How long does iTunes match usually take to gather information step 1

It depends. There is no single answer to your question. The process will finish when it gets done. Step 1 took me about 3 hours. Step 2 took another couple hours for me, and step 3 took about 3 weeks to upload my non-matched tracks.

You're welcome.

Unfortunately, no, the stereo and mono versions of the Beatles albums aren't available. This is presently a shortcoming in the matching process with these particular albums. Only the stereo masters are available on the iTunes store.

Actually I believe one of the problems with the Beatles albums is that some people with monos are getting matched to stereos, so just be forewarned . . . and certainly don't swap what you have with "matched" versions - of anything really - without checking to be certain it really is a match to what you have.

Ugh...Step 1 is still going for me. It has been 6.5 hours so far, and I only have 2800 songs. The iTunes Match and Genius items in the sidebar are still spinning, which I suppose is a good thing.

It took over 24 hours to complete step 1, which included quitting iTunes and another time logging out and back in. I think that may have done the trick because setps 2 and 3 went relatively quick. iTunes had to upload 624 of my 2,800 or so songs. As for the Beatles, I have both the stereo and mono versions (neither bought from iTunes). The stereo versions were matched and the monos were uploaded.

Really? Every track from the "In Stereo" box matched and every track from the "In Mono" box uploaded? That's pretty amazing. Are you sure about that?

Yes that would be news, good news. Perhaps not surprising though. the Beatles mono-stereo mis-match has been talked up a bit and, after all - it IS The Beatles.

Upon further review...Most of the mono versions were uploaded. By most I mean every mono album had at least one song that said it was matched. Oddly enough Please Please Me mono had all but 2 songs matched. Even the stereo versions had a few uploaded songs, not many, but a few. Side 2 of Abbey Road, I joined the songs to play together and they were of course uploaded. I haven't listened to any of these on an iOS device yet, so I'm not sure if the matched mono versions are actually the stereo versions.

pwrmacbob wrote:

I haven't listened to any of these on an iOS device yet, so I'm not sure if the matched mono versions are actually the stereo versions.

They will be the stereo version since that is all that is available in the iTunes Store. At least, as far as we know.

Ugh. At least they (Apple) are not replacing what is on my computer. I did this over the past weekend and haven't really had the time to analyze everything yet. Do you have an iOS device that you use Match with? I have posted the following to a few different forums and no one has answered.

When you turn on iTunes Match on your iPhone, what happens? The bottom line for me is I have much more music in iTunes than I can fit on my iPhone. I keep a few hundred songs on my phone and thats the way I want to keep it. If I turn on iTunes Match on my iPhone I get a warning "iTunes Match will replace the music library on this device" It doesn't say what it will replace it with. Will it try to add all 3,000 songs I have from iTunes? Will it just replace the songs currently on my iPhone with the iTunes Match versions? I can't find the answer to this anywhere.

It will replace a copy of your library, but that's the database. The music you already have will stay on your iPhone. All the cloud music will show up on the phone, but it will not be downloaded automatically. On the iPhone, music is downloaded in the background as you play it, or if you decide to manually download using either a playlist or by scrolling to bottom of an album track list and hitting the download all button.

Music storage on the phone is handled in a dynamic way byiTunes Match. If you fill the phone up and decide to add more songs, it will delete tracks you haven't played for awhile - or so I've been told.

I manage music on my iPhone by downloading at home on wifi what I might want, toggling the music app settings so all I see is what's on the phone, and hitting the road.

I should have mentioned that if you use SIRI and ask it to play, for instance, "some Dire Straits" with the "show all music" option on, Siri might pull music from the cloud even if you have a Dire Straits album album local on the phone. That's what it did for me yesterday. If I had toggled the music setting so the cloud songs didn't show, I suspect SIRI would have stuck with the downloaded album.

I did have the settings option to let Match use 3g for downloads turned on. I should have had that killed if I really, really didn't want SIRI to go pulling tracks fromt the cloud while I was out of the house.

Thanks for the info. I will try it within the next few days.

You are correct. Only the 160 songs that were on my iPhone before I turned on iTunes Match (on the phone) were actually on my phone. All others will need to be downloaded if I want to listen to them. Very good. That is what I was hoping for.