iTunes match is automatically downloading songs to phone

I, too, have been bitten by this bug. It's clearly a bug, and I am displeased to read that 9.3 beta isn't fixing it, either. Battery drain, storage full so that phone stops working... Who would have thought that simply paying for what sounds like a pretty cool service would render one's phone unusable?

Anyway, I'm hoping for a fix. I like the idea of Match now that the limit has been raised. But, man, I really don't feel like Apple' tests anything thoroughly. It's, like, Tim Cook downloads a Coldplay album from his iPhone, sees it show up on his iPad and declares "ship it!" None of Apple's cloud stuff ever works very well initially and, by the time they get it to work, you're totally afraid to trust it.

Anyway, I've been on with Apple support for 1.5 hours on this issue. I'll post here if there are any updates or news items to report :-)

I was quite a late convert to Apple products starting with the iPhone 3G. It was great, and I had no problems with that, the 3GS, 4 or 4S. However, the 5 and 6 and software over the last couple of years have left me bitterly disappointed.

I don't get 3G let alone 4G at home or many of the areas locally, and I have to have the phone switched to 2G to stand any chance of a signal: with 2G the signal is much weaker than any previous phones and drops out on a whim, often for prolonged periods. When switched to 3G or 4G there's maybe one bar at best.

Two years ago the update to iOS meant that it was impossible to sync my music and playlists between computer and phone. That lasted for about a year, despite it being a seemingly common problem, based on these forum contributions. Apple didn't seem to want to recognise there was a problem.

Now, I've got a brand new iPhone 6S + which I can use because I can't stop the auto-downloading of songs and battery wipeout within a few hours.I've reverted to my broken and crap-signal iPhone 6. Both are 128Gb, but when it's trying to download a music library of 90000 songs... I've tried deleting downloads, but they keep re-appearing. I've switched my sims, and the new phone, with no active SIM will still start downloading if I switch on wifi. I'm working 12 hour days atm so haven't had the time to speak to Apple to see what can be done.

And then, of course, they've ruined the iTunes Store by limiting search results to a measly 100. I like to find different versions of songs, and if you search for a song with a common word in a title there's not a hope in **** of getting any sensible results. The latest major OS upgradem in the autumn even put an end to the back-door method which took you back to the old paged layout.

All in all I'm not impressed with Apple, and if it wasn't for the money I've invested in some Apps, I'd have already moved away by now.

push

Apple, come on, this is really annoying...

I have 9.2.1 on my iPhone 5c and was seeing the same problems described here: phone choking on downloads, battery dying, even if I turned Cellular Data completely off and disabled iCloud Music Library; the phone still surreptitiously managed to download songs via my WiFi connection. I'm not really sure how I got it to stabilize, but I can tell you I disabled the iCloud Music Library in iTunes Preferences on my Mac, disabled WiFi on my phone and then synced the phone directly to the computer. The phone seemed a bit calmer so I re-enabled the WiFi and opened the Music app on the phone. When I did this, I noticed a small gray bar at the top that said it was downloading a small number of songs (50 or so). When I pressed on the bar, it showed the download queue. The thing I had never noticed before was at the bottom of the queue: a bar that read "Cancel All Downloads". Pressing this bar stopped the automatic download process. This gave me the courage to try re-enabling the iCloud Music Library which of course attempted to queue a large number of downloads (5000+), but before it got very far I scrolled to the bottom and cancelled all downloads. It seems to be behaving at this point.

Hopefully this helps some of you who may not have seen the option to cancel the downloads. Obviously, it would be preferable to have this available without even looking at the queue. Nevertheless, I hope this brings some of you some sanity.

FWIW I decided to wait out the process on a hunch (and several ASC reports) that once Apple finished the initial match processing of my 80,000 track library it would stop pushing everything to my iPhone.

So I turned off cellular access for the iOS Music app so at the very least it was only using my wifi data -- which was annoying because I lost half the functionality of listening to radio and library streams away from home for a week or two. And I was paying Apple $9.99/month at least in part for that functionality.

And I waited, periodically updated my iCloud Music library on the Mac iTunes app (as the match process stopped numerous times for no apparent reason) and kept deleting the new tracks as they seemingly randomly filled my iPhone.

And then... it stopped.

I waited a day or two, deleted the useless "My Music" tracks that were on my iPhone one album at a time as I could not get Settings>General>Storage>Manage Storage>All Songs to swipe delete the whole library. (It would just hang or crash Settings.app).

I took a deep breath, turned on Use Cellular Data. And started adding tracks from my iCloud Music Library and Apple Music's cloud both using Wifi and LTE.

And finally, it seems to work. For two whole weeks now. I'm not sure why Apple put me through a month of agony, a surprise $30 extra on my AT&T bill, and still told me with a straight face (technically it was over the phone) that this was a feature.

My message is simple: Ya' slippin!

I recently received this response from a second level support representative from Apple.

"I do apologize for the late response i know this has taken some time so i appreciate your patience. From what we have from engineering it seems Apple has received reports of the symptom you describe and is currently investigating this issue. Keep your software up-to-date using Software Update. You may also want to check the support website from time to time for possible updates about this issue. Further updates, if any, may come by way of a software update, knowledge base article or software release, i do apologize there isn’t an exact fix for this but i appreciate your patience while we work on a fix for this. Please let me know if you have any additional questions."

So it seems that at least Apple is aware of the problem and working on it. I have yet to retry iTunes Match to see if it is fixed or if any of the suggested workarounds solve my problem as it was such a hassle the first time that my iPad was bricked by all the downloads. I have more or less kissed away this year's subscription cost as I will not turn on iTunes Match until I know it works but I have made sure that the subscription will not automatically renew!

Still having the issue here. Is this gonna be fixed soon? Please advise. It's tempting to jump ship after a while.

I just finished a 3 month project archiving all my music expecting iTunes Match glory. This bug appeared at about the day i finished. Yay.

If you have completed uploading all your songs to iTunes Match, then I think it's possible to use Apple Music without problems. I encountered this problem a few weeks ago, but since I cleared the "Downloading Songs" list, my iPhone hasn't attempted to download any more songs on its own. Just to repeat what I've written before:

• Click on the "Downloading ... songs" bar in the Music app
• Scroll to the bottom of the listed songs
• Keep clicking "Cancel Downloads" over and over again until no songs reappear on the list
• If you upload more songs, repeat this procedure.

We've had a few confirmations that the above works. It's a bug that Apple needs to fix soon, but it doesn't mean that iTunes Match is unusable.

does not work, if cloud library wasn't turned on before activating iTunes Match.

during the initial setup of iCloud library on the phone there is no downloading songs bar..

I emptied the phone of music, turned iCloud off and then on again. Said to Replace the library. Immediately went to Music App and clicked on a download and 'Canceled All Downloads' or whatever it said. Downloads stopped, the library loaded and is working. Thanks Ray.

It looks like I MAY have finally worked this out. None of the previous suggestions have worked for me, but what has fixed it (for now) for me, and doesn't seem to have been mentioned before, is the button for Settings... on iTunes on my Mac, when my iPhone is connected, next to the Autofill button.

Connect your iPhone to your Mac, and click on the icon for the phone. Click on Music on the On My Device menu on the left. Click on Settings... and set the Reserve space for disk use slider right to the right hand side - so that you essentially are saying you're making no space available for music actually ON your device. Click OK.

I did the above, and set off iTunes to prepare a new iCloud Music Library. Once it had done so (24,000 songs), I connected my phone, which was empty of music. On the iPhone, I set the switch for iCloud Music Library ON...it scanned and presented the library, but actually downloaded nothing to my iPhone. It didn't even attempt to.

This has been a real struggle for the last few weeks, but hopefully this has fixed it. I'll let you know if there are any problems down the line...

What do you mean with "set off iTunes to prepare a new iCloud Music Library"

Thanks

What I mean is that what I did is 'start again' - as in I disconnected the computer from iTunes Match, so there was no iTunes Music Library set up. Then I went to the iTunes store from iTunes, clicked on iTunes Match and then clicked on 'Add This Computer'. It then prepares a new iCloud library (which can take a long time, depending on your upload speed).

Incidentally, this morning I added a new album to my iCloud library. It attempted to download it to my phone, but I just deleted the download and it didn't try again.

When you say that none of the previous suggestions worked, are you sure you kept on clicking the "Cancel Downloads" button until no new songs were added to the list, i.e., following Re: iTunes match is automatically downloading songs to phone. When you added the new album just now, you only had to clear songs from that one album, which probably took a single click, but if you have uploaded thousands of songs, it can take a long time to clear the list. You have to be persistent until they are all gone. Then they don't reappear in my experience. Of course, it's ridiculous we are still having this discussion. There is no excuse for Apple taking so long to fix it.

I have an iPhone 5s that I use for streaming Pandora in my truck on a business account that has a large, but not unlimited data plan. 3 days ago I noticed iCloud Match bumped up the limit, so I signed up.

This morning my iPhone started reporting "low storage" error! I turned out it pulled 10GB of music over LTE. The same symptoms like everyone here; repetitive downloads that filled up the phone for now reason.

Called Apple and spoke to 2 people. (Not sure if the 2nd guy I spoke to was actually Level 2 tech or not) To his defense he called me back 2-3 times as my backup cell was dropping the connection. We tried everything, disabling LTE, disabling iCloud Music Library, Automatic Downloads, etc etc.

POSSIBLE FIX:

This 5S was a clean install, with not a single local copy of my iTunes playlist song. It kept on downloading UNTIL we logged off from the iCloud and iTunes accounts THEN rebooted and finally signed back into the before mentioned service.

CAUSE:

1. Looking back, everything was good to go for 2 days. Last night I looked at my mac mini's iTunes and noticed a lot of songs with the crossed cloud icon (not eligible for upload).

As these were legitimate songs I selected quite a few of them and "forced" the upload to the cloud. Not sure if this started the problem or not...and not sure why these songs can't be uploaded either. These are mp3 files not videos.

* At the same time my personal iPhone 6S+ (on IOS 9.0.2) did not start any automatic uploads. This phone had some locally stored music and I managed to download a few songs to the existing songs from the cloud without any ill effect.

APPLE should be working on this issue as if I had a 128GB phone, I would have used $900 worth of company data this month! Good thing a 16GB 5S got filled up quick and drew my attention.

P.S. I'm thinking about uploading 9GB of videos to use up available space on the phone and try to force the above mentioned songs to sync.