The Problem

iTunes Match is really impressive. But sometimes, it can be painfully buggy. This will likely improve with time. For now, it’s worth taking the time to learn what hiccups you might encounter with the service and the best ways to work around them.

Rarely, iTunes Match ends up completely dead in the water. It’s not common, and outages never last long, but as an Internet-based service, iTunes Match can and will briefly go offline. When that happens, there’s pretty much nothing you can do; when you double-click songs in iTunes on your computer or tab songs on your iOS device, if they’re stored only in iCloud, they won’t play—and that’s that.

Sometimes, however, the service is up and running, but you still encounter weirdness and frustrations.