iTunes Match: Two Months Later 

20 Jan 2012

Back in December, I wrote up a bit about what using iTunes Match was like out of the gate.

There were some gotchas that were a bit vexing at the time:

• Album Art Syncing
• Smart Playlists With "Limits" Not Working on iOS devices
• Play Counts Not Updating Reliably
• No Genius Playlists on iOS devices

Let's take these one one by one

Album Art Syncing

If you're using multiple Macs (or, presumably, a Mac and a PC), this is now about as flawless as it gets. The syncing of songs from one computer to another seems to be nearly perfect. If I update album art on one machine, it now seems to be on the rest within a reasonable amount of time. There was a period of time where that wasn't true, where random songs would be missing artwork when streaming them, but that's just not the case now. If a song has artwork on one machine, it does on every other one. So, one check in the positive column!

However, that's not the case for iOS devices. Now, for a lot of songs, your album artwork will be there. Particularly for songs you play a lot, your iOS device of choice (I'm going to go with iPhone) will download and cache the data. But, if you're playing a playlist or have your Music app on shuffle, you're going to find that a whole bunch of songs don't have album art. The iPhone will go get the album art when you play the song (so the next time it will have album art), but even that seems flaky, as the length of time that the art gets cached seems inconsistent at best.

It does look like (and I should stress that this just seems different to me, it might not be a change) that the Music app will now try to cache artwork ahead of time. In other words, if you've got a playlist, it'll go grab the artwork for the next 5 songs or so, so that they'll be there. I think it does this, smartly, in an attempt to always be ahead of you, so you'll never see the ugly no artwork icon.

But it just doesn't work that well, for a couple of reasons. First, it's just unreliable. I've seen enough times where I'll just get a few songs into a playlist and all of a sudden I'll hit a few songs with no artwork, then a batch with artwork, etc. It just seems to hit or miss.

More importantly, the caching seems to render the Music app nearly inoperable. I'm not sure if it's cases where it doesn't have a network connection, or if it has a weak one, or something else entirely, but when it starts downloading artwork for a larger playlist, you might not be able to use the UI for 15-30 seconds.

Very un-Apple like.

Given that, nightly, the iPhone uploads a backup of itself, is there any reason that, during the same window, it couldn't download all of the artwork you need for your music? My library (about 8000 songs, all in the cloud, 90% with artwork) has about 500MB of artwork. Explain why the iPhone couldn't grab that over wifi when it's plugged in charging at night.

Baffling.

Not-So-Smart Playlists

The "limit" feature that works so well in iTunes on the desktop simply doesn't work on iOS devices.

Well … that's not actually true. Those options used to work, pre-Match. They just don't work now. You'll see people online bitching about playlists having too many songs, or inconsistent songs. This is why.

Your playlist that limits to your 25 most recent songs? It'll probably just have every song you have in it.

Still not fixed. Presumably, this would only be fixed with an iOS update (it must be part of the Music app itself), but you'd think that Apple could set the cloud side of iTunes Match to simply sync over the actual contents of your "50 Best Songs" playlist, as a temporary work around.

No such luck.

There's another smart playlist feature that still doesn't work with iTunes Match on iOS devices, due to …

Play Counts Not Syncing

This is actually broader than play counts, it is really all meta data. And, like album art, it works perfectly on the desktop. I've now got this great system where I can crank through unrated music while I'm working, and when I get home, anything I've rated highly is already in my four- and five-star playlists. It's really, really nice.

But it doesn't work for iOS devices. At all. Or, almost at all.

Sometimes, the first track in a playlist that you listen to on an iOS device will update it's play count. Not it's last played date. Just the play count. And only sometimes. And only the first song. Bizarre.

This obviously contributes to the smart playlist problem. If you've got a "Radio" playlist like I do (where it'll play songs that haven't been played in a while), these just don't work. Until I listen to those songs on a desktop, they will haunt me in the Radio playlist, showing up over and over again, even though I've heard them 50 times.

No Genius Playlists on iOS Devices

Nope, still don't work.

So, where do we stand?

Well, if you're a desktop user with multiple computers, iTunes Match is flawless. It really is. Stuff. Just. Works. It's very Apple-like, which is something you couldn't say 8 weeks ago.

Actually, there's still one problem with the desktop experience …

The iTunes Match error messages suck. Flat out suck. When you hit a song that they can't handle, you don't get a good explanation why, and in the worst case, sometimes Match will sit there and churn for as long as you'll let it. In my case, that was until my iMac crashed (because I hadn't noticed it had been going for a day or so).

I do believe, though, that this is the exception. That most folks with your average iTunes setup are going to be just fine.

Back to our regularly scheduled summary …

So, as I was saying, if you're a desktop user (a laptop and an iMac, or a couple of laptops, or a Mac and a PC), iTunes Match is everything it is supposed to be when you bought it.

If you're an iOS user, there are still some problems, and I don't expect these problems will be resolved until we get a new build of iOS (5.1?). They're not necessarily load or cloud issues; they seem to be fundamental application issues that need to be resolved.

And I'm optimistic that these will get resolved. Some of them (the metadata syncing) just seem like bugs, not fundamentally unfixable issues. There's nothing on the list that jumps out as challenging engineering (other than the scale).

Even with the stuff that works intermittently, or not at all, iTunes Match is still worth it, even just as a backup of your music, a way to play music on your Apple TV without having to keep a computer on, and a way to get higher quality versions of the crappy music you ripped in 1998.

Or maybe you don't need a higher quality version of "… Baby One More Time". To each their own. I suppose.