iPhone tracklist ghost files & other queries!

tobacco_slammers wrote:

1. When I connect my iPhone 4S to my iMac with no music stored on the phone, I select Music from the iPhone list and there are 158 songs listed, some greyed out, some not, none of them play. How do I delete these from this list? I've tried turning off iTM on both the phone and computer but this doesn't help. If I click on a song that isn't greyed out I get an exclamation mark to the far left of the track name, all the greyed out ones have a circle with 2 arrows which I presume is some kind of sync symbol.

So far the only method we have found to get rid fo these "ghost" tracks is to restore from a backup. It's annoying.

tobacco_slammers wrote:

2. After my full library was matched I deleted lower bitrate tracks and MP3 files from my computer in order to replace them with 256 AAC matched versions but downloading the files from iCloud after deleting the originals appears to be replacing it with the same file type. I have 553 MPEG audio files that wont delete and get replaced with a matched AAC version. How do I replace them with the matched AAC version stored in iCloud.

If you are getting the same files back then they were "uploaded" and not "matched." You should turn on the iCloud Status column in the iTunes Browser so you can see the status of each track. Pull down View > View Options, select "icloud status" and click OK.

tobacco_slammers wrote:

3. I have 188 AAC files in my library which will also no let me replace them with a matched version. How do I replace these? (The reason for replacing these is although they are 256 AAC files I think they originally were lower bit rate and I want to clean things up! OCD and all...)

After you enable the iCloud Status column you will be able to see if these tracks are "matched" or "uploaded." If they are "uploaded" as I suspect you can not replace them, since they are not "matched."

That's a question no one can answer right now. We know a little bit about what criteria Apple uses to match songs (waveforms, file size, song length, etc) but we don't know exactly how it works. So sometimes tracks that seem like they should match, do not. I've got several like this in my library as well. For example, I've got the remastered Led Zeppelin boxed set from 1993... every track from from those 9 albums matched except 1. Very odd. The only thing we can do right now is report these mismatches to Apple using their feedback page <http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html>.

I'm glad I am not the only one that finds the "ghost tracks" annoying. I called Apple about this and trying to explain it was like I'm talking a different language. Apple knows about it and I was told to wait for an update. Whether we see or not, that is the question. The funny thing thing is, it happens the way you described it on my iPhone but the iPad works fine. Once you delete a track from the iPad it is gone, no ghost tracks. If you delete a track on the iPhone, ghost tracks.

Apple shoud have caught this issue but again it's still in beta. It should never have been sold this way until it had more time to bake.

Cubus25 wrote:

Apple shoud have caught this issue but again it's still in beta. It should never have been sold this way until it had more time to bake.

This is a misconception. No where in the marketing material available online does Apple say iTunes Match is a beta product.

I do agree that the "ghost tracks" are a bug, and probably should have been caught during development and testing. I'm at a loss as to how it was not.

I thought it still was a beta, I retract that statement. The issues shoud have been caught.

Has any one noticed that using iTunes Match makes syncing with a computer take longer? I restored my phone again because of this issue. What was happening, locating the iPhone on wi-fi and preparing it took several minutes to complete (iTunes Match active on the phone). Since I restored (did not setup iTunes Match on the iPhone) syncing is quick over wi-fi.

Apple seems to be aware of this issue as well. Anyone else having this issue?