When djay announced that Spotify would stop working, I decided to leave the streaming world completely (at least for djing) and go for iTunes Match instead. I love that djay has iCloud sync for cue points and I wanted to keep the possibility to prepare my cue points on my iPhone to have them available on my iPad or Mac later on. With iTunes Match, I figured I would still enjoy some cloud benefits such as not having to worry about syncing data anymore. This didn’t work out for me and I wanted to share with you why:
- Cue Points do not sync for all songs: For some reason, djay considers some songs on my Mac as different from those that iTunes Match puts on my iDevices. Details here
- iTunes Match does not even work correctly outside of djay: One time, songs just got deleted from my iPad. “No problem”, I thought, “I can always download them again”. That does not work, though, because of iTunes Match’s dreaded “This item cannot be downloaded”. This has been discussed extensively here. I was able to work around it once but after having gotten a new iPad, there were just too many songs that I could not download. Fixing them would have meant deleting all songs in my Music.app and I was not ready to do that because I did not want to lose all my playlists.
In the end, I am now syncing files locally again, like it’s 2010. It sucks to go back but at least it should be reliable.