Fed up with iTunes Match. Only 90% matched.

Question

Hi,
So I have lots of music ripped from my huge CD collection. I was incredibly impressed with iTunes Match when it was released. Sure, it was slow, but it did indeed add lots of music to the cloud and find lots of my CD music. Very impressive.
But here's the problem - after all this time I still have around 10% of my library unmatched. And not unmatched as in "error" or "ineligible". Unmatched as in "waiting". Waiting for what?
This has been the case for months. There is no consistency in file format, artist, length, bitrate, date added, release date, etc etc. I even have some CDs where some tracks are available in iTunes Match and some are not (usually stuck in "waiting" state). I even until recently had music I'd bought from iTMS that was unmatched!
Having songs randomly missing from albums on my iPhones and iPods and iPads is ruining my music experience. I have now lost count of the number of times I've thought "Oh! I've not listened to ALBUM for ages!" only to find it either not available at all or not available fully in iTunes Match.
Is everyone having the same poor experience or is it just me? I mean, iTunes Match is a revolutionary and brilliant concept, but because it's so unreliable it's usefulness is dramatically reduced (as in, it can't be relied on, making it largely pointless).
Sorry to be so negative but iTunes Match needs to work 100% to be replace traditional syncing for reliability.
Neil.
PS Please do not try to diagnose a problem with my setup. There are none at my end - I've tried re-encoding to MP3 or AAC and adding those to get a match, all without success. I've tried pretty much all the stuff suggested on here and still am 10% short. I have 1990 "waiting" items of 21693 items. That's a huge gap.

Answer 1

I have very similar, very frustrating problems with iTunes match.  I have reasonably fast 802.11n WiFi and fast low latency internet connection... 10-30 ms...  55-75 mbps down, 10-12 mbps up.  I have the same results when not using WiFi.
I have a large collection of songs that have been remixed that are not in the iTunes store.  These cannot be matched and are therefore uploaded.
Yesterday I uploaded an 88 track Razormaid! remix compilation, 11 tracks at a time from 8 CDs.  I encode AAC.  I would run match after each disk import until each disk was successful.  It often takes iTunes match MULTIPLE match passes on each disk to successfully upload each track.  Occasionally some tracks get flagged as ERROR in the iCloiud status column and I need to manually flag the track to update in iTunes match.
These 88 tracks use 5.52 gb in iTunes.  I have 6154 tracks total using 62.34 gb. 
Uploading these 88 tracks was almost an ALL DAY process and seems to require lots of supervision.  I have managed to get ALL of my tracks uploaded but it takes a tremendous amount of patience.
Now I'm finding that dowloading these uploaded non matched tracks to my devices is extremely slow.
ALSO... super frustrating... if you ever change your cover art... iTunes match may not let that occur.  I have had my cover art revert back to the original art I originally uploaded AND revert it back in iTunes... overwriting my more recent change to the iTunes master.  Process:  I change the art then manually run the iTunes match update....  Sometimes the art takes... sometimes it doesn't.... sometimes it updates the devices, sometimes it doesn't.  Arrrgggg....
They need to smooth out the upload process for unmatched songs....  When the upload process fails it shouldn't have to start the entire 3 step process over....  Improve the speed for downloads...  Fix the cover art update process.
Fix these and it will be a teriffic service!