Yesterday I finally flipped the switch disabling iTunes match. I really wanted to like it. I really, really wanted to like it. It was my favorite feature and I couldn’t wait for it to be released. The moment it was turned on I got it and waited all weekend for it to match and upload my music. Once it was done, I was like a kid on Christmas. Wide eyed and excited, I fired up the iPod app on my iPhone and it promptly froze. About ten seconds later it came back and started showing me my twenty two thousand songs. Then I went to play one and it froze again. About five second later it started playing. It’s rare for Apple to release something that is imperfect but in this case I think they missed the mark.
iTunes match is supposed to match the music in your iTunes library up to 25,000 sounds and provide it in iCloud for up to five devices to stream/download. Unfortunately, it does not perform like you would expect an apple product to.
First off, I have found that most songs with explicit lyrics are censored. While with most music this isn’t an issue, if you are listening to, say, Eminem, you will only hear about every other word. Or maybe a little old school GN’R, how about “Get In The Ring?” I think they censored the whole thing. I searched for a way to fix this and the only option I found was to buy the explicit version of the song directly from iTunes, then it would play the proper version. This is not a valid option as I own a lot of this music and have ripped it from CD’s. I am not about to purchase it again. I understand that there is no way to match an old CD for the censored version but maybe an option asking if you want explicit lyrics or not. I believe you can set parental levels for children in iTunes already.
Second, a lot of songs do not match properly. I started noticing live versions of songs that I don’t own and couldn’t find the studio version. For some reason my whole Billy Joel collection is now live versions when listening on my iPhone or iPad.
Third, when listening to music it skips tracks I want to listen to because it gets stuck trying to download them. This is really annoying, and it does it while shuffling too. It does not only happen on the cellular network either, it happens on my home WiFi as well. Normally, after fighting with it, I give up and am finally able to listen to that song 3 days later when it eventually decides to download it.
Lastly, (and this is the most annoying issue) it makes the iPod slow as hell. When first launching the app it takes about ten seconds for it to become response, even if it has been playing in the background it takes at least six seconds. From there it takes another five seconds to scroll and once you try to play a song it takes another four seconds. I do not expect to see response time like this from any Apple product and it’s super annoying if you are listening to music while driving. From a Google search of the issue I know I am not the only one experiencing these issues. I also can’t find a reason they are occurring. A lot of forums say it’s due to the artwork being loaded. That doesn’t make sense as apps like Pandora can load artwork and the song nearly instantaneously.
I really hope Apple is aware of these issues and corrects them. In the meantime I will be using Spotify.
