Is there anyone out there who has used iTunes Match for a large music collection who actually likes and recommends it?

I love iTunes Match. I have about 90 GB of music, and counting. My iMac is my "master", where I keep copies of everything locally, and my Macbook, iPad, iPhone, and iPod all have access to the full library. I was able to use Match to upgrade the quality of about 2000 songs in my library.

I wish I would have had this before I spent the extra money for a 64 GB iPhone. With Match I could get by just fine with 16 GB.

I'M SORRY BUT THAT IS NOT A DEAL......IT'S A SCAM. JUST HAD TO PUT IN MY 2 CENTS. NO OFFENCE. BACKING TO DVD OR FLASH DRIVE SHOULD BE A CONTINUED OPTION. THAT'S FREE.

I THINK THAT I'M MISSING SOMETHING AND WOULD APPRECIATE ANY HELP. I HAVE VERY LARGE ITUNES MUSIC COLLECTION THAT I HAVE LOST BEFORE. THERE ARE PLENTY OF PURCHASES, BUT TONS OF LIVE SHOWS. IMPORTING BACK THE ONE'S I STILL HAVE IS AN UNBELIEVIBLE PROCESS. I LEARNED THE HARD WAY THAT BACKUP DISCS R GREAT. I UNDERSTAND THE CLOUD/MATCH THING, BUT I WOULD PREFER A HARD COPY DVD DATA FORMAT- IS THIS NO LONGER POSSIBLE? CAN YOU CHANGE FORMAT, PUT IN A FILE, DO WHATEVER; THEN BURN DVD DATA THAT COULD LATER BE USED FOR RECOVERY. I'M CURRENTLY WITH PC LAPTOP AND DON'T TRUST IT, DRIVE CRASHED ALREADY. REALLY CAN'T PAY A LARGE YEARLY BILL FOR WI-FI EXCLUSIVE PRODUCTS THAT MAY OR MAY NOT WORK. ANY FEEDBACK ON GETTING THESE TUNES ON HARD COPY. THANK YOU.

There is no reason to yell.

iTunes Match is not a backup service, nor should it be used as one. It is your responsibility to keep all your personal data, including music, backed up in case of disaster. I would suggest you buy an external HDD at least twice the size of the internal HDD and start using it to back up your personal data.

Having backups will greatly simplify restoring in case there is a disaster.

i wrote a email earlier from iphone, don't see it. basically, sorry for my tone last night, but i had just figured out the Match/cloud/ wi-fi scam and was venting towards Apple. Thank you for the ext hd idea, that would be nice, but i have a mac and Sony just laying her with outragous repairs needed that are not in my budget. I also prefer the hard copy that updates since last backup. I was just wondering if there was any tricks for getting my last 100+GB onto a disc? figured a knowledgeable computer person could figure something out, I currentky have a LT PC, that has crashed already..............this mean't hours of imports and GET INFO activity, Do you knor of any hoops i could jump through, or am i screwed? does windows media player play fair? maybe a transfer > burn there or maybe a crazy reformat with different ;anksanks surely i'm missing sommethin? thanks Bryan

I originally thought that iTunes match was a God send. However, it has caused me to spend numerous hours trying to fix my library from downloaded songs that would not play; to playlist that skip over songs. I have spent at least 48 hours on the phone with Apple trying to fix my library. iTunes match is not something that I would recommend at this time to anyone with a large music library.

iTunes Match is awesome! Yes it has it's bugs every once in awhile but now that it's more a streaming service it's flawless for my use. I have 30,000 of MY music (not Pandora with no control...) on a 16 GB phone. I've had iTunes Match for about a year and I would say I felt a little limited with the way it was set up before because I'd have to pre-download what I thought I might listen to throughout the day because the 3G download didn't work very well while I drove (or at all really). But now that it's more streamed it works perfectly.

My library is fine, there were a couple minor fixes like a few cover arts (such as a greatest hits album instead of the actual album). But really no big deal!

My only gripe is as of right now play counts and last played data don't update very well. But the rumor is this will be fixed on iTunes 11.

I thought iTunes Match was limited to 25,000 songs. How did you get 30,000 in the cloud or is this a mistake on your part?

For what it is worth I used iTunes Match on a library of 20,000 songs of which about half were mp3. It matched about 75-80% of my library and upgraded a significant proportion of my music from pre 2007 which were mostly my rougher tracks audio quality wise.

As a cloud service I would say that it is a disaster in that the playlists do not sync correctly in iOS6 and the playcounts and last played do not sync across the cloud from my phone back to my computers. However as service that upgraded a significant part of my music collection it was worth the $25 at the time. Whether I'll keep it at renewal time I am not so sure.

I'm pretty happy with it, although I do feel like it's quite buggy and requires a lot of patience. My library is 20,000 songs and when I turned on iTunes Match it put most of my music in the cloud. I still had to upload around 4,500 songs which took a while. When I was done, I had a few hundred songs that were ineligible. That was frustrating because a lot of them were random songs out of albums I purchased through iTunes. So I had to burn and rip them to get them back in. I also gave up on some songs with errors, no matter what I did I couldn't get them back into my cloud library. Now my issue is the music available to me on my iPhone is from about a week agao. No matter what I do, I can't get my current playlists to show up.

When I think about it, it's really nice to have access to MOST of my music. My wife and Ii travel a lot and we can be all over the country and access our music from almost anywhere on our iPads and iPhones, so that in itself is pretty amazing. I would really get behind it if it just worked the way they say it does and wasn't so quirky. I feel like i have to quit my music often and restart my phone when I'm playing music.

Happy Dad wrote:

I thought iTunes Match was limited to 25,000 songs.

It is. VeryQueasy just made a typo.

No, it's not a typo. The 25,000 song limit does not include songs purchased from the iTunes store.

True dat.

No, I don't recommend it. I'm assuming here that my username can be clicked on to see my other posts and I have recently written a feedback post about why i won't be using it once my subscription ends.

You realize you are responding to a post that is almost 2 years old?

GB

I didn't realise, no, but it was brought up in the side panel on the right as being a related thread to what I was reading/writing.

The fact that this happened merely demonstrates to me that Apple's support forum is as poor as their shoddy software and that nothing has been improved or acted upon in the last 2 years!