Comments on: iTunes Match: What are your first impressions?

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:33:32 +0000

Yes, I say a lot more time in the oven. This has created so much work for me, I can’t believe it. “It just works” sure it does. Apple should pay me to use this service. No matches to 80% of Van Morrison stuff, come on. You’re kidding, right.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:08:04 +0000

I am having the same results, including a crippling effect when scrubbing to different parts of a track. For example, in iTunes now when I play a matched song it initiates with a delay, and then I have to wait for the streaming to load before I can scrub to a later part of the song. The initial delay is very uninviting, as it is nice to be able to skip through songs quickly when unsure of what you want to hear (much like channel surfing w/ TV… except now it’s like channel surfing with Time Warner Cable where it takes forever).

I assume the option to download specific tracks to specific devices will eliminate this for the tracks I listen to most often on any given device.. say iMac (where I currently store my main library), my MBP and my iPhone. It should be nice to have a centralized location for everything and be able to call upon any song in my library unlike now where I have to do a sync to get songs onto my phone, etc. I just signed up about 30 minutes ago though, so this is only an initial reaction. I hope, somehow, the delay is minimized with time.

By: David

David — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:37:52 +0000

I’ve experienced a number of problems with the service, a couple which are similar to problems seen with IOS 5.

First, like others, I have several tracks that were uploaded that should have been matched (for example, two tracks of a CD were uploaded but the rest matched). Second, several tracks that used to play on iTunes are now greyed out, unaccessible and I can’t find out why. Third, when I tried to access my iTunes match account from my iPad, I received an error message that I do not have a subscription. Fourth, my Apple ID password was suddenly clobbered – at least I received a message that my password was not valid. I had the same experience with IOS 5.

I hope some of these are just teething problems with the initial public release and caused by the heavy demand. I would have expected some of these issues to have been identified and resolved during the beta testing (particularly the match/upload issues).

By: David

David — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:59:07 +0000

It’s your own fault. Do your due diligence before your purchase. You are welcome to use your 25GB in iCloud for storing/backup of your music, you just won’t get iTunes Match functionality. They are 2 different services and are sold as such. Anyone who has iTunes can purchase iTunes match, an iCloud account is not required.

By: Sherwin Ngo ★

Sherwin Ngo ★ — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 08:11:14 +0000

Upgrading 1800+ of my lower quality files to 256 kbps is worth the $25.

@SherwinNgo

By: Imrickjamesbch

Imrickjamesbch — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:51:13 +0000

‘Hope everyone backed their collection up on DVD before starting this adventure. Monday 12pm, 71gb/8700+songs, 46 hours uploading to Tuesday 9:50pm, still have 1300 tracks to go. Multiple restarts. Combining this with all of my smart playlists to upgrade to 256k then deleting the 128kbs junk, finding real duplicates, not the originals with ease: are all priceless. I love my music collection even more now. Thanks Apple!

By: Mad Wax

Mad Wax — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:38:30 +0000

too much work, I’m going back to cassette tapes.

By: Tee

Tee — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:12:08 +0000

I’m looking for more info before attempting to sign up. I had some problems when I migrated from an old laptop to my current machine. Some audiobooks imported twice. I tried to edit so that the items were only in one location, but it created duplicate entries in the database. I didn’t want to lose my rating and play count info, too late to start over. This makes it look like I have 32,000 items, but I think it would be more like about 21,000 without the duplicates (which point to the same files). Afraid to delete the duplicates, as it deletes the original files rather than the iTunes database entries. Anywho, would be VERY happy if iTunes could clean up and remove the duplicate info. I don’t use a lot of playlists, use mostly genius mixes, so if all those go away that is fine with me. I use some podcast smart playlists, which are still managed with iTunes. Anyone seen what happens in iTunes if you had duplicates? Does it cleanup the song counts and remove the extras?

By: Elias

Elias — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:00:26 +0000

Whatever songs you had synced on your iPhone prior to turning on iTunes Match on your iPhone remains on your iPhone. You do not have to re-download them.

By: Troy Henson

Troy Henson — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:12:51 +0000

Well, I don’t have the quickest Internet service, but I let it upload all night and it stalled, I had to restart my Itunes and initiate the match process again. I still have 200 songs to upload… But I have to say they downloaded pretty fast on my Iphone 4s