iTunes Match horribly slow lately?

I'm having the same problems too. I buy music regularly on CD, or from other download stores such as Amazon. For the past month the iTunes Match service has been slower than usual, in fact I bought 3 albums in the last week and have been trying for 2 days to get them matched or uploaded. If I leave iTunes on, after about 2 hours I'm getting an error message saying that there's a connection issue. Yet, I am able to use the internet, and I have no problem playing or dowloading tracks that are already in the cloud.

I do have quite a large library but I'm still 2000 or so songs below the 25000 limit.

I signed up for Match as soon as it came out, and even with the early bugs, it was as a fantastic service, but over the past several months, it's been getting steadily slower and less reliable. New items added to my computer used to appear on my iPhone literally by the time I picked it up to check. Now it takes several hours. Streaming often gets so slow that I have to download the music to play it, and out of a CD, usually a track or two will fail to download the first time.

Definitely not feeling loved as a customer.

Add me to the list. Last few weeks I've had a NOTICEABLE slowdown and 100% failure rate with Updating iTunes Match. "Network connection timeouts" when everything else in terms of my online world is moving at superhighway speeds.

60 songs and counting that are in an "unmatched" state - that I cannot get to match.

Gosh, Apple, how I love to hate you and hate to love you.

Customer since my 1984 128k Mac.

I have noticed that once songs are uploaded via iTunes to iTunes Match, it takes now a very long time for them to show up on my iPhone 5. I have only been a match user since August 2013, and got differing results and immediately lamented losing the ability to add a few songs to a playlist on iTunes I wanted to listen to right as I was heading out the door, sync the iPhone via cable, and I was good to go. Now that is impossible and a huge loss.

I tried disabling iTunes Match on my iPhone and that seemed to work yesterday, but you have to REALLY disable it, like leave it disabled for a minute or more such that when you enable Match again, the progress bar comes up saying it is initializing iTunes Match. In doing so I got songs finally onto my iPhone that had not appeared on their own after an hour of waiting. Of course then you have to wait for the slow progress bar of enabling iTunes Match to happen, but at least it is an actionable solution for forcing iTunes Match content to appear on your iPhone.

It's great having access to all my music via only a 16GB phone, but losing the ability to immediately sync and have content on the phone is a heavy tradeoff.

For the last 3 weeks or so Match has been HORRIBLE! Takes hours just to match 1 song sometimes (often times getting constant errors).. I tired matching a song around 10 am today and I just now was able to get it match (at 3:45)... simply ridiculous. I have noticed though, if it hangs for a while.. if you turn off Match and then turn back on, it usually fixes the problem. Not sure if it just goes into a limbo state or something, but this solution works for the most part.

Based on what xtbs7645x posted, I closed out my itunes match that had been sending information to Apple for hours. Then I clicked on the upper left corned, went to the itunes store, and clicked on "update itunes match."

Bingo, within minutes my two new songs were updated and quickly appeared on my Apple phone as well. I hope this solution works all the time!

Thanks john330, that worked for me!

prior to updating match, my computer was stuck on sending info to Apple for at least 7 hrs. I closed out and followed your lead; it worked in a couple of minutes too.

I called apple and a very nice girl told me that they won't know about this problem if we don't complain. So writing here is ok, but there's NO solution, we have to call them and "force" them to solve this. Otherwise, they won't do anything!

I know the forums aren't manned by Apple employees, but I find it very hard to believe they don't have a few persons browsing and taking notes.

This is absolutely ridiculous, I have been in contact with them, turn offf, turn on, update itunes match, disable network adapter, reboot, sit and spin for 40 etc.. I can't take much more. It would not break my heart to up and leave itunes altogether, there are alternatives. I have asked for a refund, we will see what happens. They can shove this f***ing sh^^ you know where. Amazon doesn't put restrictions on their MP3 purchases and has cloud services, bye bye Apple!!! For all you future purchasers of Itunes Match DON'T DO IT! Do Not waste your money!!!!

I also had a very low performance and I'm very disappointed using iMatch in iPad, AppleTV and iPhone (where it consumed most of my internet quota).

I'm an Apple fan but must say that , in my opinion, Google's music parser makes a better job (was able to load an iTunes library corrupted by iTunes itself).

But fortunately all my problems with iMatch are gone - I didn't renew my subscription ;-)

You can submit feedback direct from iTunes. Go to the menu item iTunes - Provide iTunes Feedback and a handy web page appears to vent on. Everyone should do this.

I've cancelled my iTunes Match subscription for a refund...

So I added a new song to iTunes at exactly 12:00AM this morning. Left iTunes open, and I went to bed.

In bed, I thought to myself, I really want to hear that song. So I proceeded to open the Music app on my iPhone. Nope, nothing there. Well, I know iTunes Match has been giving problems lately, so I open Google Music. Good, the song is available for play. I rock myself to sleep using the Google Music app.

I woke up 7 hours later. Open iTunes on my PC; iTunes Match is stuck on Step 1.

I did as a customer suggested, and turned off iTunes Match, and turned it back on. 1 hour later the song finally matched/uploaded.

Unfortunately some Michael Jackson tracks are leaking, so I acquired another track. I added it to iTunes, hoping it would be available on all my iDevices within 5 minutes like iTunes match of old and like Google Music (which automatically uploads all my new songs to the cloud).

I was wrong. After 1 hour of being stuck on Step 1 again. I had to repeat the process of turning off and turning on Match on iTunes 11. Yes, the process resumed. The song is now in iCloud. But we have a real problem:

This doesn't just work.

This is absolutely un-Apple like, and an embarrassment. I will not be renewing my subscription, nor will I ever suggest anyone to subscribe.

TLDR: iTunes Match doesn't work properly anymore.

I echo Richardgm's comments.

I was an early adopter of iTunes Match, and it once worked great. Over the past several months its performance has degraded to the point that it is useless. I have tried all the suggested fixes as well and they never work.

I am currently evaluating Google vs. Amazon's solutions.