iTunes Match just spins on Step 1
So, here's the situation.
I have a fairly large iTunes Library (around 10,000 songs, in addition to hundreds of GB's of Movies and TV shows, which is irrelevant for this post.) It is stored on a 4 TB RAID 1 external drive. I have been a Match subscriber since it came out, and I love the service. However, I guess I am old fashioned but I still like to have a copy of all of my music stored locally. About a month ago I felt that I was ready to take the step of deleting all of my lower bit-rate music that was matched, and downloading the 256 kbps versions from the iTunes Store back to my local library. I followed the process outlined in this article: http://www.macworld.com/article/1163620/how_to_upgrade_tracks_to_itunes_match_fa st.html. It was kind of a disaster, I was able to get the playlists worked out very easily, but the process of re-downloading all of the music was a mess. I kept getting failure messages that required me to click ok before the downloads would continue, and then having to re-download files over and over again, it took almost a month to get everything downloaded. I finally did, and my local library is back up and running, and in great shape.
The problem is, when I turn on iTunes Match on my Library, it spins at step 1 forever, it will go for days, trying to analyze the library but never does. I can still access iTunes Match from my MacBook Pro, my work computer, my iPad and my iPhone without issue, but my main library is no longer updating iTunes Match! There is clearly a corrupt database file of some kind on the local library, but I do not seem to be able to locate it. Does anyone have any suggestions for next steps? I will not nuke my Library, I will unsubcribe from the service before I take that route, but any recommendations or advice would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.7.4)