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I had the same problem with dropbox a couple years ago. Generally it's a good idea to leave a bit of upload bandwidth free if you have the option otherwise it can degrade certain services (possibly related to the server perceiving it as having excess timeouts/lost packets—my guess).

that's pretty much exactly what happens… some amount of bandwidth is needed for each "flow" to manage its connection - when packet acknowledgements are lost due to congestion everything can really go to hell. TCP is supposed to handle this (and in general it does) but sometimes when your uplink is 'full' things go bad quickly.

it's the reason why download speeds on bit torrent can suck if you've maxed out your uplink. the acknowledgments your end is sending for the downloaded packets are lost and the other end thinks the packets it sent were lost, and so need to be retransmitted.
 
Could be that those Napster songs stolen 15 years ago are finally catching up with people.
 
I gave up on iTunes Match. It is so much easier to do things myself than to rely on such a buggy service. It isn't worth it. Apple still can't seem to do internet services right.

iTunes Match doesn't seem to like when I have the same file (lossless) on multiple machines. It treats them like separate songs. It seems like it always wants me to download the AAC version on the other machines, but I was mainly using iTunes Match to sync tags between Macs (which it couldn't do reliably). I wish Apple were more clear about this. I'm not going to renew this until they make some changes to it.

I had to clear out my entire iTunes library on my MacBook in order to revert the mess that iTunes Match created with duplicates, wrong tags, etc. I tried clearing out the iTunes Match library as well to start off fresh, but it never worked. All the songs kept coming back, so that was the last straw and I turned it off.
 
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Frustrated by this too—iTunes Match has been really hit or miss lately. Right now I have four files it just hangs on during the “matching” process, though it uploaded a bunch of tracks I ripped from a CD the other day. All but 1 track of that CD, that is. The other three that won’t go are the two tracks of the new Kyary Pamyu Pamyu single CD I ripped when it arrived last Tuesday, and a Tumblr-posted MP3 of a Mountain Goats demo from John Darnielle. Those files play just fine, they don’t seem to be corrupted in any way, and I tagged them and all, so everything seems to be in order, but… no upload. And, of course, no error message other than an eventual “timeout”, which I don’t believe. I wish I had any visibility into what was going wrong so I could at least ATTEMPT to fix it!
 
I think Apple needs to be up-front about what kind of restrictions iTunes Match imposes on uploading. I was having an issue for the past week or so with some short sound files that I put on my computer. The files were associated with a language textbook. It turns out that iTunes Match will never consistently upload sound files that are shorter than, say, 4 seconds. I found this out after scouring blog posts and articles for a few days. My solution was to use the program "Join Together" to merge the sound files together into longer tracks. Since doing that, everything has uploaded fine, and iTunes Match is working perfectly. One would think that Apple would publicize a restriction on the service like this, rather than leave people in the dark.

TLDR: one of the restrictions on iTunes Match is that short sound files will not usually be uploaded properly and Apple does not publicize this. There may be other restrictions that Apple does not publicize.

It's odd that they are restricting files that are short, not very long. It can't be a size issue, so what is the point? There are probably some more illogical restrictions that we don't know about.
 
iTunes Match has always had issues with uploading content that isn't on the iTunes servers. As weird as it sounds, with my experience I think some ISP's work better than others. Also has to do with your internet speeds. :confused: Either way, iTunes Match is pretty jacked up.
 
I'm having a similar issue. In addition to upload issues I also cannot download recently purchased iTunes albums. One album in particular was on my phone and now isn't. When i go to the store the album and all of it's tracks are listed as purchased, however I cannot re-download it. Same goes for my ipad and my wife's iphone. Previously purchased music cannot not be downloaded again on any of the ios devices.
 
All these endless problems have finally made me try Google Play Music.

It seems very promising so far. Uploaded 19,000 songs in one day!

And it's free!
 
Guess I'm special or something. Just matched 4k songs the other day (1k not listed, so uploaded) without any issues at all.

I didn't expect it to do anything but match up my music (seems a lot of people are having meta sync issues). Everything is showing up fine on 3 devices.

All these endless problems have finally made me try Google Play Music.

It seems very promising so far. Uploaded 19,000 songs in one day!

And it's free!

I tried that last weekend... but the lack of a desktop app is a killer. As a web developer I couldn't have my music playing through a browser - especially since I'm constantly opening/closing stuff. The mobile app works well at least.

Another bad part is - google music did hang for me. Made it to about 3533 uploaded - and it was stuck on "processing music" for 4 hours until I sopped it. Tried again - same thing.
 
I concur, My itunes seems to always be updating information to itunes Match.

It just doesn't work well. I work in music. and i am routinely receiving new songs and have been trying to organize myself in the itunes Match/Cloud.

but... it just ain't working fast or quality for my needs.

I hope Apple gets it working better
 
o my dear iTunes. Once you were so easy to use. Now I just don't understand you anymore, I keep getting duplicate tracks and tracks with an exclamation mark (file lost). Such a pity. I will avoid you and have given my music love to Spotify.

I had massive problems with Match a few months back, gave Spotify premium a try and haven't looked back. I can't understand how Apple have taken iTunes from a sleek, fast, minimal music library to the current buggy behemoth. Spotify isn't perfect, and I hate missing out on some artists, but it beats the hell out of iTunes at the moment.
 
iTunes Match has been buggy from day one.

And by buggy I mean:

1. Replacing explicit songs with clean versions.
2. Duplicating tracks.
3. Not updating play counts.
4. Not updating smart playlists.
5. Not completing the upload/match process (it gets stuck).
6. No consistency between all devices due to #3 & #4.
7. Matching incorrect songs.

I've been using iTunes Match since it was first released and I've had all 7 of these issues at one time or another.

Some of these issues seem to stem from the way the service itself works. When it was first announced I assumed it would use software to scan the actual audio of each song file and then match that to the appropriate song in Apple's music library. This doesn't seem to be the case though.

I did want to say that, for me, the service has been pretty good. I have over 15,000 songs so it can take awhile to process but overall it work reliably the majority of the time. I do hope Apple is able to resolve these issues for those who are experiencing them.
 
I'm done with iTunes Match!

I've been using it for a little over a year. (Unfortunately my subscription just renewed :( )

I was really trying to like it and give it a chance, but it has been a struggle to get part of my music library on it. I only keep ~800 tracks in my library because I really don't trust it. It has always been an annoyance because of duplicate tracks and wrong/missing artwork. But after several lost hours of trying to add CD tracks to my library this weekend, I'm ready to get off iTunes completely.

I reported it to iTunes Store Support who opened a case for me. I have been corresponding with a second tier technical support person who has asked for detailed info about the file type/size.

In theory, it would be great if Apple could seamlessly curate/sync/stream my music for me. It would solve so many issues for me, but as is it has cost me more time and grief than it is worth.

I know where Apple wants to head with all this - they want to sell/curate/distribute all of our media (movies) and data (photos, videos, docs, etc.) in iCloud.

Sorry Apple, but I just don't trust you after this little experiment. I'll keep my stuff locally and handle my own distribution, thanks!
 
iTunes Match problem: ALAC files

Hi. There has been discussion of match problems back for some time on the discussion boards. Someone on one of these, provided support for ONE possible problem being certain ALAC (m4a, but Apple Lossless Audio Codec) files. (There are probably multiple problems, but I'm just guessing)

I too have had sketchy Match performance over the years but it's gotten better. I'm not complaining. But when iTunes recently as indicated in the article, and after an update, started to Match my library again, it hung up on the last files added to the library. Which happen to be high res ALAC files converted from FLACs. Having Match hang was new to me, *my problems had been isolated tracks not matching*.

The ALAC files it choked on were high res files at 96 kHz bit rate and 24 bit, converted from FLACs. Notably, ALACs I previously ripped from CDs at 48 kHz and 24 bit samples size have come to Match ok. (though there were problems early. They often didn't match at first, but they didn't hang the entire Match process, though.

Both the 48 and 96 KHz ALAC/m4a files sync and play just fine, but the 96 kHz files appear to be what hanging up MY iTunes Match. I could either/both downsample or remove the songs from my library, but I don't want to do that.
 
o my dear iTunes. Once you were so easy to use. Now I just don't understand you anymore, I keep getting duplicate tracks and tracks with an exclamation mark (file lost).

The exclamation mark thing is nothing new. Been happening to me periodically for the last 10 years or so, I'd say, since long before iTunes match.

But yeah, iTunes match is kind of silly. It wouldn't surprise me if it goes away at some point, to be replaced by an iTunes unlimited streaming service.
 
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No Problems Here

Interesting to see so many claiming issues over the years. I've used Match from the start of the service, and have never had any problems.
 
This problem is older than June 10th...I have had issues with this for a while.

When iTunes Match works as it is supposed to it is amazing. However, track upload issues, album artwork missing, and duplicates have bugged the service from the outset.

Same here. This was a problem for me since end of last year. It's why I let my Match subscription lapse in February and now use Google Play for music in the cloud streaming.
 
When it was first announced I assumed it would use software to scan the actual audio of each song file and then match that to the appropriate song in Apple's music library. This doesn't seem to be the case though.

Sure looks like that's how it works. What makes you think otherwise.
 
Interesting to see so many claiming issues over the years. I've used Match from the start of the service, and have never had any problems.

How many songs are you matching? Of them, how many are not available in the iTunes store? How often do you make changes to your iTunes library? How many devices are you syncing across?

It seems that the people (like me) who are having issues with iTunes match (mine started last week) are syncing many thousands of songs (I have 16,000), many of which are not matched with the iTunes store (>8,000 for me) and who are trying to (and depend upon) keep a large library (>100GB) synced across several devices (5 in my case).
 
Oh Apple this is sign that you have to the direction of Spotify or Amazon Prime Music to stay in the game:D:p:apple:
 
Interesting to see so many claiming issues over the years. I've used Match from the start of the service, and have never had any problems.

Make a smart playlist on your PC/Mac called "Recently Played".

Play a song on either PC or iDevice.

Does the playlist reflect a change on the other device?
 
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