iTunes Match not uploading songs? Here’s how to fix it

By Christian Varga. , in Software

I recently purchased iTunes match thinking it would be great way to store all my music in the cloud. Everything went alright during the initial match, about 3500 songs out of 4500 were matched leaving about a thousand to upload. I knew uploading these tracks would take some time, but I had a lot of difficulties with the process. Match would just upload 1 or 2 (or no) songs and then pause, leaving me to click the Start button and have it scan my entire library again, try and upload, and have it fail after another couple of songs. At this rate I knew I was never going to get my music in the cloud.

While uploading, I noticed something interesting. Many websites I tried to visit actually timed out – Match was choking my bandwidth hard. Once a ping on google.com failed with a could not resolve host. Perhaps this is a problem with my router configuration, but still I wondered – could Match be hogging so much bandwidth that it actually prevented iTunes from keeping a connection with with the Store, ultimately causing it to disconnect Match? Self sabotage sounds crazy, but to test the theory I installed netlimiter and limited iTunes to ~75% of my bandwidth. After days of failed attempts, I left Match to do it’s thing while I went off to work. When I came back home, to my surprise Match was still uploading (200 songs complete). The problem is solved.

So if you’re having trouble with iTunes Match uploading your songs, follow the steps below and you should get Match uploading without failure.

  1. Download NetLimiter for Windows from netlimiter.com. Don’t worry – you’ll get a 30 day free trial. However it is worth the $30 for other uses you’ll find for it.
  2. Find out your peak upload speed. You can find this out from speedtest.net (make sure nothing else is uploading at the same time).
  3. Open up iTunes and NetLimiter.
  4. Find iTunes in the NetLimiter list, tick the checkbox under the UL Limit column, and click on the speed to change it.
  5. Speedtest gives us a result in Mbps, so change the dropdown to Mbits, and enter roughly 75% of your peak upload (for example if your peak upload was 0.33, enter 0.248).
  6. Let Match do it’s thing, preferably when you’re not using the computer.

I hope this helps some people out with their iTunes Match and uploading. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

EDIT: it looks like Entonnoir might be a good tool for mac users.

  • Daviderie

    Great idea…I am having this exact issue and thought it was strange that iTunes caused network traffic to come to a halt. I’ll give this a try, although I have a mac and need to find a tool like NetLimiter.

    • levymetal

      I just edited my post, have a try of this: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/28072/entonnoir

  • Paul Cary

    I’m experiencing the same thing — 4 songs left to upload that are ~120 MB. Should be within the iCloud limits, but they take forever and iTunes Match becomes a bandwidth hog. I’m using a Mac too so NetLimiter won’t work.

    • levymetal

      I just edited my post, have a try of this: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/28072/entonnoir

  • http://twitter.com/tanookisuit_ty Tylyn Taylor

    Entonnoir works perfectly! Port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS), the default UL is 1024 kBytes/s. I limited my UL on both ports to 512 kBytes/s and after 6 months of fighting with iTunes Match (and not really using iTunes out of frustration), IT FINALLY WORKS. The remaining 100 songs should be uploaded in the next hour and, more importantly, my networking isn’t crashing every 5 minutes because of iTunes. So happy I found this article!

    • http://christianvarga.com/ Christian Varga

      Thanks for the comment, glad you got it sorted! It’s definitely a weird issue and it doesn’t seem to be affecting the majority of people. What router are you using?