Same problem here. I had iTunes Match for a bout a month when it first came out and canceled it. Tried using iCloud Library yesterday and it completely hosed my library. I restored it from a Time Machine backup and everything is fine, but I'd kind of like to actually try Apple Music.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Music / iCloud Music Library has made a right old mess of my iTunes library :(
- Thread starter andyp350
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
But if I want to use Music in the Cloud, I guess I'm screwed until Apple fixes this problem, if they ever do.
EDIT: Actually, I can't use AM without iCloud Music. Well, I can, but streaming only. If I want to download anything for offline use in iTunes and add it to my playlists, I can't unless iCloud Music is enabled. What a cluster****.
Last edited:
If you try to use apple music and add to your library, the device your are using has to have icloud library turned on.
I completely wiped my cloud library this morning from my work computer. Things kept reappearing and I kept deleting until nothing came back. Then I turned icloud library back on on my ipad mini. After a bit things reappeared on my itunes on my computer. A bit later I look at my ipad play lists and album art is getting changed to what they pick. For example it will switch to the artwork from a greatest hits version. The songs are still correct at least. I’m continuing to experiment. I want to be able to use it but they sure do make it difficult.
I completely wiped my cloud library this morning from my work computer. Things kept reappearing and I kept deleting until nothing came back. Then I turned icloud library back on on my ipad mini. After a bit things reappeared on my itunes on my computer. A bit later I look at my ipad play lists and album art is getting changed to what they pick. For example it will switch to the artwork from a greatest hits version. The songs are still correct at least. I’m continuing to experiment. I want to be able to use it but they sure do make it difficult.
Ok, so there are a few solutions for getting our libraries back to normal. But, we still can't add offline music if we disable iCloud Music.
So, here's what I'm doing: I'm leaving my iTunes music untouched (no iCloud), and I'm using iCloud on my phone. Ok, but that still leaves album and metadata issues.
I found that I can add the correct album to My Music (capitalized to mean Apple's service), and that seems to correct the issues with album art. And, seemingly awesome enough, it shows the songs as already existing on my device. At this time there are two albums, one from Apple Music and one, corrupted, from my collection. But if I delete the corrupted album, the downloaded songs from Apple Music's album disappear and must be made "available offline" IE must be downloaded.
Not an ideal solution, but it gets worse. Sometimes Apple Music doesn't have an album. Take, for example, music from the movie The Mexican by Alan Silvestri and Various Artists (Apple Music thinks this is the movie Mouse Hunt...). I can't add this to My Music, which means I have to be ok with the album being messed up or lose it completely. There is no way to override Apple Music's redefinition of this album as Mouse Hunt.
And if I choose to re-sync with my computer, I will lose every song I downloaded from Apple Music...
It's frustrating, and the only reason I'm still debating whether or not to continue with this service.
So, here's what I'm doing: I'm leaving my iTunes music untouched (no iCloud), and I'm using iCloud on my phone. Ok, but that still leaves album and metadata issues.
I found that I can add the correct album to My Music (capitalized to mean Apple's service), and that seems to correct the issues with album art. And, seemingly awesome enough, it shows the songs as already existing on my device. At this time there are two albums, one from Apple Music and one, corrupted, from my collection. But if I delete the corrupted album, the downloaded songs from Apple Music's album disappear and must be made "available offline" IE must be downloaded.
Not an ideal solution, but it gets worse. Sometimes Apple Music doesn't have an album. Take, for example, music from the movie The Mexican by Alan Silvestri and Various Artists (Apple Music thinks this is the movie Mouse Hunt...). I can't add this to My Music, which means I have to be ok with the album being messed up or lose it completely. There is no way to override Apple Music's redefinition of this album as Mouse Hunt.
And if I choose to re-sync with my computer, I will lose every song I downloaded from Apple Music...
It's frustrating, and the only reason I'm still debating whether or not to continue with this service.
I just hope they release a proper fix, they must take it seriously if its affecting wether we can actually listen to music we've purachsed.
I give up. I've tried several things and every time I re-enable iCloud Music, it completely ruins my library. I won't be continuing with this service after my trial unless Apple gets their **** together.
Not an optimal solution by any means, but you can always create a second iTunes library that you use for Apple Music and any personal music you want synced to your phone. That's my current workaround to test out Apple Music without destroying my main library.
Well...At this point I happily have my iPad and iPhone with fully synced "normal sync" copies of my music and playlists on the devices. Apple Music is "on" & iCloud Library is "off" and will be staying off.
Frankly, there is NO reason at all that any of the Apple Music/Beats stuff needs to be in the same App as my normal music. I'm sure they could still "scan what I have" in the back end to help with recommendations.
Bottom line is: Until they have a setting that is LASER SHARP on the point of "we won't mess with one bit of your existing, highly curated, metadata and music", I'm totally out on iCloud Music Library.
Frankly, there is NO reason at all that any of the Apple Music/Beats stuff needs to be in the same App as my normal music. I'm sure they could still "scan what I have" in the back end to help with recommendations.
Bottom line is: Until they have a setting that is LASER SHARP on the point of "we won't mess with one bit of your existing, highly curated, metadata and music", I'm totally out on iCloud Music Library.
Yeah, I'm really hoping they separate Apple Music and iCloud Library. My iTunes library is more than 10 years in the making. I have everything accurately tagged, I have high resolution, correct album art for everything. I make use of star ratings to generate smart playlists. I'm anal about my music library, and don't want to have to upload it to the cloud and ruin anything. Apple Music can be used without iCloud Library IF you only want to stream. But it seems that if you want to download songs for offline use, or to add to your playlists, you have to use iCloud Library. I just want it to be able download songs to my local library and sync them over to my iOS devices like it would anything else. This forced integration between the two services is stupid.
Same here, songs re-populate a few seconds after getting deleted. Did you figure it out ?
Same here, couldn't have put it better. This topic needs a MacRumors front page article, by the way, at least in my opinion. Or do I overestimate the amount of people who are affected by this problem?
Artist from the Apple curated Playlists are being throw in the Artist and Albums view on My Music.
It didn't work like this in Beats, nor does it work like this in Spotify.
Playlists need to stay in playlists. Now I have to SCROLL SCROLL SCROLL through a bunch of artists that only have one song in the "album" because Apple decided to throw the artist and albums from a playlist in with the regular Artist and Albums tags.
It didn't work like this in Beats, nor does it work like this in Spotify.
Playlists need to stay in playlists. Now I have to SCROLL SCROLL SCROLL through a bunch of artists that only have one song in the "album" because Apple decided to throw the artist and albums from a playlist in with the regular Artist and Albums tags.
How do I upload my music as in iTunes Match? I enabled icloud music library in the Mac but it doesn't seem to upload anything.
Yup, ever since I enabled iCloud Music Library on my Mac, iTunes was telling me I had all sorts of duplicates.
None of the duplicates made any sense though. Songs I purchased last week had duplicates that were marked as added back in 2004, 2006, and other random dates. I deleted the older "duplicates" but when I checked them out from the Trash, they were actually completely different songs! Clearly, iCloud Music Library totally scrambled the metadata.
Even before the yesterday's iTunes update, I all of a sudden started getting duplicate playlists.
(Notes: I was a previous subscriber of iTunes Match but let it expire last year; I am also running a Public Beta of Yosemite)
So, the only choice I had was to restore my iTunes folder from Time Machine, and when I restarted iTunes, I quickly declined the option to enable iCloud Music Library.
None of the duplicates made any sense though. Songs I purchased last week had duplicates that were marked as added back in 2004, 2006, and other random dates. I deleted the older "duplicates" but when I checked them out from the Trash, they were actually completely different songs! Clearly, iCloud Music Library totally scrambled the metadata.
Even before the yesterday's iTunes update, I all of a sudden started getting duplicate playlists.
(Notes: I was a previous subscriber of iTunes Match but let it expire last year; I am also running a Public Beta of Yosemite)
So, the only choice I had was to restore my iTunes folder from Time Machine, and when I restarted iTunes, I quickly declined the option to enable iCloud Music Library.
Been onto support all day with no luck. Appears to be a serious problem with their matching services, and any pre-existing songs which may be on a past iTunes Match account. All this has led to many problems when people activate iCloud Music Library.
@frogywill, I had to go onto my iOS device and delete them manually from there. However, I wouldn't recommend this as it has led to more issues.
@frogywill, I had to go onto my iOS device and delete them manually from there. However, I wouldn't recommend this as it has led to more issues.
Hopefully they'll offer a way to completely wipe and reset whatever iTunes library you have in the cloud. That might be the only way to fix the problem. And since it seems like most everybody who was affected was a previous iTunes Match subscriber, they probably don't care about losing anything.
I've had the same trouble everyone else had - enabled Apple Music on my phone, turned on iCloud Music Library, got home and updated iTunes, enabled iCloud Music Library on my iMac and all my playlists were totally messed up - playlist folders named from years 1999-2015 were renamed to 2015-2029 and had random playlists inside them, actual playlists all had random songs, and even going to actual artists and albums pages brought up random tracks/cover art.
I've restored iTunes from Time Machine and told iTunes not to enabled iCloud Music Library on my desktop. You can still stream music, listen to Beats 1, and all that jazz - just not add stuff to My Music or download to your mac. It's fine on the phone, so since it's my phone I take out and about and want offline music on it, I'll live with it that way. My desktop iTunes can play my old playlists or just stream anything new I want. When iTunes is updated to fix whatever is going on, hopefully I can just re-enabled iCloud Music Library, but for now this seems like it'll work.
Edit: Wanted to add, I also used iTunes Match back when it was first launched in the UK (December 2011 I think, based on where I remember working at the time!) but didn't renew after the first year.
I've restored iTunes from Time Machine and told iTunes not to enabled iCloud Music Library on my desktop. You can still stream music, listen to Beats 1, and all that jazz - just not add stuff to My Music or download to your mac. It's fine on the phone, so since it's my phone I take out and about and want offline music on it, I'll live with it that way. My desktop iTunes can play my old playlists or just stream anything new I want. When iTunes is updated to fix whatever is going on, hopefully I can just re-enabled iCloud Music Library, but for now this seems like it'll work.
Edit: Wanted to add, I also used iTunes Match back when it was first launched in the UK (December 2011 I think, based on where I remember working at the time!) but didn't renew after the first year.
I had the duplicate playlist issue. It's convinced that the playlists on my phone are different from the playlists on my mac, even though they were loaded from my mac and not edited on the phone.
I have no idea how to get my entire library out of the cloud now that it's there, even though I turned off iCloud Music on my mac.
Another data point, a friend of mine who has never used iTunes Match is experiencing many of the same problems we're seeing here, so it's not isolated to iTunes Match users. I'm leaving mine off until this is figured out.
This is what I would like also. It seems like it shouldn't be so hard to do, but Apple is making it impossible.