Bad Data in iTunes Match

TidBITS Talk
1

Good morning!

I’m wondering if there’s any way to force iTunes Match to update the cloud copies of tracks that have been imported from a CD and are not in Apple Music.

A couple of weeks ago I imported a CD that was not in Apple Music. As I listened to it on my Mac for the first time, I realized that a number of the tracks had skips and I did a re-import (with error correction turned on). On my Mac, the my library now has these tracks playing correctly.

The issue is that it appears iTunes Match uploaded the tracks to the cloud during the period when they were defective, and has not realized that the tracks have been updated on the Mac. So whenever I play the tracks on my iPhone or iPad, I get the version with the skips.

I’ve tried using File… Library… Update Cloud Library on my Mac (and leaving that process to run until it was done), but that did not seem to make a difference.

(Note – I first encountered the problem on my iPhone. I did “Update Cloud Library”, and then tried to listen to the track on my iPad, which as far as I know had never previously played the track and so would not have had the bad version cached locally, and I still got the bad version.)

This is a Mac Studio M1 Max, an iPhone 13 Pro, and an iPad Pro 11-inch 4th generation. All are on the most recent OS version.

Has anyone encountered something like this? Is there some way to force iTunes Match to delete or refresh its data?

Dave Scocca

2

I think you need to delete the tracks from the library, which will remove all traces of the tracks from iTunes match, and then add them back again.

1 Like
3

I assume the nondestructive way to do this is to copy the .m4a files to somewhere else on my drive, then delete, then re-import from the files?

Dave

4

I believe so. I seem to recall the last time I did this, I assumed the .m4a files would be moved to the trash can but turned out to be wrong. I would copy files somewhere else just to be safe.

5

A similar thing happened to me, but it was with metadata, not the actual media content. (Song names were correct in the album view but not in song view - as i played songs in Apple Music on Mac or devices the song titles would say weird things. This was with content ripped before 2011, but that was a majority of my library.)

But deleting songs and re-importing .m4a or .mp3 files did not fix the problem for me - I needed to delete the albums from the library, do a library update, and then re-import from CD. (This is how I spent a week or two in early 2021.)

One other difference: I had/have an Apple Music subscription in addition to iTunes Match.

6

This worked! Thanks very much!

Dave

7

I also have Apple Music, but this was a CD from a boxed set that’s never been in the iTunes Store or in Apple Music. (The main album has been, but the additional discs from the expanded edition have not.) So, fortunately, there was no conflicting metadata to fight with, but unfortunately Apple never had the correct audio file so it had to upload my bad one.

But @chirano gave me a solution that worked, so that’s great.

Dave

8

Because of problems like this, as well as iTunes Match somehow overwriting my local library’s .mp4 files with .mp3 files, I created a backup of the actual music files on another drive and use ChronoSync with a filter that only copies new songs and only overwrites .mp3 files with .mp4 files.