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iTunes Match Gobbling Up Cellular Data (even though disabled)

I've found a few previous threads that reference this problem, but it's pretty horrific especially now LTE is in the picture.

Despite setting the "Use Cellular Data" option to OFF (verified in both Music and iTunes settings), if you select music to be downloaded (i.e. click the cloud icon), iTunes grabs the music regardless of whether you are on WiFi or Cellular.

Scenario 1: I get a new iPhone5 and want to sync my existing music library to it. I have a playlist with all 2500 songs in it, so I go there and hit the cloud icon so all my music copies over. There's no way to pause the whole process - only individual songs - and no way to stop it using cellular data, so when I leave the house, my phone starts eating up my cellular data plan (2.5GB in 3 days, when most of my time was spent at home). I detailed this on my blog - http://lamejournal.com/2012/09/24/itunes-match-uses-cellular-data-even-when-you- say-no/

Still, it shouldn't be so bad, because I spent most of my time at home. Right?

Scenario 2: Your brand new iPhone 5 has problems staying connected to WiFi (see the many threads on this issue). What happens when it has problems with WiFi and drops off the network? Yup, you got it, it uses LTE instead. So while I'm sitting in my house, 10 feet away from a 802.11n access point, supposedly 'safely' downloading my music over my home Internet connection, my phone randomly decides it doesn't want to play with WiFi after all, and continues downloading on cellular instead. Isn't that great?

This is ridiculous. The option "Use Cellular Data" should do exactly what it says - when turned OFF, iTunes should not be downloading iTunes Match data from the cloud over cellular. I have 20Gig of music to download, and thank goodness I caught it when I did before being hit with enormous overages.

Hopefully this is just a bug and can be fixed easily and quickly by Apple.

Thank you!

iPhone 5, iOS 6, iTunes Match

Posted on Sep 25, 2012 6:47 AM

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jgherbert Author

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Posted on Sep 25, 2012 1:08 PM

Ok. So here's the deal.

If you are on cellular data (not WiFi) and you have the Use Cellular Data options set to OFF, you cannot add items to the iTunes Match download queue, and you can't immediately play (sort of stream) tracks either. While on WiFi, those options are available to you, and you can fill up the queue for download.

Once a track is in the queue, it will download over any network connection you have. You can't control that, and the only way to stop it is to either individually pause every track in your download queue (2500 tracks? I think not), go into Airplane Mode (hmm), or disable 3G data in Settings (at best, a brutal workaround).

The only real workaround is to stay at home while you add 1 album at a time, wait for it to finish, then add the next one. That way you can keep your queue size manageable enough to be able to pause it when needed.

AppleCare Tier2 confirm this behavior - not quite as a 'feature', but "currently that's how it is". It's a ridiculous design decision that will cost some people very dearly on their data plan overages. Worse, if you are using iTunes Match at home on WiFi and you are experiencing the WiFi drops that are being reported, your iTunes Match transfers will continue virtually uninterrupted over cellular data instead until your WiFi comes back.

*shakes head*

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37 replies

sherrjo

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Sep 26, 2013 12:24 AM in response to gadgetcoma

Hello Gadgetcoma nice nick name.

I am wondering if they have infact changed something since last year. I signe upto match last year and as soon as I switched it on it removed all my songs from my phone and they were all on the cloud.

I then had to redownload them again via match which was probably not correct.

However unlike you it didn't seem to just stop the download queue when it was disconnected from wifi but continued to download all queued up tracks. At the time (if you read the full thread) apple said this was by design.

I will switch match on again today and do some testing to see if it has improved. However from reading the latest posts is seems like the podcast app is still very buggy and not to be used. I highly recommend Downcast if people come here looking for a podcast app.

Sep 26, 2013 8:26 AM in response to sherrjo

I saw the same thing and assumed that the music was removed when iTunes Match was turned on. In fact, the phone gave me a message saying that music on the phone would be replaced by music on iTunes Match. It appears that the message is not exactly right. The behavior I saw (and the Apple rep confirmed) is that music already on your phone is not removed when you turn on iTunes Match if that music is already in iTunes Match. This does make sense (in a way). It's assuming that music already on your phone shouldn't have to be redownloaded from iTunes Match. You can verify this by having iTunes Match turned off, load some music to your phone via iTunes syncing, turn off the phone's "Show All Music" option, then turn on iTunes Match. You should still see any music you already loaded to your phone. If you turn on "Show All Music," the rest of your iTunes Match music will show up with the cloud download icon showing.

If you try this out, please let me know what you find.

Oct 11, 2013 9:05 AM in response to jgherbert

I now have the opposite problem. I have unlimited data, so I want to be able to play match songs over cellular. However, when I'm not on Wifi, my phone doesn't permit me to play any music in the cloud.

Oct 12, 2014 4:44 AM in response to jgherbert

I would have hoped this issue would have been corrected two years and two major operating systems updates later, but I just had the exact same thing happen to me: After restoring my iPhone 5 to try to solve a frustrating battery issue, I set my favorites playlist (about 2,200 songs) to download from the cloud. Even though I was home a good portion of that day and the next, when my wife and I went out for dinner nearly 48 hours later, I got the notice from Verizon that I had used up almost 75 percent of my data.

I can't figure out how to stop the download. I have tried turning iTunes Match off, then back on again, but that doesn't help. About half the songs have the downloading icon on beside them (the square with the red circle; though the red circle looks complete, if I hit that button, it's replaced by the cloud icon). To top it off, even on WiFi, data doesn't appear to be working very well on my phone, at least on some things. Mail, for instance, is very slow to update.

I don't know if this is my phone's way of telling me it's time to upgrade, but my contract isn't up until December.

Oct 12, 2014 9:02 AM in response to Dan Radmacher

Why would you buy a new iPhone over this? You will have the same problem. All over again. Apple is not very good at online services. They all have bugs and work unreliably.

Only a non iOS phone will fix this issue.

Oct 24, 2014 2:45 AM in response to jgherbert

Upgraded iphone 5c to IOS 8.1 on my PC using iTunes (12.0.1.26) and upgrade locked up. After restarting iphone most of my music was missing so I attempted to restore all of my missing music. The sync downloaded all music (approx. 1gb) through the cellular network (even though my phone was connected to the pc using a cable) and not through the pc. Unbeknown to me I exceeded all my monthly data limit within minutes. I have done this operation many times before and was bewildered as to what was going on and so I checked all my settings and everything looked ok. From what I have read above the only way I will do this operation again is by removing the sim card.

Jul 8, 2016 7:18 PM in response to jgherbert

Had this happen to me recently (June 2016) running iOS 9.3.x, so it's still an issue.

I *THINK* I may have finally stumbled on a fix.

If you're stuck in the download loop, turn on Airplane Mode, then hit the Cancel Download command.

The list should clear.

Now --- it may start again when you disable Airplane Mode, only with a shorter song count. Turn on Airplane Mode again and hit cancel again.

Do this two or three times until the list shrinks to zero.

iTunes Match Gobbling Up Cellular Data (even though disabled)