How can I force iTunes Match to upload a "Duplicate" to the iCloud?

At the moment you can't force an upload.

I'm intrigued by your example though. It sounds very odd. What is the album? Perhaps others may have had some success with it, which may help.

If match has just made a mistake in this example, it may feasibly be worth deleting it from your library (and the track from the cloud) and retrying it.

I've also had this problem with probably about 30 of my tracks from various albums - it marks them as duplicates on my Macbook - which they most definately aren't - and then these that are marked as duplicates are not available on my iphone - which was the whole point of buying Match. So I've tried to turn Match off completely, with no luck (see seperate post). Good luck, anyone else have answers?

Some people have solved this by slightly altering the duplicate tracks (maybe by adding some extra silence at the beginning).

However, it seems that the OP may be having an issue with incorrect duplicate identification as duplicates, which is why I asked what the album is.

Since writing my original reply, it occurred to me that the album in question may be a compilation, where he has all the tracks on other albums as well. Especially if that album isn't in the iTunes store itself then it will probably trigger a load of duplicates.

If that is the case then changing the songs slightly may help, but my solution temporarily is to live with it for a while, and leave feedback with Apple about the issue.

Right now your only option is to to modify the second "duplicate" audio file slightly so that the match fails, see this post: Re: Replace "matched" music with "uploaded" music?

To do this you need an audio editor like audacity (free) or Garageband to add a few seconds of silence or to raise the pitch slightly.

Or just wait till Apple reacts to all the complaints and adds an upload button to iTunes Match - you also may want to send feedback to Apple on this - http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

Regards

Léonie

I'm adding my 2¢ because I just "discovered" iTunes Match yesterday and decided to subscribe thinking there was no downside (doh!).

Well, firstly, there's the enormous downside of Apple's structure not being able to keep up with (what they should have known would be) enormous interest... my iTunes has been matching for >20-hours and has yet to reach half-way up my library. BTW: I thought I read the iTunes Match info fairly thoroughly prior to subscribing and did not see anything about it being for songs vrs full library.

And secondly, and even more important to me, is that Apple's method of determining duplicate songs is not robust enough, especially for classical music and audio books (e.g., LoTR). I have >12000 "songs" in my library, and Match has determined a boatload are duplicates. They are not of course and even if Apple's duplicate-determining algorithm just looked at disc & track numbers it would "know" that. Anyway, there's a fairly good chance I will not have one complete album upload/match out of >500 albums. That's nae Scottish, in anybody's book.

Gotta say, using Garage Band to individually alter >2000 "songs" on the off-chance that may assist Apple's duplicate algorithm to be correct is not gonna happen. If, after the matching/uploading is complete, I still have >even 100-not-duplicate-songs listed as duplicates, I'm getting my $29.95 subscription back.

... and C: does anybody know why Apple's Lion spell check doesn't work on Apple's discussion forums???

I'm suffering the same problem. It happens with the songs in "Buffalo Springfield Again" album. I also have a Buffalo Springfield 4CD box set (2001 edition) that includes a remastered version of the former record and all the songs are marked as duplicated.

I know the songs are the same but i would like to have both copies in my ipod for the same reason that I bought both CD.

Modifying the song is out of the question. If anyone knows another workaround I'll be glad.

Regards, Rafael

i had 30 tracks flagged as duplicate by itunes match so i created a smart playlist (media kind is music, icloud status is duplicate) then selected the tracks in the playlist and clicked add to icloud, now they have all been added, i hope this works for anyone else with the duplicates issue

You are a genious, thank you very much for helping me with this.

I have a lot of songs that are infact exactly the same song but belong to different compilations so its great to have it in both compilations.

I may have found a solution! Just right-click on the song in iTunes and click on "Add to iCloud" 🙂