PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – Music is more than a hobby for Paul Cutler, it is a passion.
For 20 years, he has carefully crafted his collection of thousands of songs hand selected from several different sources. Likening the process to archeology, Cutler says he looks for tunes that are unique, the kind of songs you wouldn’t hear on the radio. This sort of commitment is an investment of both money and time. He’s also dedicated hours rating the songs and setting up playlists.
Then he decided to try iTunes Match for a $24.99 yearly subscription.
He thought the service would “protect” his iTunes library, instead he claims, “It did the complete opposite. It’s a disaster.”
He claims the service scrambled his library, some songs went missing and duplicates were made of others.
iTunes Match is a service that stores your music in the iCloud and then makes that service available on all your devices.
Customers complain about iTunes Match
It’s also been the source of complaints, to include on Apple’s own support community forums.
Last summer, a Verge article stated that Apple Music has an “iCloud problem” adding, “iTunes Match has been one of Apple’s more flawed cloud services for a few years now.”
While Apple rolled out a fix to address the bugs in the system, people continued to complain of duplicates and songs that won’t play.
"They came out with a patch to fix it but they didn’t fix it,” stated Cutler, “Their solution to reload all the music. The amount of time it would take, it would literally take weeks.”
“It is completely understandable why Paul is upset with Apple in that he spent years compiling this music library. And more importantly, all the information about the music library, the ratings, the playlists, these are not small things, these are not very easy to replicate, and unfortunately because those playlists are pointing at music that is no longer there, reconstructing that is a bit of a pain,” stated Ken Colburn of Data Doctors, an Arizona-based data recovery and computer repair company.
WEB EXTRA: Ken Colburn of Data Doctors on iTunes Match concerns
“Apple has gone through various versions of their music service and as they transition from service to service that is where most people are having a problem because they are handling music and the playlist in different ways. Generally speaking you got to start over the way Apple is approaching this which is not a good thing. You spent this time to put together these playlists and to reproduce that especially if you have tens of thousands of songs and hundreds of playlists it is a big pain and I think the folks at Apple don’t really understand that part of it. It is kind of nuances; it is the second part of your music library. Apple’s perspective on this is that the music itself is there, they are not really putting credibility or credence into the complaints when we talk about playlists and ratings and all these things that we do to personalize this music. For somebody who is in to music like Paul, those playlists, those ratings, all that stuff you have done to your music library is just as important. Apple doesn’t want to take liability for those extra issues.”
For Paul, more than an iCloud problem he believes Apple has a customer service problem. He says he has yet to receive an apology or a credit.
Colburn recommends backing up your music and understanding the risk of switching services.
“What we can all learn from this is that if you do have an extensive music collection and you are going to switch services even going from one Apple service to another, the likelihood of you getting everything exactly the way it was before is pretty low,” stated Colburn, “there’s always going to be something missing. So you have to be good with that, you have to understand that’s the risk. You have to assume something is going to go wrong.”
Apple would not comment for this story and did not respond to inquiries on whether it planned to credit Paul.
A spokeswoman provided the following links related to this issue:
· iTunes Match:
· iCloud Music Library: Understanding differences between Apple Music and iTunes Match:
· Coverage