iTunes Match: another neglected Apple service
As the iTunes Guy for Macworld, I get many emails about problems with iTunes Match. With iTunes Match nearly 18 months old, it surprises me that such problems are still so widespread. When Apple expanded iTunes Match in January 2013 to 112 countries, I was surprised it did so without fixing any of the bugs associated with the service. iTunes Match remains a source of consternation for many.
How it should work
The iTunes Match premise is pretty simple. As Apple says, “iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to iCloud for you to listen to anytime, on any device.” And, “since there are more than 26 million songs in the iTunes Store, chances are your music is already in iCloud.”
But this is not the case. As Macworld’s Lex Friedman uncovered in The She Came In Through the Bathroom Window Incident, right after the launch of iTunes Match, many songs that should match simple don’t. And this is one of the biggest gripes of many users. Their computers spend a lot of time uploading songs that should match, because those songs are in the iTunes Store. With many albums, one or two tracks don’t match, while the others do. In some cases, this even happens with purchased tracks.
You can see here that iTunes shows some tracks in a purchased album as matched, not purchased. In some cases, even purchased tracks get uploaded rather than matched.
While iTunes Match is designed to store tracks that don’t match, the problem is that these tracks have to be uploaded, and when people with large music libraries (though smaller than Apple’s maximum eligible library size of 25,000 tracks, of course) try to set up iTunes Match, the time to upload unmatched files can be substantial. If you don’t have a very fast Internet connection, it can take days or weeks to upload thousands of files. And when you add new tracks to your iTunes library, you can wait a long time while iTunes scans your tunes, matches them, and then uploads the new unmatched ones.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2036062/itunes-match-another-neglected-apple-service.html#tk.rss_all
