iTunes Match crippled in iOS 6

I've tried all of that, because that's what has worked in the past. However, no matter how many times I try to replace on iTunes, then get my device to re-sync the corrupted song, the corrupted song remains on my iPhone. And because I can no longer delete individual songs on my iPhone, I can't manually remove it. It's asinine.

I saw this posted in a similar thread, but thought I'd share here as well as I had the same experience. I started to download a large amount of music over wi-fi (out of necessity after iTunes Match deleted my entire library). The music wasn't able to finish downloading before I left the house and even though I had "Use Cellular Data" disabled, the songs continued to download over my cell network. As there were still over 1,000 songs to download, I had to turn off my cell data to prevent the downloads from continuing. Just a warning for anyone who tries to download a large amount at one time. I previously submitted a complaint to Apple but didn't mention this as it hadn't happened at the time. Just further evidence that this was a crappy plan on their part. Hoping that they fix this asap. Does anyone know of another way to publicize this issue? I have replied to articles on Macworld and CNet.

Hey, Steve, that's a good idea.

I just did it.

Thanks for the suggestion, I strongly agree.

andrea

Good Morning Ryan80!

Ha! Ha! This is crazy. But, I figured out why.

You were holding your iPad in landscape mode and therefore were displaying two half-screen size pages at a time. I was holding my iPad in portrait mode and therefore displaying one full size page at a time.

This results in the same material being displayed on a different page numbers. I put my iPad in landscape mode and indeed there was your discovery on what was now called page 165 under playlists.

These page numbering discoveries don't help the iTunes Match catastrophie much, but they are sure providing some comic relief. :-)

All that aside, I will still be forever amazed you found this piece of information.

If I was you, I'd sign up for the next "Search for Atlantis" expedition.

You are....The Master.

Despite the problems with iTunes Match, I hope you have a good day.

Mr. Luigi

Hi CongressDJ,

Oh Well.

Something ventured. Nothing gained.

Off to write my feedback request.

Have a good day,

Mr. Luigi

<Edited By Host>

Hi steve.lawrence,

I agree also. As with several other glaring problems in the past, the only avenue Apple provides customers to gain access to the decision machine is through the feedback process...however agonizingly slow it often is.

For our Peeps in this Discussion Thread, here are the links to the Feedback Site:

http://www.apple.com/feedbtack

Good luck to all of us,

Mr. Luigi

I agree, if stays like this i won´t be paying anymore for the service.

I agree, this is horrible! I am a huge fan of iTunes Match, but not this way. I think the interface is better of iTunes on the iPhone, but not being able to delete or download individual songs or see what has or has not been downloaded to my phone is a huge step backwards. I think iTunes match was great before, and I was just hoping that Apple would make incremental improvements moving forward. Apple, what happened!??!?!

mollib,

Data usage is my biggest concern. Used to be that I could store a limited core selection of my music on my iPhone via an iPhone / iTunes sync knowing that if I needed something else from the rest of my library I could always hit the cloud icon next to that offline track and it would download and play as long as I was connected to the net; basically the whole selling point of iTunes Match in my opinion. Now, it is either iTunes Match or not. This means that when I activate iTunes Match on my phone, all the transferred music is deleted and anytime I want to play a song it must be downloaded from iCloud first. This is insane. It means all my data will be sucked up just setting up my iPhone music library. Furthermore I can't easily know what is online or offline. I have 6GB of data monthly but lost 2GB playing music over the weekend not realizing my entire library was now offline due to the move to iOS 6. I'm just wondering how many other users did the exact same thing!

Is it just me or is this entirely counter to what Apple marketed iTunes Match as? I'm concerned this has something to do with the record labels preferring people not have downloaded copies of the music they have purchased on their devices. I don't see the reason why Apple would change this process otherwise. Seems to completely limit the usability of iTunes Match while consuming excessive amounts of users precious data.

One other point to add to my above post. In iOS 6 there are now two switches in the iPhone's system settings for governing whether the phone uses Cellular Data to download music from iCloud.

Under Settings: Music there is a "Use Cellular Data" switch which appears after the "iTunes Match" switch is turned on and under Settings: General: Cellular there is another switch labelled "iTunes" under the "Use Cellular Data for:" section.

I'm curious why there are two?? Which one actually turns the newly dangerous data tap off for iTunes music downloads?

I do hope that this is all just another example of Apple's ever diminishing quality control that will be addressed in 6.1 and not something more problematic such as influence from the record labels to limit our control over the music we download.

Since we've been discussing what iOS6+iTunes Match does not do, I thought I'd engage in some speculation of what it does/might do.

From the manual:

"When iTunes Match is turned on, you can’t delete music. If space is needed, iTunes Match removes music for you, starting with the oldest and least played songs."

This actually could be kind of cool. Perhaps we no longer will even need to worry about deleting music. Whether you are just listening to music, which may stream but is ultimately a download, or manually download songs, it would actually be awesome if iOS handled music almost like it handles memory management, where you just don't have to worry about it.

Time will tell as to how iOS6 actually deals with this. Big questions have yet to be answered, like do photos taken with the camera cause music to be removed? Does installing an application cause music to be removed? Is iOS6 smart enough to not let you fill your iPhone completely, since we all know devices get very unhappy when a storage is completely filled.

Some changes we will just have to deal with. To download a single song, Apple now expects you to just play it. They've gone more towards the Spotify approach, where you can only download entire playlists or albums, etc. Really, this isn't that big of a deal (to me).

One thing I think we can all agree with, is that Apple should be more transparent and up front when making significant changes to a service we pay extra for. An email to subscribers at a bare minimum describing the changes to iTunes Match for iOS6 users.

Hi Joel,

I like some of the points you've made and your willingness to look at all this from a different direction. I think if Apple had just done what you said in your well worded last paragraph this forum thread would have a very different tone...a better one. Still, I can't wait for iOS 6.1. :-)

I am still not sure exactly what is happening when the user does "just play it" as you state. I conjectured in an earlier post that when you do this you actually are downloading your song to a "streaming cache" and not downloading it in the "normal" sense. For example, I have only two songs from the album Black in Black by AC/DC. When I go into view by "Artist" and select AC/DC I get a screen that shows those two songs. Same thing happens when I view by "Album" and select "Back in Black." I get that same screen listing those two songs.

Now, this is the interesting part. If I just play BOTH songs (the "entire" album as far as what I own) the Cloud icon with the downward arrow that is part of this screen does NOT go away. I have to click on the Cloud icon with the downward arrow to remove the Cloud icon. (Clicking that Cloud icon causes the downloading circles to appear next to each song in the album). That seems to indicate to me that there is a difference between "downloading" a song by playing it and downloading songs by hitting the Cloud icon.

Both methods use up memory. I checked "Usage" --> "Music" and the number of MB goes up in Music whether I play the song or hit the Cloud icon.

So, I wonder what the functional difference is between downloading by playing and downloading by hitting the Cloud icon. Does downloading by playing indeed send the music to a streaming cache and downloading by hitting the Cloud icon send the music to a different area in the iPhone's memory? And if so, does that matter? If it matters, how?

So many questions. So few answers.