Love iTunes Match on iTunes, but not on iPhone?

[benguild]

iTunes Match works perfectly on iTunes. I get it.

On my iPhone, however, I generally am not willing to download songs OTA unless I really want to hear a specific song that I don't have with me. Otherwise, I manually select the songs I want to keep with me in advance, considering the device only has 16GB.

I'm a bit lost when it comes to how to manage a similar scenario while using this service. Even setting "Show All Music" to "Off" ... how do I add new music? Before, I could just add songs via iTunes, but this seems pretty backward. — Do I have to turn that setting to "On", download the song(s), then turn it back off? Why is it like this? How is the average person supposed to figure this out?

I was hoping that if I gave a voice command, such as "Play all songs shuffled" ... it would read from the songs on my device, not from iCloud. Instead, it starts shuffling/downloading from thousands of tracks.

I guess what I don't understand is if you want to casually select only from the songs on the device, there's no apparent way to add new music except from the iTunes Store. Also, it shows playlists from iCloud with no songs in them or that are incomplete (only some iCloud songs downloaded), which is dumb and distracting.

This doesn't make any sense to me, I'm sorry. Love it on the desktop, hate it on the iPhone.

 

[WisdomWolf]

iTunes Match works perfectly on iTunes. I get it.

On my iPhone, however, I generally am not willing to download songs OTA unless I really want to hear a specific song that I don't have with me. Otherwise, I manually select the songs I want to keep with me in advance, considering the device only has 16GB.

I'm a bit lost when it comes to how to manage a similar scenario while using this service. Even setting "Show All Music" to "Off" ... how do I add new music? Before, I could just add songs via iTunes, but this seems pretty backward. — Do I have to turn that setting to "On", download the song(s), then turn it back off? Why is it like this? How is the average person supposed to figure this out?

I was hoping that if I gave a voice command, such as "Play all songs shuffled" ... it would read from the songs on my device, not from iCloud. Instead, it starts shuffling/downloading from thousands of tracks.

I guess what I don't understand is if you want to casually select only from the songs on the device, there's no apparent way to add new music except from the iTunes Store. Also, it shows playlists from iCloud with no songs in them or that are incomplete (only some iCloud songs downloaded), which is dumb and distracting.

This doesn't make any sense to me, I'm sorry. Love it on the desktop, hate it on the iPhone.

I'm pretty certain that the playlists aren't supposed to show as empty on iOS. I suspect this is a bug and/or has something to do with the hammering that Apple's servers are taking today. There is also a bug where playlists that are limited to a certain number of songs are ignoring the limit. For example, my Top 25 Most Played currently shows 3888 songs on my iPad 2.

Once the kinks are ironed out it'll be fairly simple albeit not exactly straightforward. Selecting show all songs should show all the songs in the cloud and if you want to play one it will stream and download at the same time. So to add more songs you'll simple view them or associated playlists to download them. Running out of space? Go ahead and delete the song from the device, it will still be available at anytime via iCloud.


TL;DR Give it some time.

 

[benguild]

I guess I just wish we could separate "Show all songs" from "Play all songs" — I think that might solve all of the problems.

That and maybe an option to hide incomplete playlists. Or dim them.