Apple Music / iCloud Music Library has made a right old mess of my iTunes library :(

[flur]

Now that you said this, I decided to give my library a closer look.

"Electric Avenue" by Shark Bites and Dog Fights? Uh... what? I never added this to my library!!

I am worried now that there is a nightmare hidden in "My Music" that I am not even aware of yet.

I had songs in my purchased music that I never bought - just a few, and really random stuff, not just that U2 album. Those weren't new, I just never bothered to worry about them until they were being thrust in my face with iCML/Apple Music. It just goes to show the whole thing has been a cluster for a lot longer than just Apple Music, and not just for iTunes Match users.

I restored my entire music folder back to mid-June with time machine and will NOT be reconnecting my mac. It's a bummer as I was really excited about the service, and love the music discovery options it provides.

 

[Paco II]

I am an iTunes Match subscriber. I just downloaded (on my Mac) a 'matched' song from the cloud and it's a standard m4a file.

Ok but this is STILL confusing. What if you HAVE been an iTunes Match subscriber the entire time? Their reply suggests THEN you could still download the files in non DRM form.... But my understanding from the posts on here is that is not the case and even iTunes Match subscribers can't get non DRM files downloaded. Am I'm going crazy here?

 

[Jstuts5797]

I am an iTunes Match subscriber. I just downloaded (on my Mac) a 'matched' song from the cloud and it's a standard m4a file.

THANK YOU for testing this for me!!!!!!! So I'm guessing as an iTunes Match subscriber it is then now ok for me to upgrade to itunes 12.2 without having negative side effects?

 

[Paco II]

I couldn't say that for sure. My situation is slightly unique. My primary music collection is too large for iTunes Match. So I created another library for iTunes Match. I move music in from the other library, let it sync, then delete local copy in that second library. So my iTunes Match library has no local files. For me, I see no issues with my library (so far) perhaps because it lives entirely in the cloud. And as mentioned when I select a 'matched' song to download locally it is a regular m4a.

THANK YOU for testing this for me!!!!!!! So I'm guessing as an iTunes Match subscriber it is then now ok for me to upgrade to itunes 12.2 without having negative side effects?

 

[msvadi]

Nearly every songs been duplicated with a cloud version and a local version.

I had a similar issue with duplicate albums, but I think it was completely resolved by unchecking iCloud Music Library in iTunes' Preferences.

 

[bjjp2]

If AM replaces the local copies on your phone anyway, then what's the difference between "merge" and "replace"?

 

[whsbuss]

Since I decided to make a full backup copy of my regular iTunes library and just start with a blank library for AM things have been just fine. I have added a few tracks that AM doesn't support and they work fine without changes; strange.

This way in case I don't continue in 3-months I can go back to my old library, fully in-tact.

 

[kh3khalid]

So guys anyone figured out how to enable iCould Music Library without it messing up songs info, artwork, and playlists?

I was a former iTunes Match subscriber, maybe that's what's causing the problem?

 

[yg17]

So guys anyone figured out how to enable iCould Music Library without it messing up songs info, artwork, and playlists?

I was a former iTunes Match subscriber, maybe that's what's causing the problem?

Nope. If you want to use iCML, you have to start fresh. And even then, there are still issues with songs from Apple Music being greyed out and stuff not automatically syncing to iOS devices.

 

[Arran]

I think there could be a lot of complaints about missing or messed up libraries in three months time when people start opting out of Apple Music at the end of the free trial.

Indeed. And with that thought (and profuse apologies to The Eagles) it's time for a musical reference:

Hotel Cupertino: You can check out anytime, but you can never leave

 

[ciarals]

This is my situation:

• Subscribed to iTunes Match since the beginning
• iOS and iTunes updated to latest version
• Apple Music never activated
• iCloud Music Library never activated on iOS and already ON in iTunes at first start after update

What I did (after reading all the apocalypse here):

• Time Machine backup
• iTunes update to latest version
• Deactivate iCloud Music Library from Preferences 2 seconds after launch of updated iTunes (Fear of the Dark)

After this, I started looking around trying to find iTunes Match where it was in the previous iTunes version: I couldn't find it so I went to My Account section in iTunes and there was the usual iTunes in the Cloud section with my iTunes Match suscription. And it wasn't enabled. So I guessed that deactivating iCloud Music Library at start also deactivated iTunes Match. So I re-activated iTunes Match from My Account section in iTunes and after all the usual iTunes Match processes, everything was ok, unchanged since previous iTunes version. And in Preferences iCloud Music Library was active again.

I did this process another time (Preferences - Deactivate iTunes Music Library - My Account - Activate iTunes Match) and everything is still fine, no mess at all.

My guess is that all this mess is caused by old and no more used iTunes Match libraries that for some unknown reason cause the destroy of the Universe.

Hope to have helped you guys

 

[Quu]

So this is maybe a warning to others who have curated their iTunes libraries over the years.

I used Apple Music for the past few days since it released and it was all good. Today everything went ******* insane.

99.999% of my music is stuff I've added to my library myself as .mp3 files. I've not deleted any since starting the Apple Music trial but today it duplicated almost all of my library, duplicated my playlists, and it ****ed up all my ratings for my songs.

I have a 5 Star smart playlist which only shows me songs I've rated 5 stars. I had about 340 songs in that playlist. Today it contains 2,500+ songs and it was still going up until I disabled iCloud. The Apple Music iCloud syncing thing has determined any album I have a single song in that I've rated 5 stars means that every song in that album and the album itself are now 5 star rated aswell.

I cannot begin to accurately describe how livid I am. Needless to say I've turned the iCloud sync thing off and I'm done with Apple Music.

Complete trash, half baked. Whatever you want to call it. I was singing its praises yesterday even on these forums but that was until its done this. Thank god for Time Machine backups or I'd be re-rating everything by hand right now and dealing with all my music being DRM'd from the cloud sync.

 

[lars666]

I feel with you. This is, in my opinion, the most serious Apple problem since a long time and I cannot understand why MacRumors doesn't FINALLY post a front page article about this (like "The Verge" etc. already did) to raise awareness that Apple Music destroys iTunes libraries just by being turned on (irreparably if you don't have a backup) and even deletes media files from your hard drive. Instead they are posting an article how clunky to use "Connect" is for artists and how to use the "heart" rating system...

I guess not too few affected people even didn't realize yet what iCloud Music Library has done to their libraries...

(EDIT: This was a new own thread when I replied, therefore this answer - merged by the moderators in the meantime.)

 

[Rigby]

THANK YOU for testing this for me!!!!!!! So I'm guessing as an iTunes Match subscriber it is then now ok for me to upgrade to itunes 12.2 without having negative side effects?

Have you signed up for Apple Music? That seems to be what screwed up some people's libraries. If you have only iTunes Match, updating to 12.2 and enabling iCloud Music Library is safe. Everything will work just like before.

 

[Aluminum213]

iTunes Match has been a bugged filled mess from day 1, iCloud Music is iTunes Match with a new name. Why people thought it wouldn't continue to be a bug filled mess is beyond me

Apple really is the WORST at cloud based services, put to shame by Microsoft and Google

 

[harry20larry]

iCloud Music Library

Like many others here I have been plagued with issues surrounding iCloud Music Library including duplicating songs, playlists being muddled and errors. I have been receiving some brilliant support from Apple over the last few days and I think we have come to a solution. I have tried to make a step-by-step guide to see if it works with any of you.

1) Create a backup of your entire iTunes folder in Music. This can be on Time Machine or locally. Before closing this library, make a note of number of songs and size of library.
2) Quit iTunes. We are now going to create a new iTunes Library. Do this by alt+clicking on iTunes in the the dock. Select the option to create a new library. Name it whatever you want.
3) When it opens, click yes to using iCloud Music Library
4) Allow everything to do its work here. Leave it until it has finished.
5) Only your purchased songs should have been brought down into your library. This is what happened for me. It also restored some relatively incomplete playlists. I deleted them.
6) Re-add all your other songs to your library. This can be done by simply with cmd+O. Find your old iTunes Music folder (should have a list of artists in folders) and click open.
7) Allow iTunes to do its work processing all the songs and adding them. Once it is done, verify number of songs is similar to your old library's total (in the adding process it tries to remove any duplicates)
8) Once added, iCloud Music Library will do its work. Having had so many issues with it in the last few days, this time it actually worked for me. Leave it to completely sync your library. This will take time depending on your internet connection.
9) Quit iTunes. Open your old library by double clicking the .itl file in your old library. Follow these instructions to export your playlists: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12145?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US
10) Quit iTunes, open you new library. Import your playlists using the same instructions.
11) Allow iCloud to sync

This should now be it all set up. Next is your phone and iPad.

1) Open Settings>General>Usage>Manage Storage>Music>Edit then delete all songs
2) Verify all songs have been deleted by opening the music app
3) Now turn on iCloud Music Library in Music Settings. This should load everything in from the cloud.
4) You can now select which playlist you want to store offline.

I hope this helps people who have had the same issue as me. If it doesn't work, I am really sorry. Let's just hope Apple find a solution for this soon!

 

[mgpg89]

This should now be it all set up. Next is your phone and iPad.

1) Open Settings>General>Usage>Manage Storage>Music>Edit then delete all songs
2) Verify all songs have been deleted by opening the music app
3) Now turn on iCloud Music Library in Music Settings. This should load everything in from the cloud.
4) You can now select which playlist you want to store offline.

I hope this helps people who have had the same issue as me. If it doesn't work, I am really sorry. Let's just hope Apple find a solution for this soon!

Tried this a couple of times, but my iPhone still won't download all songs properly in any given playlist.

 

[harry20larry]

Tried this a couple of times, but my iPhone still won't download all songs properly in any given playlist.

Is this once you have made a new library as above? The Apple senior said to me in the process of an iCloud Music sync the library and playlist files are uploaded and matched, then downloaded. Some libraries can be corrupt slightly and not work well with the cloud, thus starting a fresh with a new library fixes this.

 

[mgpg89]

Is this once you have made a new library as above? The Apple senior said to me in the process of an iCloud Music sync the library and playlist files are uploaded and matched, then downloaded. Some libraries can be corrupt slightly and not work well with the cloud, thus starting a fresh with a new library fixes this.

No, Apple Music is working flawlessly on my Mac, so I skipped straight to the iPhone section at the end.
So you're suggesting I build a new library on my Mac, even though the problems keep persisting on my iPhone, right?

If so, I'll give it a shot later tonight.
Thanks for sharing your insights.

 

[turbineseaplane]

This is all WAY too much effort - Total failure if you ask me.

 

[0970373]

I am an iTunes Match subscriber. I just downloaded (on my Mac) a 'matched' song from the cloud and it's a standard m4a file.

I've done a little further testing my self on a test account, sep iTunes Library from my main. If you turn the "iCloud Status" column on, you can see what kind of file something is. It will wither say Uploaded, Matched or Apple Music. There is no consistency here as songs from the same album are marked differently.

So if I re-download something marked matched or uploaded, the file comes back as DRM free. BUT if it's a song that is in the Apple Music collection, then it comes back as the Apple Music DRM protected file.

Also, someone from Apple responded to my email to "Tim Cook" and we're going to chat on Monday. I really hope everyone here who is having problems or concerns is reporting it to Apple. They can't fix what they don't know about.

 

[Jstuts5797]

Have you signed up for Apple Music? That seems to be what screwed up some people's libraries. If you have only iTunes Match, updating to 12.2 and enabling iCloud Music Library is safe. Everything will work just like before.

Yes I have subscribed to Apple Music, and I have every intention to keep that subscription as well as iTunes Match. I just want to know when it's safe to update and use iTunes as I do have some CDs I want to add to my library and them iTunes Match/Apple Music. But I can be patient if need be. As far as on my iPad and iPhone... Well I have no issues at all, everything works great for me and I find nothing strange in my library. It even kept my star ratings and fixed just about any and all tag/metadata/album art from songs I had not fixed yet myself.

 

[Quu]

Also, someone from Apple responded to my email to "Tim Cook" and we're going to chat on Monday. I really hope everyone here who is having problems or concerns is reporting it to Apple. They can't fix what they don't know about.

They are a multi-billion dollar company that didn't test this stuff to within an inch of its life. I don't want to liaise with them and give them a blow by blow of all my problems. I'll just not use it.

I'm actually really pissed off about it because if it just didn't work that'd be one thing but it's actually trashing my personal data, my song library is something I've spent hundreds of hours curating over the past decade when iTunes first graced my 2003 iBook and had I not been using Time Machine I'd be completely ****ed.

Apple can solve it on their own without my help as far as I'm concerned.

 

[randy98mtu]

It took a lot of effort, but the Apple Music concept seemed worth it to me. I'm now getting a bit nervous about the "artist can pull content later" idea. At any rate, as I posted a few pages back, I determined a handful of music that was causing issues in my previous attempts and deleted it from my library (I didn't care about it and figured I would be able to download it later through Apple Music most likely.) I also took the opportunity to delete more stuff I just don't play. In all I went from 15,500 songs down to 12,800 songs. Then I made a dummy library and just kept deleting from my iCML until it was as empty as I could get it. I found the best thing was to just delete and let it for a while, not hit update library. That seems to be an "undo" button with a timer on it. After that was done, I turned on my iCML and let it work for a while. I ended up with 2500 songs in Apple Music, a few matched and a ton "Local Only" that I had previously deleted in my purge process. It remembers you deleting them. I was pretty happy, but a little bothered by the Apple Music status for stuff I had purchased. Then I remembered I had to manually log the computer back in to iTunes Match which I resubscribed the other day. When I did that, 90% of my Apple Music switched over to Matched. I only have 20 or so songs that say "matched" They are all songs I bought in iTunes, so that is still strange. I set to adding my local only stuff back to Apple Music. Of note, I also had 1500 "duplicates" before my library purge down to 12,800 songs. After I only had 3. They were easy to examine and fix.

I had done all of this on my work computer (PC). This morning I decided to throw the switch on my personal Mac. I copied the library file from my PC, pointed it to the correct location for my library files and let it find all of those. Then I turned on my iTM and ICML and everything seems correct still. I have now added 1 songs from Apple Music and it created a separate folder to upload that file to, so this keeps our file management easy.

I'm not totally sure what actually worked about this whole process. I suspect it was deleting some of the stuff that had confused the system previously. The only thing I still have not done is sync a device to the computer. I'm nervous about that after reading the last 2 pages. I'm waiting a few more days because my phone is on iOS 9 Beta 2 so I can't turn on Apple Music anyway. I might try turning on the cloud library though. To date my iPad looks good and it's on 8.4. I did find a few manual playlists this morning that were dorked up. One was missing several songs, a few others had some random songs added. Very goofy.

 

[flur]

So I just updated my MBA about a half hour ago (the mess that I had to clean up was on my MBP). I turned off wifi before I opened iTunes, because I'm paranoid, and it turns out I had good reason - the option to turn off iCloud Library is missing. The option to view Apple Music is there, and activated by default. When I went to uncheck it, it told me that I would no longer be able to use iCloud Library, which makes me think the iCML was enabled by default.

Does anyone know if Apple changed the update? I suppose it's possible something weird happened for me, but it's a caution to anyone who hasn't updated yet - be careful when you open iTunes that first time after the update.