I have a problem with iTunes Match...

Question

...and not like an 'oh man, this bolt's too big for this hole' problem, more of a 'hey man, if you don't stop doing that then you and me gona have a problem' problem.
For starters, I found that enabling the iTunes Match service means that I can't manually synch any files or playlists to my device.  So when I travel to an area without wifi or phone signal, which happens more than Apple obviously thinks, I can't listen to any of my music. Whose bright idea was that??!
Secondly, when I do enable iTunes Match, I often find that changes I make on my computer (shuffling the order of songs on playlists, adding new files to my library etc.) don't always correlate with the Match service, for instance I made a playlist on my computer but it doesn't appear on my phone, or I set a playlist on iTunes to order itself by the date the files were added, but on my phone they appear in whatever order they **** well please.  It unfortunately doesn't 'just work'.
And thirdly, although this isn't really connected to the Match service but rather just a chance for me to vent as I'm already doing it, when I heard they were bringing 'wifi synching' to iOS I was really excited. Then I found out it would only synch while your iDevices were plugged in and charging.  THEN I found out that every time I plugged my phone in it would automatically try to synch, waking up my laptop if it wasn't already awake. So every night I would plug my phone in by my bed, turn over to go to sleep, then have to get up 20 seconds later to re-sleep my machine; this could happen at random points during the night.
I'm not expecting Apple to change their products over the dissatisfaction of one disgruntled user, I'm just wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same problems and has found any ways around them.  Also I must say as annoying as certain aspects of iTunes Match are, it's still a fantastic service (in theory...).

Answer 1

peanutismint wrote:
I hope they manage to fix the playlists issue, hopefully by the next couple of updates.  I figured the syncing/waking thing would be what it was meant to do.  I wonder if there's a command line or something I can tweak in settings to stop my Mac waking on LAN/Bluetooth etc....
In System Prefs > Energy Saver > Power Adapter unselect the option for "wake for network access." Although this may have the effect of preventing wireless syncing. I'm not sure.
peanutismint wrote:
The downloading of songs is pretty much useless as a feature in my situation, as by the time you're out of signal and can't stream music, neither can you download it (and if I were expected to download it first in case of signal loss then doesn't that negate the need for a streaming music service anyway?!)
iTunes Match doesn't stream to iOS devices, all songs are downloaded. If you have not done so, you can enable "use cellular data" to download music by going to Settings > Store and setting the option to ON. To answer your question, though, yes, pre-downloading of tracks is the "best practice" for using an iDevice with iTunes Match enabled.