iTunes Match and IOS 6

[gloss]

I agree to most of that, but why are you having to download one track at a time?

Well, in iOS5 you could queue up whole albums/artists and it would download as many tracks simultaneously as it could. Now, it literally downloads and processes a single track at a time. That, combined with the fact that you can't delete tracks/albums without wiping your library completely makes it insanely difficult to get exactly the music you want on your phone.

It's stupid.

 

[zhenya]

Well, in iOS5 you could queue up whole albums/artists and it would download as many tracks simultaneously as it could. Now, it literally downloads and processes a single track at a time. That, combined with the fact that you can't delete tracks/albums without wiping your library completely makes it insanely difficult to get exactly the music you want on your phone.

It's stupid.

This way should be better. In iOS 5 listening to music over cellular was basically impossible. A song might start but would cut out and be virtually impossible to get it to start again. Now that they've moved to a streaming format, putting all network resources towards downloading the song you are listening to should improve the experience greatly.

You can delete tracks or albums without wiping your library. Turn off iTunes Match (you may also want to turn off Show All Music to speed the process along). Delete anything you want to delete. Turn Match (and Show all Music, if applicable) back on, and it will keep your downloaded music while also displaying your entire library.

I'm beginning to think that the majority - if not all - of the problems with Match are at Apple's end, i.e. the software driving the servers.

We've been through several minor iTunes and iOS upgrades, and now a major iOS upgrade and still the old, old problem of random missing album artwork exists.

If not that, then the problem is rooted in iTunes and we'll have to wait for iTunes 11 for everything to be fixed.

Having answered a LOT of questions here since Match was first introduced, I have to disagree. MOST problems are because users don't understand how the system works. Apple certainly could make things easier and more consistent (and at times, changes take time to propagate, making things more confusing), but I'm a heavy Match user with a very large library and it always works just about how I expect it to.

 

[gloss]

This way should be better. In iOS 5 listening to music over cellular was basically impossible. A song might start but would cut out and be virtually impossible to get it to start again. Now that they've moved to a streaming format, putting all network resources towards downloading the song you are listening to should improve the experience greatly.

You can delete tracks or albums without wiping your library. Turn off iTunes Match (you may also want to turn off Show All Music to speed the process along). Delete anything you want to delete. Turn Match (and Show all Music, if applicable) back on, and it will keep your downloaded music while also displaying your entire library.

Match turned itself off after I upgraded, and wiped my library, which I'd downloaded from Match in iOS 5, when I turned it on again. And it's when I went to try and rebuild it, I discovered that Apple had decided to enforce a one-download-at-a-time rule for no apparent reason.

There is no way that you can argue for having queued songs download individually. I have 3000 songs I want on my device. In iOS 6, each one has to finish downloading and processing before the next one can begin. What is this, the 90s?

 

[zhenya]

I have tested this over and over this week, and songs that are downloaded to my device do not get wiped, no matter how many times I turn Match on or off.

I would suspect that the vast majority of users would place emphasis on streaming quality over overall speed of large playlist downloads (which has always been very, very slow - like overnight or days to download 10-15GB of music on a 50Mb connection). I'm hoping that both are better from here on out.

 

[molingrad]

Sorry, my iTunes match is working fine.

Better than fine!

 

[mmp1964]

Match is working flawlessly in my 4S

Do you use smart playlists that rely on playcounts? Can you tell what songs you've downloaded and which haven't? Create a smart playlist called "Recently Played" and set the rule to show songs played in the last week. Play a bunch of songs on your phone and see if those songs show up in that playlist.

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What device is giving you problems?

I have an iPad 2, and iTunes Match seems to be working fine.

I also have an iPhone 4, and Match is a MESS. All of the playlists on the phone are blank. I can select the playlist, but there are no tracks in it. It looks like songs that were previously downloaded are still there, but I couldn't download anything new. So, then I tried to turn off iTunes Match, only to find that I can't! In iOS 6, it apparently has to get turned off in 2 places in Settings: App Store and Music. I've tried to turn it off in both places, tried loaded songs directly from iTunes on my computer, tried restarting the phone several times, but nothing works. The Music app still shows all those blank playlists. What a mess. Has anyone else seen this issue?

Same exact experience. This is what is happening, in my opinion. The playlist structure is there - so you are seeing all of your playlists. However -now that you've turned off iTunes Match - the only songs that you are seeing are songs that you have physically synced to your phone. So - if you have a playlist that contains none of the songs that are on your phone, it will be blank. If you have a playlist of your "Top 100 Most Played" but only 37 of those songs have physically been synced to your phone- then you will only see 37 of those songs.

"Mess" might be too nice of a term. At this point - the only thing I can think of to clear this up is to delete all of my playlists - period - from everywhere, then resync. And never turn ITM back on again.

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This way should be better. In iOS 5 listening to music over cellular was basically impossible. A song might start but would cut out and be virtually impossible to get it to start again. Now that they've moved to a streaming format, putting all network resources towards downloading the song you are listening to should improve the experience greatly.

You can delete tracks or albums without wiping your library. Turn off iTunes Match (you may also want to turn off Show All Music to speed the process along). Delete anything you want to delete. Turn Match (and Show all Music, if applicable) back on, and it will keep your downloaded music while also displaying your entire library.




Having answered a LOT of questions here since Match was first introduced, I have to disagree. MOST problems are because users don't understand how the system works. Apple certainly could make things easier and more consistent (and at times, changes take time to propagate, making things more confusing), but I'm a heavy Match user with a very large library and it always works just about how I expect it to.

Totally disagree with what you are saying. All of these are work-arounds that should not be required. Go see how Rdio does it to see it done right. At least how Rdio used to work (you could clearly see what was physically on your device and what wasn't - you can download a track at a time, a playlist at a time, an album at a time - either from your phone or designate something to download to your phone).

 

[MasterHowl]

Working fine on my 4S and iPad 3