Remove music from iPhone after enabling iCloud/match

You can remove songs individually by song, album or artist. I assume you know how to actually do the delete from your post, but in case you don't, you swipe across the song, album or artist and then click delete when it appears.

If you go to settings/music then turn the "show all music" tag off then it will just show the music which is actually on your phone.

It is not easy at the moment I have to say. Hopefully this will be improved soon.

Not sure whether that is actually any help.

Absolutely. There is a lot to be done on this area.

Ability to allow a maximum amount of storage to be used by the cloud (with files being deleted when it is used up) is fairly essential in my opinion. Ideally with some user definable rules to determine what tracks get deleted.

Also, I think you should be able to specify a playlist as the base playlist for the device. You should be able to then do a delete everything except that playlist, to take your phone back to havng just your favoured tracks.

That should just be a starting point, before adding more options to allow management of the device. As it is, there s so much potential for people filling up their phones inadvertently.

I'm dealing with this right now as well. Unfortunately, when I swipe/delete songs or albums from my iPhone, they're completely wiped out - as in they aren't even available to re-download onto my phone from the iCloud any more. They're just gone. Even turning Match off and on multiple times throughout the day doesn't bring them back. All I wanted to do was free up memory, but now I've lost the ability to access some of my favorite music instead.

I'm getting pretty sick of these obvious flaws in the iTunes Match service. Didn't it dawn on anyone at Apple that people would want to intuitively manage their files once they'd been downloaded onto their devices? And I actually PAID for this hassle and frustration?

Make sure you go into Settings -> Music and make sure "Show All Music" is turned on. There is no way to delete a song from iTunes Match from your phone.

Thanks for the reply. "Show All Music" is turned on, although on or off, my phone only lists 240 or so tracks while I actually have over 12,000 tracks available in the Cloud (or at least that's what iTunes on my laptop confirms to me when I update Match)

And sadly, you apparently can delete a song from Match from your phone. Because as I said, when I swipe on a song I've downloaded to my iPhone in order to "delete" the local file to free up space, the song literally disappears from my phone, never to be seen again - even with "Show All Music" turned on.

Match is a train wreck. They need to make it work simply and intuitively.

If that is on, I highly recommend looking at th KB article: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4054

Specifically:

Make sure iTunes Match is turned on.

Please see this article for information about turning on or adding a computer or device to iTunes Match.

If iTunes Match is already enabled on your computer or device, try turning iTunes Match off and then on again.

• On your Computer choose Store > Turn Off iTunes Match, then Store > Turn On iTunes Match.
• On your iOS device tap Settings > Music > iTunes Match Off, then Settings > Music > iTunes Match On.

And sadly, you apparently can delete a song from Match from your phone.

I am sorry, but no, you can't. If that were true, you would no longer see the song in your music library on your computer, and it would most likely be gone forever. The only way to remove an item from iTunes Match:

To delete an item from iCloud in iTunes

1. From a computer with iTunes Match enabled, open iTunes 10.5.1 or later on your computer. You can download the latest version of iTunes here.
2. Click Music on the left side of iTunes.
3. Select the item you would like to delete. Right-click the item and then choose Delete.
4. You will be asked to confirm this action.
5. If the item you want to delete exists in iTunes on your computer as well as in iCloud, click the checkbox to also delete the item from iCloud.

Match is a train wreck. They need to make it work simply and intuitively.

I don't disagree with you on this.

Again, I appreciate the response. Sadly, I've looked at all of these support articles and they've been no help whatsoever. Perhaps a fuller description of what I'm dealing with will help save us some back and forth.

First of all, Match was working properly for me the first week or so after I signed up for it. From the start, I have had the following settings established on my iPhone:

Settings > iCloud > Account: properly logged in to the correct, main account

Settings > iCloud > Storage & Backup > iCloud Backup: On

Settings > Music > iTunes Match: On

Settings > Music > Show All Music: On

Settings > Store: Logged into the same correct, main account as above

Settings > Store > Automatic Downloads > Music: On

On my laptop - the computer I use to primarily manage my iTunes music collection - when I "Update iTunes Match", all but three songs are listed as "Matched", "Uploaded", or "Purchased", and I'm correctly told that "12,277 songs are now available in iCloud". I can live without those three songs so, so far so good.

But over the past week, music has been disappearing from my iPhone 4. When I go under Music > Playlists, none of my Playlists are showing. When I go under Music > Songs, it only lists 240 of the 12,277 tracks that are supposedly available in iCloud. Only 126 of around 1300 artists are listed. I have meticulously collected/scanned album artwork for literally every song in my collection, but a ton of it is now missing on even the few tracks that do show up on my iPhone, and on and on and on.

I've been trying switching settings on and off, logging out and back in, waiting minutes, hours, or even days between attempts, running a restore to previous backup for the whole phone, etc. But after days of frustration and time wasted - nothing. And the real kicker is that the whole music collection IS showing up just fine on my wife's iPhone 4 using the same basic settings - it just won't work on mine any more, and it's mostly my music to begin with!

Lastly, I know that in theory you can't delete a Matched song from your iPhone, but once I swipe-delete a track or album from the phone itself, it simply disappears from my phone forever. It does not remove it from the Cloud, but it is irretrievably lost on my phone.

So to summarize, I've basically eliminated that it may be user error, and have even discovered in these forums that others are experiencing identical issues to mine - typically once their device's memory has been filled up by tracks downloaded from the Cloud and they had to free up a bit of space as was the case for me. Yet no one seems to have found a fix.

So if understand correctly, there is no way to delete tracks off my iPhone's playlist AND keep them in iCloud. I have to delete them either under Artist or Album?

This seems totally backwards because I'm able to view the playlist on my phone, and "Download all" tracks in the playlist, but I can't delete the tracks off my phone, and keep them in iCloud via the playlist.

I'm not sure whether you understand correctly or not.

You can delete tracks off a playlist on your iPhone by using the edit button when viewing the playlist. This doesn't actually remove the file from your phone, or the cloud, but it deletes the track off of your playlist.

To delete the track itself from your phone you have to do it via the Album or Artist view. This will remove the file from your phone, but won't delete it from the playlist or the cloud.

You just need to remember that when you are viewing a playlist, any editing that you do affects the playlist itself. If you are viewing by artist or album then any edits will affect whether the file stays on your computer.

I actually think this is fairly logical, if only because match gives us the ability to edit playlists, but not other data. If you could delete songs from your phone via playlists then I think there would be confusion where people are trying to edit their playlists and end up deleting files or vice versa.

As far as I am aware, nothing that you do on your phone will remove tracks from the Cloud. Whilst at first grandbrother thought he was deleting songs from the cloud, it now seems quite clear that for some reason his phone isn't seeing the cloud files. I'm almost certain that he didn't actually delete files from the cloud.

Thanks for your response. I guess what I'm saying is that I wish there was a way to delete songs off my iPhones storage via the playlist, BUT keep it in the iCloud (similar to deleting via Artist or Albums).

Here's a senerio that happens very often for me:

• Make a 100 song playlist on iTunes
• Download all 100 songs to my iPhone using the "Download All" button on the bottom of the playlist window
• Finish listening to all 100 songs on iPhone and want to delete them off the phone (to make space for other songs), but keep the playlist intact, songs and all, on iTunes

Given that the playlist contain various artists, it would be a pain to go into the Artists section and delete them one by one. It would be nice if there was a "Delete all from playlist, but leave on iCloud" option.

Yes, it is certainly not easy to delete the files from a playlist off your phone at the moment.

Whilst I think that the current situation is fairly logical, it could certainly do with some improvement for exactly this reason. It just needs to be done well to avoid people accidently editing the playlists.

To be honest, this is the sort of thing that is often improved after a few updates. I'm fairly confident that it will get better.

This is a huge problem. I have a playlist on my iPhone that I want to get rid of. If I delete the playlist, the original playlist on my Mac is gone. There goes a ton of work. The only solution is to duplicate the playlist on your mac, give it a diff name, download that one to your iPHone and when you are done, delete the playlist from your phone. It disappears from your mac, but remember, it was only a duplicate.

They way it SHOULD work is that if you try to delete a playlist from your phone, then a question pops up to see if you want to delete it from your mac as well or just the phone.