud Status'.

2. When the iCloud Status appears in the column headers, click it to sort your library and then select all tracks which are in 'waiting' status (select the first, then scroll down and shift-select the last):

3. Right click on any selected track and select 'Delete', to delete all of the 'waiting' tracks. Trust me here!

4. Check the box as above and click 'Delete Items'. Trust me... here's the good bit:

5. Click 'Keep Files'... please be careful! ;-)

6. You will now have deleted all tracks which would not match from your library. It appears that you have just lost a lot of music. But fear not, all of the tracks are still right there in your iTunes music folder, because you (hopefully!!) selected the 'Keep Files' option.

7. Now, just go to File -> Add to Library, and select the root directory of your iTunes music folder (normally titled 'iTunes Music')

8. Go and get a coffee, or a beer, or two depending on how many tracks you've got. Whatever floats your boat. iTunes will beaver away effectively reconstructing your library by adding back all of the music you had 'semi-deleted'.

9. Once your library is back to where it was, and all of the album artwork has been re-done etc... Go to Store, click on 'update iTunes match'....

...and watch the magic happen. Just as it should have done 'out of the box'.

All my songs are now matched. Don't ask me exactly how this worked (corrupted meta-data, bad library referencing, older imports, who knows?). All I know is that it worked for me, where nothing else did (save possibly for the AAC solution, which was not suitable for me). And I know it's not really a 'quick-fix' per se, as the process will take your computer some considerable time if you have a big library. But most of this happens whilst you're putting your feet up or getting on with something else, so it's not exactly labour intensive!

Good luck...

Hi Masson,

Thanks for your great experiment and suggestion, which tatolly works for me.

So, I guess there might be someone seeing this post without taking action to do it, then you should. Just go try several of your "waiting" items, if it does work for you, just go on by semi-deleting the rest of them from your iTunes library and also from iCould, re-adding them(by dragging or cmd+O...) to iTunes library then to the iCould. I believe you're good to go.

Good luck.

I went into View, and then I clicked on View Options and then a grey box popped up on and I made sure I unchecked Icloud download and Icloud status. And then my music on my itunes stopped saying "waiting" and my music played again.

Hello there here is my problem. My itunes match will not sync properly. It shows a lot of songs over 100 with the icloud match status as "Waiting"

Here is what i have done

1. Reinstall the entire OS delete everything and start from scratch

2. Turn on and off itunes match.

3. Hold down the option key

4. Move my music out of the music folder clear everything out of my itunes and bing back my music.

5. Use backup copies of my music in case the music files had been corrupted.

6. Checked numerious mac community forms that report simular issues.

7. Tried another macbook pro that I have

8. My wifes account which has about 8000 songs did no have the issue. My account seems to have the issue sobeservices2. I beleive this to be account specific. My account has 11481 songs and about 100 to 100 show with the status of "waiting"

9. I get no error messages

10. I've tried multiple ISP - COMCAST - FIOS - I even tried multiple computers

11. Redid the entire os

12. My account has problems "*****s2" but my wife account does not

13. Replicated the issue on more then one computer it seems only has problems with my itunes account. Suck waiting to upload

and its not always the same songs sometimes it's different songs that it gets suck waiting to upload.

14. Removed the waiting songs and attempted again

15. Started with fresh iTunes had the server match a blank itunes folder to the point where it said "0 Songs Match" then re-added them

16. Called Apple Care and spoke with a Senior Advisor who told me he would have to escalate a ticket and he to thought I had done all the tsing possible and that it was up to the engineers to figure out a solution.

I have been working on this for about 4 weeks now. All my trouble shooting has pointed it to be an account specific issue.

Any advise from the community

Since my fix – which did work fine for a while, I have had intermittent problems getting the playlists to sync.

Here is the fix which I used:

1. In iTunes, go to Store > View my Apple ID

2. De-select the option to automatically renew iTunes Match

3. Ignore all of the emails reminding you that iTunes Match is about to expire

4. iTunes Match expires

5. You no longer have any syncing issues with songs OR playlists

6. You have £21.99 per year to put towards a subscription to Spotify Premium.

7. Congratulations, stress free music in the cloud... pour yourself a drink, you deserve it!

Trust me... not only does this fix work perfectly, but it is really quite cathartic....

Yah Spotify that much a year?

But it doesn't sync your library like itunes match does. I kind of liked how apple has it. The probably didn't start happening till they started to propbly mess with a few things.

Hopeing a solution comes back soon..

I think its specific with my account and they have to do something.

For me the fix was simple - every track that failed to sync was one that I ripped from my collection of CDs or was a free track from an artists site. Checking the artist downloads I found that they all had low bitrates so I ran them thru iTunes and converted them from mp3 to AAC at a higher bitrate. They synced. All the rest of the tracks had high bitrates but I tested a few converting them the same as I had the artist downloads and they synced. I tried doing an mp3 to mp3 conversion (upping the bitrate slightly). They synced.

In short, my solution was to convert the tracks that didn't sync. I now have 100% synced.

Spotify, that's a good solution, like this one. I also couldn't upload all songs, it was about 1000 songs with "Waiting" 7 months ago, now we are down to 700 songs. Tried everything, deactivated/activated thousand times, with and without option key, created a new library, clicked this, checked that.

I did some analysis of what is happening. During the match process there are some accesses to third party websites (e.g. to s.mzstatic.com) but these are working fine. When Step 1 and Step 2 are done, iTunes tries to establish a connection with s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com (question, what is the data center in NC for, if they use amazon to store all the data?) at beginning of step 3. The matching stops, as the connection to s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com gets not established. I cannot see too much, as it is a SSL connection, but as no data is transfered at all I have the feeling that there is a connection problem, maybe a wrong certificate or something.

I downloaded the Amazon Cloud Drive client on my mac, and this software can access amazons servers without any problems. I now ended with Google Play Music. Upload of >6000 songs was done in less than 24 hours, works great, the only thing which I miss a little bit are smart playlists. Google - it just works.

I had been having the same problems as everyone else and after reading all the complaints in all the discussions and trying every possible solution I have been able to get past this. I have an iMac, Charter cable modem (30Mbps down and 4 Mbps up) and an Airport Extreme. I determined that my problem, like others, was isolated to my home network (not songs). Found this out by setting my iPad (with Verizon Data Plan) up as a personal Hot Spot and connecting the iMac to it wirelessly. Suddenly all songs in "Waiting" status began to upload, at least until my data plan was exhausted (About 250 songs), so I knew this was a networking problem. I in no way profess to be any kind of a network guru but I researched everything possible anyway. Apple routers do not offer QoS settings. However, Apple has a piece of software for download that developers use for testing called "Network Line Conditioner". Can't remember where I found it off hand, but figured it was a safe product to try since it was an Apple product and not some third party software. Initially I had no luck modifying the direct LAN connection to the router so I disconnected the LAN cable from the iMac. I then turned on the Mac's Wi-Fi and connected to my home network. After trying several of the pre-set options in the program, I was able to find one that worked and I slowed down my Upload speed and made a 1% allowance for dropped packets (My custom setting, I'm not sure I even know what dropped packets are). Don't know what this fixed or what the problem really was but my songs in "Waiting" now upload without problems or failures or restarting. The (GUI) program is very easy to use and simple to turn "On" and "Off". When "On" it resides up top near the "Signal Strength" indicator and is selectable with a "Right Click". I can't promise that this will work for any or all but I wanted to share my success. Maybe others can elaborate on my lack of "Network Knowledge" and explain this a little better. Good luck to all!