iTunes Match play count syncing - And my brief review of match in general

[silentfury007]

Hey guys, sorry if this has been asked, though I couldn't find anything in my brief search. I'm using iTunes match, but my play counts, top-25, recently played, etc, aren't updating when I listen to music on my phone, even after plugging in and syncing with itunes. Does anyone know a fix to this? Also, my top 25 playlist, when I look at it on my phone, has likes hundreds of songs in it..... not 25.....?

Overall, I like the IDEA of itunes match, but it's sort of a bummer that when listening to an album, it doesn't start to pre-load the next song or something. You have to wait a second or two for it to load (or more if in the car and/or listening over 3G). It's a small thing, but when listening to albums from bands that actually still make albums, it sort of ruins the flow. So that's probably my biggest gripe. I used Amazon's cloud service when it first came out, and while overall it pretty much sucked, it at least pre-loaded the next song in the album/playlist.

 

[imronburgundy]

My experience has been lackluster so far. It's pretty much terrible on 3g. I don't have the best service at work, but Pandora and Google music play through flawlessly. If you even remotely try to shuffle your songs on itunes match, it will play the first song, then just stop after the first one. A lot of work needs to be done on this for it to be a legitimate contender. Maybe it's the fact that all of the songs are played at 256 kbps. If we could opt into lower quality for a better experience, I would definitely do so.

 

[drone46]

Have you guys noticed Match sucking your battery dry much faster than normal?