Apple Music & duplicate songs

[HopefulHumanist]

I've been thinking about this since I started using the service. Since the service treats music from the Apple Music catalog as distinct songs from their counterparts that already existed in our libraries, it results in duplicate songs with the play counts spread across all of them.

If you're like me, you want all the play counts and library data to fall under one song; that way it is the same in all its playlists and versions. Some of my albums have matched to their Apple Music counterparts but not with any pattern I can detect.

Can any of you think of a way to consolidate all versions of a track in a way that there's only one left? The only thing I can think of is to add Apple Music versions of music you already own, update their play counts and delete the copies you had originally. This seems like it would take ages so I'm hoping for another solution.

 

[Nipperserphil]

I've been thinking about this since I started using the service. Since the service treats music from the Apple Music catalog as distinct songs from their counterparts that already existed in our libraries, it results in duplicate songs with the play counts spread across all of them.

If you're like me, you want all the play counts and library data to fall under one song; that way it is the same in all its playlists and versions. Some of my albums have matched to their Apple Music counterparts but not with any pattern I can detect.

Can any of you think of a way to consolidate all versions of a track in a way that there's only one left? The only thing I can think of is to add Apple Music versions of music you already own, update their play counts and delete the copies you had originally. This seems like it would take ages so I'm hoping for another solution.

I'm in the same situation, and I'm left wondering if this is actually a bug. I used to have iTunes Match and that just showed the local file and a symbol to show if it was already uploaded (or matched).

Plus I also have a ton of files which have the symbol to denote that file was removed from iCloud ... I get the feeling that my old iTunes Match account (which I cancelled months ago) is behind some of this mess.

 

[HopefulHumanist]

I'm in the same situation, and I'm left wondering if this is actually a bug. I used to have iTunes Match and that just showed the local file and a symbol to show if it was already uploaded (or matched).

Plus I also have a ton of files which have the symbol to denote that file was removed from iCloud ... I get the feeling that my old iTunes Match account (which I cancelled months ago) is behind some of this mess.

The fact that you have tracks with the iCloud status "removed" means that yeah, your account got deleted or the tracks got deleted from your iTunes in the cloud. I think you should be able to just click "Add to Apple Music/iCloud" and put them back.

My concerns are somewhat related but somewhat unrelated. All my files that existed in my library before Apple Music are just fine but if I were to ask Siri to play a song or use one of the pre-made playlists, it will use the Apple Music version instead of the copy I had originally. This will lead to stratification of play count, ratings and loved status between various versions of the same track.

I was looking for a way to avoid this issue and the only one I've thought of so far is to either slowly replace my original files with Apple Music ones or start a new library altogether. Both solutions are less than ideal due to the amount of time necessary to complete.