I lost all my personal recordings of singing lessons when I turned iTunes match on. Help!

Along with my commercial music I had lists of personal tapes of all kinds. Could not access them when itunes match was activated but when I deactivated match, I got my recordings back but they are not accessible. That is I see them in the list, but there is an icon cloud with some sort of arrow in it. Otherwise I was able to play all my other music. The problem is I tried to retrieve my 50 something tapes of singing lesssons using my external back up, but the back up seems to be dead. Can anyone help me with how to retrieve my personal recordings?