How extensive is the catalogue for Match?

[punkromance]

I have a reasonably large library ~22,000 songs and my taste in music is pretty varied with a lot of the stuff being relatively unheard of. I don't want to sign up only for it to not match a large part of my music. Is what I see in the iTunes Store all it will match?

For example, a better known band I have is mewithoutYou. I have seven albums by them and 70 songs, whereas the iTunes store only has three albums and 36 songs. Does that mean half of them wouldn't be matched?

Cheers

 

[tersono]

In theory, the stuff it can't match it will upload from your library. In my experience, though, it's flawed - I won't be renewing my sub.

Like you, I have a pretty large library - mixture of Apple lossless ripped from CD, stuff from the Apple Store and a bunch of mp3s. Some obscure stuff amongst it. My media server spent almost a week (!) matching the library and uploading a bunch of files - at the end of it, however, there was still around 20% of my library un "matched".

I read somewhere that the fix was to re-rip the problem files and then re-import. I tried it - a few days later (!) I still had around 15% of my library failing to match.

I've given up and turned the feature off. Apple make wonderful hardware and software, but their cloud syncing solutions - at least in my experience - always have issues, and iTunes match is no exception. It's probably fine for folks who have downloaded most of their music from iTunes and have relatively modest libraries, but for the rest of us, it just don't cut it...