iTunes Match Launches in 19 New Countries: Latin America, Baltics, Netherlands

Why is this on page one while the other one is in iOS page (2), should have been both in iOS Blog.

Why would this be in iOS blog? It is about iTunes, not iOS.

There is a storage limit based on number of songs. But iTunes Match will subtract any songs that are already know in the iTunes database. The remaining portion of songs should be less than 25 000.

WRONG!
The songs you have purchased from iTuned don't count towards the 25,000. All other songs do (regardless of whether apple has them in their database.

Don't even bother with this service. Match will never successfully match all of your songs, even if your whole library is ripped from CD. You'll then spend hours, days, maybe even weeks downloading as many different sources of certain tracks just to get the thing to match it properly.

Most of my CDs for example have many tracks that werent matched, purely because on the CD, the tracks are correctly split, where as on itunes, Apple have decided that they need merging before they are suitable to be added to the store.

And then even if everything is correct, i.e. track name / length / artist etc, then you need to pray to the gods that it actually does match.

After a week and a half of hard work, I've managed to get it from 1000+ unmatched songs down to about 77. The remaining 77 are proving impossible to match.

Why? If they do not match, just upload them and be done with it.

Bah. Still nothing in Scandinavia :-(

Why is this on page one while the other one is in iOS page (2), should have been both in iOS Blog.

19 countries > 1 country

Apple more than doubled the number of countries with iTunes Match support.

Don't you understand? You're now supposed buy the remaining 77 tracks from the iTunes Store™...

I see no reason to when I have my signed Take To The Skies - Enter Shikari CD sitting here. Just because Apple decided that they wanted to merge tracks to make their version unique doesnt mean i have to pay twice.

Apple suck.

Same here, in the UK and purchased iTunes Match a few days ago, was working ok but while uploading 1000+ unmatched songs (incredibly slowly) I inadvertently exited iTunes, now I'm stuck at "Step 2, 6314 of 6719 songs uploaded" permanently it seems.

Buggy and slow to load on my iPhone/iPad, taking around 10 secs minimum for a track to start playing regardless of how good my WiFi is... Very disappointed with "it just works" not being true. Also if Apple want to supply everything over the cloud do they intend to offer their own network service because I can see that listening to tracks while working abroad will likely result in £000's in bills! :D

Stuck beyond belief for > 24 hours now.

Thanks Apple, for another release fail.

Hi everyone, i'm from Lima, Peru.

I feel really disappointed because today i purchased iTunes match service and after 20 attempts it was unable to match my library (around 7000 files) I tried everything on the apple discussions forum, recreating library, removing sc info folder, etc. and it just don't works.

For troubleshooting purposes, i had to remove all music, added back a couple of albums (28 songs in total) and tried matching just those 28 songs. No luck

Now i am upset because i had to remove ALL MY MUSIC from my library leaving just one file, and nothing!! hours upon hours of waiting for nothing. It's still stuck in Step 2. It is a waste of time.

BTW, i'm on an iMac 21'5 (mid 2011) with 16GB RAM, latest version of iTunes (10.5.2 64bit)

So i am sorry to say so but i've realized that iTunes Match is a flawed service. Hope they refund me as requested otherwise it will be a complete scam.

In my library of 18,000-odd songs, almost all of which I personally ripped, I'm getting a failed match frequency of under 1%. That seems pretty good to me. And I'm very impressed with the transparency. I can rip a CD at work and go home and play it on my AppleTV.

Apparently the issue is how close your CD rip is to the current iTunes offering. If you bought the CD yesterday, it will very likely match everything. But if you're an old guy like me who bought most of his CD collection in the mid '80s, those albums have been re-issued multiple times, and don't match well...

This was the big draw for me -- getting improved quality through matches. Some of these early CDs (in the early era of CDs as a technology) were horribly produced. Some match, and the sound quality is distinctly better. But it's horrible to listen to a whole album and have half the songs be of low quality...

Unfortunately the best method I've found to correct this is to hunt for a different rip (or multiple) and try matching it... Second best method is manipulating tracks length and tags to match what iTunes currently has... Useless methods are re-ripping and format conversion... Of course another method would work perfectly--buying the unmatched songs, but my unmatched (or rather "should-have-matched") count is currently at 525 songs or about another $600 for this iTunes Match "service"...