[nirvana]

How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices.

The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.

[jmduke]

'Scam' was a bad choice of words, but its ridiculously buggy (it accepts your music downloaded from TPB, but will only take half of an album which I legally bought and ripped to disk) and iOS playback is horrendous (both on and off WiFi.)

[nirvana]

Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import.

I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them.

The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced.

I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)