My iTunes Match Experience

I'm in the middle of setting up with iTunes Match. So far, it's been anything but smooth.

First off, I signed up during the brief window when iTunes Match was available for sale but not actually working in Canada, so I had a completely broken service for a day or so.

But once it was officially switched on, it started working. There are 3 steps to iTunes Match:

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Step 1 was painless. It whipped through my ~23k songs in an hour or so, and then went on to step 2. I left it at step 2 overnight, and when I woke up in the morning, it was stuck. It was about 80% done, but not moving.

I stopped iTunes Match and restarted it, and this time paid attention to where it stopped. This time it made it to song #22548, and then hung. Stopped, restarted, and it made it to 22549. Progress, but the 10 minutes or so it took for every attempt to make it to that song number was painful. I was watching with fs_usage to see if it was getting hung up on a certain album or something, but every time it stopped it was on something completely different.

But after 2 more restarts, it made it all the way through my music library. Now it's on Step 3, uploading, and and with 4103 items to go, this one's going to take a while.

The message I wanted to convey in this post is: If iTunes Match is hanging during Step 2, just stop it and restart it. Eventually it will complete.

Update three days later: It's just over half done. About 1950 songs to go. I'm on DSL, so my upstream bandwidth is about 1 megabit.