Wow. iTunes Match on iOS 6 is a disaster.

[TC03]

I just found out Apple has removed the ability to remove downloaded music on iOS 6. In stead, iTunes Match automatically deletes the least played songs when space is required.

This is terrible! Users can no longer control what music they have on their iPhone. Sometimes I just want to get rid of some music because I'm tired of it, but it might have enough plays to never get get deleted.

The only way to delete your own music is by turning iTunes Match off, delete the music and turn it back on again. However, it takes ages for iTunes Match to 'initialize' when turning it back on again, so this doesn't work either.

The alternative is just to stream music, but this isn't ideal either. For example, when playings songs on shuffle, I don't want to play songs from my entire library. My library is a colleciton that I've built up over the past years, but it does not accurately reflect my current taste in music.

This is pretty bad. Apple screwed up a flawless service. I'm very disappointed.

 

[canesalato]

if you create a playlist with all your tracks and then download them it won't delete them. If you instead just play them it will download but put them in a different "category", like a cache that it will delete when it needs space. Well...at least that's what i found from my testing. Problem is, it seems very convoluted, complex, complicated and poorly documented. User shouldn't have to "test" and do "trial and error" to understand how to use it. Well. I loved iTunes match in iOS5 and i hate it now. And it's not only iTunes match: a lot of things are actually really worse and more complicated in iOS6.

btw: you cannot delete single songs with iTunes match on. but you can delete albums! But just on the iPad (WTF!?!?)
Simply (??) touch and hold you finger on the album cover until an X appears, then touch the X.

 

[Menel]

One other option you left out.

Settings.app > General > Usage > Show All Apps > Music > Edit > Delete
Wipes out the cache.

And start over playing/syncing the music you want without dealing with reloaded entire Match database.

 

[canesalato]

One other option you left out.

Settings.app > General > Usage > Show All Apps > Music > Edit > Delete
Wipes out the cache.

And start over playing/syncing the music you want without dealing with reloaded entire Match database.

Well, right, but that option doesn't only delete the cache. It deletes every song you have downloaded on the device

 

[TC03]

if you create a playlist with all your tracks and then download them it won't delete them. If you instead just play them it will download but put them in a different "category", like a cache that it will delete when it needs space. Well...at least that's what i found from my testing. Problem is, it seems very convoluted, complex, complicated and poorly documented. User shouldn't have to "test" and do "trial and error" to understand how to use it. Well. I loved iTunes match in iOS5 and i hate it now. And it's not only iTunes match: a lot of things are actually really worse and more complicated in iOS6.

btw: you cannot delete single songs with iTunes match on. but you can delete albums! But just on the iPad (WTF!?!?)
Simply (??) touch and hold you finger on the album cover until an X appears, then touch the X.

Thanks! I am okay with just deleting albums. At least on my iPad, iTunes Match does what I want.

As for the iPhone, your idea is smart but not realy usefull either I'm affraid. I think I'll just stick with turning iTunes Match on and off. It will take a few minutes to delete an album, but I don't delete music regularly so I might cope with that.

However, I don't understand why the music player is disabled while enabling iCloud. This makes no sense to me at all.

 

[Menel]

Well, right, but that option doesn't only delete the cache. It deletes every song you have downloaded on the device

That's because the music is in the cache.

Anyway, not so bad if your on wifi. Wipe cache, and retag the playlists you want added back. Not ideal, but fits within typical Apple over simplification and lack of options style.

 

[TC03]

That's because the music is in the cache.

Anyway, not so bad if your on wifi. Wipe cache, and retag the playlists you want added back. Not ideal, but fits within typical Apple over simplification and lack of options style.

I don't know which Apple style it fits, it requires user to pay a lot more attention to their music management (for starters, you have to create playlists). Second, the only thing you can do is delete all your music and download it all again. That takes hours.

 

[zhenya]

Compared to iOS5, Match on iOS6 is greatly improved. In iOS5, every song that you ever played was permanently downloaded to the device, meaning you had to constantly manage the space used by the Music app. Now, most people can just forget about managing space, as music is cached locally when they listen to it, and most things they listen to will only have to be downloaded once. Things they don't listen to often will be eventually cycled out, which means users no longer have to manage space.

The other big improvement is that you can actually reliably use the service on 3g or even Edge to stream music not already downloaded. This feature basically didn't work previously.

Yes, if you want to keep a large amount of music permanently on the device, then you need to create a playlist and download it, but that's not really all that different than what you've done in the past. You've always had to make a selection of what music to sync to the device, and you can still set up your playlist in iTunes on a computer.

I do agree that it is odd that you can't delete downloaded music when Match is on, but I think that is to avoid user confusion as some music might be 'downloaded' and other music 'cached.' What I do is turn off Show All Music, THEN turn off iTunes Match, and then delete the music I want gone. Turn Match back on, then turn on Show All Music. This works reliably and quickly even over cellular networks.

The only major complaint I have is that it still takes WAY too long to download large playlists - like days to download 20 gigs.