Has iTunes match gone haywire?

My problem started last night. Mine has gone crazy, including splitting albums & artists, adding incorrect artwork to individual tracks on the same album. Various Artist albums are totally screwed, tracks appearing all over the place.

Where is the fix Apple?

Get on it.

I'm glad it's not just me that's started having this problem. It's very frustrating going to play an album and finding songs have been split up. Also I have about 100 'various artists' listed now. Things are out of alphabetical order sometimes. It's a mess.

Does Apple read this forum or should we get in touch with them directly?

Add me to the list. Everything was perfect yesterday, now it's a colossal mess. Artists and artwork split up, mislabelled, etc. As someone who has spent countless hours making sure the metadata is to my liking, I am not happy with this at all.

How do we let Apple know?! Even artwork on iTunes on my windows PC has been altered! The whole thing has gone barmy.

Same problem here. It's only on my iOS devices, and there's no rhyme or reason to the mess.

Any idea when iOs 8.4 arrives? I'm going on holiday soon and want to be able to access my music properly. Maybe I'll disable Match for a bit? In the meantime I'm going to send an email to Apple

I'm on iOS 8.4 public beta 3 on my iPad and the issue still persists. It hasn't been there since install of the public beta, it just came up 3 days ago.

Even music bought directly from iTunes is being split up. This is completely exceptionable

Just to add that on my iPhone 6 if you turn off iTunes match but leave Show All Music on, that leaves a Purchased playlist that is ordered OK. Does this mean that the problem only affects uploaded songs that weren't bought through iTunes? And the original promise to match all the music in our libraries has been cast aside?

The way this issue came up, without any action by the user and immediately propagating across iOS devices, makes it seem like a server-side issue... possibly even data corruption.

I'm not sure that the problem is specifically to do with iOS8.3 though. Seems to me that what's happened is that the match process has screwed the meta-data that Apple has stored in the Match service in the cloud. Example (and there are many) from my recent experience : The Best of Barry White now features on song (Love's Theme) which is apparently by The Clash according to my iPhone and iPad (both on iOS8.3)!! Edith Piaf guest features on an Album called "Africanism" - which is a DJ compilation (and no she doesn't actually feature on this at all but shows up as an artist on that album - which incidentally is split into multiple albums on iOS).

So like many, I've been through the process of killing off all the Match songs, cleaning out the library, starting again with the Match service - to try and fix this problem. What I've noticed so far is:

1) Everything is absolutely clean in iTunes itself. Tags are correct, album and artist views are all correct.

2) On iOS (both iPad and iPhone) I have totally munged data - wrong artists, albums split etc. Now the thing that's interesting here is that the munging of album information is actually mixing up metadata from albums I have - so it's not ever matching any songs with albums I don't have at all. Which seems to imply to me that what's happening is that during the matching process, something (either in the Match Cloud or in iTunes) is incorrectly storing the wrong metadata for the album and/or artist when it's updating the cloud version of the meta-data. That's the only way I can see that the incorrect information is then managing to make it down to the iOS devices.

I haven't yet checked this, but it would be interesting to see if it's only happening with songs that are uploaded rather than matched. I'll check that out.

Anyway - I'm not convinced that an update to iOS8.4 will help. That's not going to correct things if it's the metadata in Match that's screwed. That would have to be done with a resync from iTunes again ... ? Wouldn't it?

Can anyone confirm if this same problem is/is not happening on non iOS8.3 devices (i.e. earlier versions of iOS). If we can isolate what's in common with this problem, then maybe we can help Apple sort it out. It's infuriating currently - and makes music almost unusable on iPhone/iPad.

It just occurred to me .. perhaps this is Apple's initial response to Taylor Swift's threat to ban her music from iTunes/Apple Music? If all her tracks show up under Rammstein she'll never know they're still selling her music online right? 😀

So I've now checked some of the mixed up songs in iTunes, and there's no pattern between uploaded songs versus matched songs. I have incorrect artist/album information on songs on my iPhone/iPad some of which were matched, and some of which were uploaded. In all cases, the mixup appears to be with other information from my library - i.e. not with any artists/albums I don't have in my library. And in all case too the information in iTunes is 100% correct. Just wrong on the iPad/iPhone.

So it looks as though either the metadata in the cloud is screwed, or alternatively that the iDevices are screwing things up when they're accessing the Match service?