My iTunes Match won't load past step 1; All songs in my library say "Exceeded Limit", even the ones that were uploaded before.

Question

My iTunes Match hasn't been working for a couple of days. It said I had exceeded the song limit, so I was going through my library and clearing out some songs. When I deleted the songs, the box that asked if I wanted to delete them from the cloud wasn't showing up. I decided to update my iTunes Match before deleting anything else. When I attempted the update, Step 1 moved incredibly slowly, then stopped working before reaching Step 2. When this has happened in the past, I have been advised to try several troubleshooting tactics from the support forum and from writing to Apple support in the past. The first one is to turn off iTunes Match, restart the computer, and turn on iTunes Match again. I did that. The same problem occurred. I tried the second trouble shooting tactic, which was to turn off iTunes Match, close iTunes, find the iTunes Library Genius.itdb and iTunes Library Extras.itdb and move them to the trash, then run a Repair Disk Permissions using Disk Utility, then turn iTunes Match back on. I tried that. The same problem occurred. I went to my iTunes library to see the iCloud status of my songs, and every single song was listed as not being in the cloud yet and had the "Exceeded Limit" status, even the songs that have been in my cloud for over a year. I checked a few of the forum topics here on the support site. One suggested opening up iTunes while holding down the Option button, creating a new library, then turning on iTunes Match and deleting songs from the cloud that way. Then open up the original library and turn on iTunes Match. I did that. The status of my songs hasn't changed, nor can iTunes Match load past Step 1. Does anyone know what I can do to fix this?

Answer 1

Maybe I didn't explain it properly, but that's one of the things I described trying in my first post. It helped get songs out of my cloud that I didn't need there, but iTunes Match still couldn't get past the first step. Last night I deleted the iTunes Library Extras.itdb, iTunes library Genius.itdb, iTunes Library.it, and iTunes Library.xml files from my computer, entered Time Machine, and recovered those same files that had been backed up after the last time I added music (the time the problem began.) After recovering those files I opened iTunes and turned Match back on. For some reason, it worked, even though those were the files that existed when the problem initially occurred.The combination of having songs removed from the cloud as well as restoring those original files must have done something, but I have no idea why that fixed the problem.