all null and void

iTunes Match had such great promise. But for me it’s been a source of constant anguish and frustration. 

I rate a lot of music, about 90% of my 18,000+ songs are rated; closer to 100% of the songs I’ve obtained in the past few years. When I first joined Match, I lost all of my ratings for the songs I’d obtained in the past three or so months. No biggie; I rated the albums again and then fine tuned my ratings over the next few weeks.

But then I woke up last week to most of my playlists being gone. Strangely, it was only the playlists and folders I used/loved the most. 

We’re talking years of work carefully crafting these little gems. Gone. 

When I contacted Apple iTunes support, they replied saying, in essence, there was nothing they could do. Of course I realize that I can probably recover most of these by going back to an old version of my library database from Time Machine or some other backup. But that’s time consuming. 

My current theory is that any playlist folder containing playlists synced to my iPhone were deleted due to some iTunes Match confusion created by my iPhone. Match never seemed to work properly on my iPhone and I had mostly taken to turning it off completely on that device. But who knows?

Now that I’ve gone through the trouble of exporting all my old playlists from a less-used and network-disconnected Mac, and importing them to my other three Macs, a bunch of other lost playlists that I hadn’t recovered manually suddenly reappeared. My playlists then seemed to be in a state of syncing flux for a few hours, appearing disappearing, moving between folders, etc. Now that everything appears to be in a somewhat steady state, what should I do? Can I rely on iTunes for my playlists? Should I switch to only using Rdio or some equivalent?