I had around 16,000 songs. After scanning iTunes matched roughly 10,000 and started uploading the other 6,000 even though probably 5,000 of them exist in iTunes.

After waiting about 18-19 hours it had only uploaded roughly 3000 or the 6000 (yes I know this is completely dependent on my internet connections upload speed)

I understand that there will have to be tracks that get uploaded, bootleg cd’s, mashup cd’s etc but I really don’t want to upload 1/3 of my music (if I wanted to upload that much I would have gotten a Google Music or Amazon account)

Then there is the match process matching 90% of an album but not 1 song so now I have 90% of an album available at 256kbps and 1 song at 128kbps. Again this is silly. After reading through some more about match I now know the reason for it (not matching the waveform that Apple has stored) but it could have been solved by just dropping the threshold for matching if it matches 60-70% of an album and not the rest.

Then there is no option to use the iTunes metadata, would have been nice to get all/most of my music at a higher bitrate with clean metadata. Again I know why they don’t use iTunes metadata as people would get annoyed if it wiped out their metadata but it could have at least been an option.

Some of my explicit tracks have been replaced with clean version and there is no way of specifying whether you want explicit or clean songs.

Have also had problems with artwork not showing on my iPhone and my sort order not being carried over from iTunes.

Finally had it mis-match songs, example matching The Beatles mono albums to the stereo ones.

Not exactly the smooth pain free experience I was hoping for. I’m just wondering if all the hassle is worth it to get access to all my music on my phone?

To sum up:
Allow using of iTunes metadata (as an option)
Allow specifying explicit/clean versions of songs (as an option)

Sorry,I’ll clear that up. iTunes match is always downloading. It just streams the beginning enough to play, then downloads after.

When I say legitimize, I say it cheekily — in much the same way I mention defrosting tunes from the USA. I don’t think that implies “here, download away and then buy into this subscription service”. Who hasn’t had a mixed CD containing songs without any proper metatags?

One thing I would like to see in the music player (iPhone/iPad) is a quick way to switch to seeing just what is on your device, to what is in the cloud. You can do this by going into settings/music… but it would be nice to have a quick way to look to see what is available to play immediately.

I’ll definitely be using this for a while.