iTunes Match Still a Mess

[JackieInCo]

After all these years, iTunes Match is still a mess.

Two weeks ago, I bought a mid 2015 MBP and so I wanted to add all my music to it through iTunes Match.

I downloaded all 14,000 songs and then began checking all of it to make sure the correct album art was showing for each album. So many albums had other albums artwork showing so I had to correct those. That took hours to do.

Then the duplicates. out of over 14,000 songs, I had 1,653 duplicates I had to delete. Many tracks had 5-6 duplicates downloaded and in the cloud. That took several hours to correct as well.

I've been using iTunes Match since beta and it has always had these problems. I doubt that they will ever be corrected. Not sure that I want to renew in February,

 

[mpayne2k]

After all these years, iTunes Match is still a mess.

Two weeks ago, I bought a mid 2015 MBP and so I wanted to add all my music to it through iTunes Match.

I downloaded all 14,000 songs and then began checking all of it to make sure the correct album art was showing for each album. So many albums had other albums artwork showing so I had to correct those. That took hours to do.

Then the duplicates. out of over 14,000 songs, I had 1,653 duplicates I had to delete. Many tracks had 5-6 duplicates downloaded and in the cloud. That took several hours to correct as well.

I've been using iTunes Match since beta and it has always had these problems. I doubt that they will ever be corrected. Not sure that I want to renew in February,

I had it for the first year and also had many of these issues. I thought long and hard about not renewing, but for $25 bucks a year the functionality I do get is worth it. I'm now in my second year. I recently upgraded my main iTunes computer (2009 iMac) to a 2014 iMac 5k and am in the process of putting iTunes match to the test. I'm nearly finished migrating all my music from the old to new. Yes I could have done it the old fashioned way of backing up and restoring the library by HD, but I took a new approach of letting Match sync all my stuff on the new then redownloading all my songs.

Lets just say the results were fairly good, but still have the nagging issues at times where I would perform a change to the Metadata and then iTunes match would override to the older no matter how many times I updated it. I got so frustrated several times that I had to walk away, leave it for a day and hope the updates took hold. To that point its still hit or miss. For shame Apple...but I'll still re-up I bet.

 

[ra4oasis]

I had it for the first year and also had many of these issues. I thought long and hard about not renewing, but for $25 bucks a year the functionality I do get is worth it. I'm now in my second year. I recently upgraded my main iTunes computer (2009 iMac) to a 2014 iMac 5k and am in the process of putting iTunes match to the test. I'm nearly finished migrating all my music from the old to new. Yes I could have done it the old fashioned way of backing up and restoring the library by HD, but I took a new approach of letting Match sync all my stuff on the new then redownloading all my songs.

Lets just say the results were fairly good, but still have the nagging issues at times where I would perform a change to the Metadata and then iTunes match would override to the older no matter how many times I updated it. I got so frustrated several times that I had to walk away, leave it for a day and hope the updates took hold. To that point its still hit or miss. For shame Apple...but I'll still re-up I bet.

I've used Match from the beginning, and although it started buggy, the only real problem I have now is inconsistent album art. Other than that, it works flawlessly on my Macbook Pro, iPad Air 2, iPhone 6, and 2 Apple TV's. Socks that you're having issues.

 

[mpayne2k]

I've used Match from the beginning, and although it started buggy, the only real problem I have now is inconsistent album art. Other than that, it works flawlessly on my Macbook Pro, iPad Air 2, iPhone 6, and 2 Apple TV's. Socks that you're having issues.

Inconsistent album art is one of my nagging issues. Sometimes I like to change it up to something that is from a different release region (ie. album art from the UK release), etc. I upload the new image effectively changing the metadata for the music, then Apple does its thing and syncs to the cloud, then on my phone it reverts back to the US release album art. I go to the computer, and even that copy has reverted. This is the main frustration.

Other examples of metadata is if I upload an album and I change the track numbers because sometimes I'll move some songs around in an album. Match has an issue where it will sometimes take this, sometimes it wont and it reverts back to retail track numbers.

Yesterday I poked around Preferences and turned off "send data to Apple" and the setting to "have iTunes find and provide album art, track information, etc." in the hopes that this would help my situation. But upon correcting the common albums that it "fixes" and then turning iTunes match back on to make changes take hold, I found this morning it reverted back to a previous state again.

I'm not giving up, I'll be proactive. One way around this issue I've found is to make changes, "update" iTunes Match then save a physical copy of the songs in a folder on your hard drive. Then I delete the file from iTunes (along with the iCloud copy) effectively removing it from my collection. Then I add the files I saved on the desktop back into iTunes and let Match do its thing. This method has worked for some of the pesky releases as it has no other version to revert to....

 

[TrenttonY]

My issue is when a song or album has multiple version on iTunes, and iTunes Matches the wrong version.

I wish a pop-up would appear and ask for which version I wanted.

For an example... I import the album version of (X) but it matched it with the single/radio version.

 

[Shirasaki]

Since iTunes match would lock my account in one region for at least a year, I have NO reason to use this service, whether it is astonishingly good or intolerably bad, especially replies from this thread is more negative than positive.