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iTunes 12.1.2: Match BROKEN! Deleted playlists, etc.!

I'm just trying to gauge if anyone else is having this problem. I've noticed since recent releases of iTunes I've had more and more problems with iTunes Match. It originally worked fine (I signed up the day it was released), and it is getting REALLY bad now. After the most recent update (12.1.2) I spent hours, as usual, rating, tagging (BMP, Key, etc.) all of my newer tracks. I soon find out that iTunes Match has deleted all of those tags and reverted back to the original tag. What's worse, no matter how many times I delete playlists, they just come back a few minutes later. I literally deleted a folder with a playlist in it 15 times, every time I look, there it is again! To REALLY top it off, today I had been working on building a playlist for about five hours (I'm a DJ, I build my lists in iTunes then import them in to Traktor). Literally as I'm working on moving tracks between playlists, iTunes COMPLETELY DELETES my entire playlist and reverts my other playlist back to some version from the day before!

It's REALLY horrible, not only unusable, but to the point of causing me serious problems. I've been a Mac user for at least 20 years and I can definitely say I've never had a problem like this with iTunes. I've just never seen anything built by Apple that actually deletes files without any interaction. Oh, any the other computer on my iTunes Match account does have the latest version of iTunes as well.

Anyone else experiencing this?

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Mavericks (10.9), 2.6 GHz - 16 RAM / 512GB SSD

Posted on Apr 11, 2015 8:32 AM

34 replies

Apr 13, 2015 8:00 AM in response to broncosfighton

There isn't much that you can do, unless they reset the server or come out with a software fix. I'm waiting for an email from one of the senior advisors at iTunes the team is going to reset my iTunes Match on the server to see if that fixes the issue. So if you are having this problem I would turn it off, and contact Apple to see if they can reset your iTunes Match server. We all have to go hard wire until this problem is solved, I tried everything that I can think of!

Apr 13, 2015 8:58 AM in response to Cornelius Qualley

I am having the same problem. I added a song to a playlist this morning, updated Match... and the playlist disappeared. I've since created it two more times, and both times it disappeared.

I spent 10 minutes on hold with Apple Support trying to tell them about it... and got disconnected. Fantastic.

Apr 13, 2015 9:45 AM in response to Cornelius Qualley

I have the same problem. I have 2 Mac computers and 3 iOS devices, so itunes match is very essential to my setup. After some painful try out, i have found a temporary fix.

first turn off itunes match on all of your mac computers, you can leave it on on your ios devices.

then create whatever playlists you need on one of your macs. because now itunes match is off, it won't try to delete your new playlists.

and after you're done, quit itunes, open it again. and turn on itunes match. it should stay.

wait and let itunes match update. this time the new playlists should stay. now go to the other mac/macs, turn on itunes match, the new playlists should sync.

check on your ios devices, they should sync as well.

Apr 13, 2015 11:37 AM in response to scottkaiser

I'll have to give your workaround a try and see if that helps for now. Currently I've disabled iTunes Match all together because my biggest fear is that it's also causing unseen issues that I may discover in the future. For example, I have a number of smart playlists that are highly reliant on metadata such as BPM, comments (which I fill with song key data from Mixed In Key), year, star rating, etc. I also noticed that after spending a long time rating music, which I do regularly to fill my playlists, none of that information stuck either, it all reverted back to some previous version.

What frustrates me so much about this issue is that it is one of the services that we have to pay for. You would think it would get a decent amount of attention since it is a subscription service. I'm just tired of getting iTunes updates that offer no new useful features but just cause more problems. It seems like there is no real direction or focus with iTunes, every version brings really random changes. Apple will change a design element, like essentially eliminating the sidebar, then bring it back in an update version. Also, they keep changing the get info window and how it functions, which is quite annoying. The version update information for the most recent version said they were doing fixes on the Get Info window, however now it has a bug that I've never seen before. If you try to cut the last part of an artist name, it just doesn't work (e.g. go to get info on a track, select some of the text at the end of the artist field, and do a cut...it doesn't work). How do you break something like that?

I just don't want Apple to turn in to Microsoft and release "features" only to subsequently provide 5 updates to fix the bugs that the new "feature" brought. Apple has always been really great at refining features and new elements to a point where they worked flawlessly. That doesn't always mean every feature, but it means everything they do include works very well. I feel like iTunes, especially, has really lost that.

Apr 13, 2015 12:12 PM in response to scottkaiser

I've experienced many of the same problems as everyone else on this thread, but I somehow stumbled on a solution. Sadly, it's a solution I can't replicate.

I too had new playlists disappear — right in front of my eyes, no less — and had to recreate them. (I've started taking screen captures of my lists so I can remember what was on them.) Anyway, the recreated playlists disappeared also — all but one. Next to that playlist is a cloud icon with a line through it, (see below) which would seem to indicate it's not syncing via iCloud. But I have no idea how that happened.

I tried duplicating that "no-iCloud" playlist, but the cloud icon doesn't copy and the duplicated playlist disappears. Anyone have an idea?

Apr 13, 2015 12:29 PM in response to Cornelius Qualley

Same issue here.

Create new playlist, drag songs inside, update iTunesMatch, playlist disappears!

It happened at least 3 times in less than 1 hour... 😐

Apr 13, 2015 2:53 PM in response to Lars Hoel

Yes, that icon basically means its not on the cloud and waiting to be updated, or you have tracks that are not eligible for iCloud, and lastly the song data couldn't be found.. Try updating iTunes match and see if that works! Usually for me it worked and my playlist is back on my IOS devices.

Apr 13, 2015 2:58 PM in response to scottkaiser

Okay this good! I have not seen any playlist lost! Thanks for the workaround! I will try to add songs maybe and see.. I only have 2 songs in there now basically this is the test subject. Thanks again!

Apr 13, 2015 3:08 PM in response to scottkaiser

Correction** It still doesn't allow new music to the playlist, if I drag it into the playlist from a mp3 I exported, it deletes the playlist

joeysvec

Level 1

0 points

Apr 13, 2015 7:16 PM in response to Travman21

I downgraded back to iTunes 12.0.1 and the playlists do not delete themselves anymore upon creation. Just google how to downgrade, it's very simple. Thanks Apple for another fun DIY iTunes Match adventure! Perhaps you should start charging a yearly fee ONLY when your software consistently works for a year.

Apr 13, 2015 7:19 PM in response to joeysvec

I Was about to do that! ThankS!

Apr 14, 2015 6:06 AM in response to Lars Hoel

So I looked at my non-disappearing playlist (the one with the line-through-the-cloud icon) a little more closely and discovered three songs in the list with that same icon. I got info on one of them, clicked the "File" tab and noticed "iCloud status" indicates Duplicate. Same for the other two songs.

Then I tried creating a new playlist, adding one of the duplicate songs. Sure enough, this new playlist has the same line-through-the-cloud icon and — most importantly — it doesn't disappear! So it seems if you have one or more songs that aren't syncing to the cloud in a playlist, iTunes Match will leave it alone.

Not an elegant workaround, I know, but at least for me it beats having to downgrade iTunes to an earlier version or turn off iTunes Match altogether.

Apr 14, 2015 6:27 AM in response to Cornelius Qualley

Update: I spoke with Apple for an hour yesterday, and they watched via screenshot as a playlist got made, then disappeared via screenshare. They elevated the issue and told me they'd get back to me.

Update 2: The issue seems to be resolved for me, at least for now. I created several playlists, edited several others, and clicked Update iTunes Match and let it complete several times, all without issue this morning, from two different laptops. I changed nothing on my end, so I am not sure what happened here.

joeysvec

Level 1

0 points

Apr 14, 2015 7:17 AM in response to Steve Murphy

I'm still having the same issues, nothing changed for me unfortunately. 😟

Apr 22, 2015 5:53 PM in response to Cornelius Qualley

Has anyone else had any progress on fixing this issue? I've not yet attempted to turn iTunes Match back on, I wasn't sure if this was determined to be some sort of server side issue that or iTunes issue.

iTunes 12.1.2: Match BROKEN! Deleted playlists, etc.!