iTunes Match never completed... what now?

[wamalarkey]

ok, here's the deal. I signed up for iTunes match. Tested a few albums/songs, all was well. (or at least I thought) Launched it on my whole library (around 10k songs) before I went to bed. Got up the next day to find it had stopped "disk full" ~ it was trying to download the 256 bit rate files to my LOCAL drive, rather than my external drive, where my Music Library lives.

Yes, I assumed it would download them to where my music library lives. I have iTunes pointed to that external drive. (While in iTunes, if I click on the upper left menu "Music Library" it goes to my external drive. BUT, when it did the match, it wanted to download the new files to 'username/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music...' on my mac mini hd.)

So now, if I go to 'music library' in iTunes (the one pointed to my external drive) most of my songs have the Cloud with a ! symbol. If I try to play it, iTunes can't find it.

So I did something which made it even worse. I freaked out, and in "just to be safe" mode, went & looked at my local drive, and using Finder, moved all the music files from my local drive to my external drive. Now I have an old "music library" folder, which is the one iTunes knew about before, and appears to be hosed (not all songs there anymore, lots missing) and all my old 160 bit rate files at the root. (This is a collection of music ripped from CDs a long time ago along with newer stuff downloaded from iTunes). From iTunes, it appears that the 160 bit rate songs are the ones with the ! symbol, and the 256 bit rate files don't (seem to be ok).

I have tried running "Update iTunes Match" and it made it to step 3 and just sits there. But nothing has changed with my music library. Still missing songs, iTunes can't find songs, etc.

I'm about to take my mac mini + the external drive to the Apple store and say "fix it" because I can't figure it out and I'm frustrated as all get out!

Any ideas or does this sound like jibberish?!?

 

[gnasher729]

I think you left out some things in your description. You can't try out iTunes Match on a few songs, it will work on your entire library. And it doesn't download things by itself.

What happens when you turn on iTunes Match: It analyses your library, it uploads all the album art to Apple's servers, and it uploads all the songs that are not matched to Apple's servers. Did that happen? On the iTunes Match screen, it has the three steps "Gathering information", "Matching your music", "Uploading artwork and remaining songs". Did these three steps finish?

 

[wamalarkey]

Hi gnasher,

Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my initial post.

I did the "create a smart playlist" thing with iTunes, which does allow you to choose just a few songs or albums to convert from the lower bit rate to the higher bit rate. Once the conversion happens, you then download the files from the cloud. (this was from a mac-world article).

Trouble is when I attempted to download the rest of my music, it was storing them on my mac mini HD, which of course ran out of space. NOT where I wanted them to go. I can't find a way to direct where they go.

Meanwhile, I can't sync music because iTunes can't find them all now.

To answer your other question, Update iTunes Match seems stuck on the last step. Never finished.

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ok, I think I found a way to do this. Preferences does allow you to set where the media folder is. Trying something now....

 

[gnasher729]

I'd say Step 1 is getting an external drive to create a Time Machine backup, if you don't have that yet. 1TB external drive is cheap. Before you do anything else, make a backup.

Step 2 is letting iTunes Match complete its cheap of moving everything into the cloud. This can take considerable time, especially if many of your files are not matched but need to be uploaded. If you make changes to your library in between, like changing its location, that doesn't help. That step needs to finish. If it doesn't finish and stops making progress, you can turn iTunes Match off and turn it on again; that may help.

Deleting files before iTunes Match finishes is dangerous. If files haven't been matched, and haven't been uploaded yet, and you delete them, then they are _gone_. You can check whether they are still in the trash; in that case move them out of the trash into some folder.