Match, IMO, is a clusterfuck.
1. It has decided I didn't need all that artwork anyway.
2. Random stuff is duplicated (iPhone/iPad).
3.
Tracks don't pre-buffer. You have 3.5 minutes to think about this, and you only start buffering now?!!
4. Because of this,
hitting Next immediately stops the playing track (when a cloud track is next). So there will an unpredictable amount of silence before the next track (even on Wifi). As a user I do not want to think about where the track comes from. If I wanted the music to stop I'd have pressed Pause.
5. Decent 3G reception != guarantee that a song will play the whole way through.
6. Going from a 3G -> Edge area = you effectively have no iPod ('the iTunes store is unavailable')
7.
Every song skipped will be downloaded in the background. Even on Edge.
8. ^ This kills the Music app. Because it's doing more than it can handle, it becomes unresponsive. Under these conditions if a local track turns up in shuffle it still needs 20-30 seconds to get its shit together before playing. (iPhone 4)
9. When shuffling it seems to favour the cloud over the local version of a song.
10. Turning off 'Show All Music' mid-shuffle has no effect. Presumably you need to start a new shuffle.
11. Once you turn it on, you can no longer manually sync playlists.
12. It's possible I can get better
12. Fucking cloud icons everywhere.
tl;dr don't even think about using Match with an iPhone. Granted most of these issues are compounded by using a cellular data connection, but currently the only way I can see it being possible to reliably play music on my phone is to turn off Show All Tracks & disable Use Cellular Data in the Store settings, effectively restricting myself to wifi only.
It just butthurts.
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