ITunes Match causing battery drain and high CPU load on iPhone 5(S)?

Question

Hi.
I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing this — coz i see no such reports anywhere:
On my iPhone 5S, ever since iOS 7.0 (and continuing with 7.1), downloading songs form iTunes Match, downloading any album from Match is really slow, heats hop the CPU and drains the battery. (As ar as  recall, all was fine under iOS 6).
Here’s steps:
i go to the Music app, tap “download all” for an album, or maybe a whole artist. The Downloading/Pending icons appear. Because status reporting is vague, i switch over to the iTunes Store app and its Downloads tab, which provides more info.
Here i see the first three songs downloading fairly quickly (i have fast WiFi), but once the progress bar reached 70%-ish, they go into Processing, and stay there for anywhere between 3 to 10 minutes. Eventually, they drop form the list (i.e. are done) and the spiel repeats with the next set.
While this is happening, my iPhone goes incredibly (“uncomfortable to hold” hot), and i can literally see the battery go down.
My iTunes library is largish, but not huge. i have about 17k songs, most of them iTunes purchased. (since Match has a limit of 25k *plus* iTunes-purchased songs, i’d expect 17k to be child’s play). On my phone, i have very few to no songs at all.
The other day, i completely reset my phone, didn’t restore form backup, and set it up fresh with only handful of essential apps. I’ve been seeing incredible battery life — i was still on 30% after over three days, yesterday. I then decided to try Match again — fresh, for the first time since the reset. I triggered the download of *one* album. The battery went down 8 percentage points while that album was downloading, and again the phone heated up immensely. Once the download was done, the drainage slowed down, but still seemed excessive compared to before (i was at 16% within an hour or so). I then shut down and rebooted the phone — and batter life was back to be excellent — the remaining 16% got the phone over the night.
Ok, so the first instinct is, of course: something if screwed up with my iTunes Match library, cloud side. right? So i grabbed my girlfriend’s iPhone 5 (also iOS 7.1; *much* smaller and completely separate iTunes Match Library). Triggered the download of an album and — lo and behold — the same behavior: songs hang in Processing for long (maybe not quite as along as for mine, but it’s i didn’t measure), and 3% battery drop for downloading 10 songs, and the battery continuing to drop faster than usual, after.
So of a sampling size of two, both libraries and (totally unrelated) Apple ID accounts show the same or similar problem. Yet no-one else seems to be reporting this, or similar, problems with Match? What am i missing?
I should also add that i see no such issues on my iPad (also running iOS 7.1 now), nor on my MacBook Air (my main Mac has the full iTunes library on disk locally). Downloading songs there works fine and prompt. I also have no problems *streaming* songs form Match.
*Does* anyone else see this? Any suggestions what to do to address this?
I’ve also filed a bug report with apple as radar://15964682.
thanx!
marc

Answer 1

I am experiencing the same issue as dwarfland. I have a black 64GB iPhone 5s running iOS version 7.1.1 and a grandfathered unlimited data plan with AT&T. I have had an iTunes Match subscription pretty much since it was introduced. I currently have around 19500 songs in my music library and try to have only around 2000-2500 songs physically located on the phone itself (all of my "top-rated" songs in a single playlist). I have recently needed to re-download all these "top-rated" songs after I restored my phone from a backup, wiping all the songs from my phone. Thanks for posting your experiences, hopefully someone from Apple will notice and help us out with a solution.