I ran iTunes Match, deleted some originals and re-downloaded from the Cloud - now no songs!

It's possible that for some reason (there are several possibilities) these songs were never added to the cloud. Were these songs purchased from iTunes originally? And if so, were they purchased using the same account you just subscribed to iTunes match with?

It looks to me as if the files haven't been deleted from iTunes correctly. As a result iTunes thinks there should be a local copy and is therefore not looking to the cloud at all. That would be why there is no download option and, if the files have moved that will explain the exclamation mark

You did delete them through iTunes didn't you? The most common reason for this problem has been where people have just removed the files (or the disk they are on) from outside of iTunes.

Try right clicking a file in iTunes and using Get Info. This should give the location where iTunes believes the file is. If it gives a file reference that is on your computer then this will confirm the problem.

If that is the case then try deleting it again from within iTunes (make sure you don't delete it from the cloud). You may well find that this gets rid of the exclamation mark and gives you the download option.

OK, That would seem to confirm to me that the files haven't been deleted properly from iTunes.

To fill in all the gaps you have two options. Either you can download as you did with these few, but as you say it will use up bandwidth (you were always going to come up against this problem, even if they had deleted properly).

Alternatively, you could restore some of them from your backup for now, and then re-delete and download over time, as your bandwidth allows.

To restore them from your backup, you should just need to replace the songs into their original positions and hopefully iTunes will just find them.

Firstly, I'd suggest that you do something about the lack of memory. If your HDD is that full then you are going to have real problems.

Unless you have a system backup then you will probably have to do it bit by bit.

Are you sure the exact wording of the error message said "not enough memory?" Because that generally means RAM not HDD space. If the HDD were full the wording would be different.

At any rate you should check the amount of free space you have on your HDD. Ideally you should keep about 10% free. Otherwise you'll start seeing OS and application instability and could even even experience data loss.

Another trouble shooting step is to launch Disk Utility run repair permissions. Do this with no applications running.

Actually, I thought after my post that it probably wouldn't be HDD as he had just deleted some songs so should have freed some up if anything. Perhaps it is RAM.

There certainly seems to be an issue with that, which is probably needs resolving more urgently than the iTunes problem.

We'll put it down as a mystery then, but at least you've got it sorted now. 🙂

I would still recommend repairing permissions, and even repairing the disk if necessary. But, glad you got it sorted out.