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

A short question: If I only enable the "iCloud Music Library" on my iPhone – will I be safe that nothing is touched in my iTunes library, even when synching the iPhone after that? Or will iTunes try to transfer iCloud changes from the iPhone to the "source"? And will I still be able to only chose specific playlists from my iTunes library to sync to my phone in this case?

If I can be sure that whatever happens, my iTunes library stays safe and I can also restore my iPhone to what it was before, I would maybe try iCloud Music Library – as I really would like to be able to create playlists on my iPhone with AM tracks. You know, the most basic stuff for every other streaming service in the world without having to mess with your music...
 
I can only speak for myself. I think the issue people are having with duplicates is more confusion than music being replace, but what do I know.

I would not choose merge if you turn iCloud Library on from your Phone. Also, I would do a restore first and get all the music off your phone. From iTunes, update the iCloud Music Library. File>Library>Update iCloud Music Library. Once iCloud is done syncing, then turn on iCloud music library from your phone without any music on it, and download fresh. I seem to be having luck that way.
 
That's some scary stuff! I would have probably lost my mind if it happened to my library.

Luckily, I had no issues with the upgrade.
However, I was already subscribed to iTunes match since it's launch and didn't feel any difference with the iCloud music library update. I do have over 12000 songs, all matched to the cloud and plays on all of my devices no problem.
 
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Ya. I'm going to make a new iTunes library with NO files in it. I gotta turn everything off in my current iTunes library, delete all those iCloud Music uploads (however you do that), replace the files that got changed from my backup, then open up a fresh library.

Using an empty iTunes library, I'm going to approach this as if I never bought an album or song in my life.
 
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I'm having many of the same issues as others in this thread. I have NOT used iTunes Match before.

Last night I upgrade my iTunes on my Macbook Pro, re-synced songs back to my iPhone, and am having so much trouble:

  • Album artwork is completely messed up. While some tracks have retained album artwork for images I specifically added to the file, most have been replaced with crappier, most-often wrong or non-sensical album artwork from the Cloud.
  • Sometimes artwork is of the wrong artist.
  • I have a huge list of live songs for specific artists that I used concert photos of - these have all been replaced by album artwork. So browsing through an artist, I see the same album cover for different albums. Really confusing and terrible.
My thought experiment, and I'm going to have to put some time into fixing my library this week, is to keep iCloud Library on, and go in and re-do album artwork and meta data on my Macbook Pro, then resync to my phone. I'll try it for a few albums/artists first and see if that helps. I'm hoping that once I update the files again, iCloud Library won't keep replacing them with the wrong info on their servers. Why can't iTunes just respect the album artwork embedded in the file?

I have a hard time believing that the engineers at Apple did not have these issues. How could they not know that iCloud libraries would replace album artwork with wrong info? That is just sloppy programming, management, and user behavior.

Like many of you here, I've spent the last 10+ years curating my own digital music and making sure everything is tagged and displayed correctly. It's now all gone to ****.
 
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Razeus said:
Ya. I'm going to make a new iTunes library with NO files in it. I gotta turn everything off in my current iTunes library, delete all those iCloud Music uploads (however you do that), replace the files that got changed from my backup, then open up a fresh library.

Using an empty iTunes library, I'm going to approach this as if I never bought an album or song in my life.
Click to expand...

Seems to be working fine for me doing this. I will have my library of local files then the library of Apple Music files. Until all the issues have been resolved this may be the best method.
 
BillyBobBongo said:
I call shenanigans, iTunes Match isn't that reliable. Now be honest, how many of those songs got uploaded...despite the other 90% of the album being matched?
Click to expand...

it was a long time ago but I remember not having any issues. when I wrote "matched" I meant "syncned/matched/uploadaed". Probably about 30% of my library wasn't matched to iTunes store versions and had to be uploaded, and I was okay with that. I would have preferred all of them to be uploaded as I had high quality mp3s ripped directly from audio-CDs (I own a little over 1000 original audio CDs). if it wasn't reliable I would have cancelled my subscription.

I also had a mirror of my archive on google music, in that case most of my library was uploaded if not all. I think it was because I was in Canada and they didn't launch here at that time (signed up with VPN).
 
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I am making a fresh backup. I have unchecked "keep my library organized" and I set my music folder to read only and locked it. Now I might try enabling the match and see what happens. lol

I did have a strange thing when I got home today. I had several playlists on my phone, primarily my All 4* and All 5* captures everything I want on my phone. Somehow it had unchecked both of these and removed all that music tonight. I know it was there all day. So now it's recopying all those files back to my phone. I have gone through my library and it seems as though everything is as it should be. My backup is done. Just need to finish this sync to my phone (iOS 9 Beta 2, so it can't use Match yet)

I did try dropping an Apple Music song into my library with iCloud Library off and it just won't let you add it or play it in any way.
 
More articles about iCloud Music Library screwing up album artwork and playlists:

http://www.macworld.com/article/294...g-mangled-music-libraries-in-itunes-12-2.html

http://www.mcelhearn.com/icloud-music-library-screws-up-album-artwork/

Maybe Apple should have rolled out Apple Music as a separate app for both OS X and iOS. I don't know...

From now on, I'm going to make sure I do a robust and redundant set of backups before I install any new iTunes/Music updates on all my Apple devices. I just won't trust new versions anymore after this fiasco.
 
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FWIW, I have been a long-time iTunes Match subscriber and just updated to iTunes 12.2 (very hesitantly and only after backing up my library). But fortunately everything went fine, and my cloud library still shows up fine both in iTunes and on my iOS devices. Phew! I'm not subscribing to Apple Music for a while though. Hopefully they'll sort out the bugs. It's a shame that you cannot confidently update Apple software anymore these days ...
 
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allan said:
More articles about iCloud Music Library screwing up album artwork and playlists:

http://www.macworld.com/article/294...g-mangled-music-libraries-in-itunes-12-2.html

http://www.mcelhearn.com/icloud-music-library-screws-up-album-artwork/

Maybe Apple should have rolled out Apple Music as a separate app for both OS X and iOS. I don't know...

From now on, I'm going to make sure I do a robust and redundant set of backups before I install any new iTunes/Music updates on all my Apple devices. I just won't trust new versions anymore after this fiasco.
Click to expand...


Sigh...I seriously have to ask. How many that have had this problem were not on iTunes Match? iTunes Match was notorious for doing this and I spent years fixing most of its mistakes. I do not have any issues with Album Art.

Again, I think selecting Merge instead of Replace when activating iCloud Music Library has caused some confusion and issues. When I first chose Merge I noticed copies of music with alternate cover art. I still had the correct version saved so I just deleted the duplicate. Since I always keep my music on my hard drive as lossless files, I can easily spot the lower bit rate file and delete it.
 
A full resync from iTunes on my Mac - along with disabling iCloud Music Library - fixed this for me.

Does anyone remember CDDB? The database is full of poor art uploads, incorrect genre tags, etc. Many services used to or still do get their metadata from that database, as it reads the information and coding from the master CD/files and identifies it with whatever has been submitted for it. I have never seen a radio or streaming service that has the kind of standards I do for cover art or other data where they've tried to go in and rectify poor scans and etc. Unfortunately this seems to also apply to Apple Music/iTunes Match. It's incredibly irritating, but unfortunately it's not a new issue.
 
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My library is finally in order, i decided to move all my music to an external drive. Completely empty my iTunes library, turn on iCloud Music Library, delete everything in the cloud.
Then I re-downloaded all my purchased music, the I went through and manually added all my music that is available on apple music, so I have essentially switched to entirely streaming, in place of my local files which I will now just leave on the back up drive.
All I have to do now is add the songs I had that are not available to stream on apple music which fortunately is not many.

I realise this is in no way a fix as it hasn't resolved the issue at all, and most people won't want to essentially get rid of all their local music. However in the long run I think this solution will work for me as I thinks streaming is where I want to be going with music.
 
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Here's my data point. iTunes Match since close to the beginning. I have only turned on AM on devices and Macs where my physical library does not exist. I was never asked to merge. Everything seems ok.
 
So I decided to start fresh, with a brand new library, to really try Apple Music, and it was still a complete failure. Even with no existing library for it to destroy, it still let me down.

When I add a song to My Music, I expected that to be reflected on my iOS devices. Except it never updated on my iOS devices. Playlists never updated either. The only way I could force it to refresh was to turn off iCloud Music and turn it back on in settings. I added stuff to my library and playlist and 3 hours later it hadn't synced to my iPad, so it was not a matter of patience. Then, when I tried making a 7 song playlist available for offline playback, it decided to download 40 songs for some reason. I think it got the 7 songs on the playlist plus 33 random ones.

I've decided to abandon the Apple Music experiment until they get their **** together because right now, it's a complete joke. I wanted to use Apple Music. I really did. I was willing to start fresh and re-add the 14,000 songs in my library from Apple Music and files on my hard drive. I was willing to re-rate everything and re-create playlists. But I couldn't. Nothing just worked, as I have expected from Apple over the years. I restored my last good iTunes library from Time Machine and am currently syncing the music to my iOS devices the old fashioned way.
 
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I'm done... I'm out. It killed my library (fortunately I do have a backup), but now I can't even get music onto my iPhone -- I just keep getting the message "Some of the files were not copied to the iPhone because iCloud Music Library is enabled on this iPhone."

So... I can't add any new *local* non-Apple Music songs to my phone at all. Completely stuck at this point, and pretty pissed at Apple. I don't even know how to fix it. This should've been a separate app. Don't touch my local library (not to mention obliterate my well-groomed artwork), and don't mess up my ability to manage my own music.

Back to Spotify. I'll check back on this clown circus in mid-September before the service renews. It's abysmal and I'm utterly disappointed.
 
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tekchic said:
I'm done... I'm out. It killed my library (fortunately I do have a backup), but now I can't even get music onto my iPhone -- I just keep getting the message "Some of the files were not copied to the iPhone because iCloud Music Library is enabled on this iPhone."

So... I can't add any new *local* non-Apple Music songs to my phone at all. Completely stuck at this point, and pretty pissed at Apple. I don't even know how to fix it. This should've been a separate app. Don't touch my local library (not to mention obliterate my well-groomed artwork), and don't mess up my ability to manage my own music.

Back to Spotify. I'll check back on this clown circus in mid-September before the service renews. It's abysmal and I'm utterly disappointed.
Click to expand...

This might be stating the obvious, but did you turn off iCloud Music Library in the Settings on your iPhone? I did that and was able to resync my music the old way without a hitch.
 
I unchecked the setting in "Music" app that I needed to turn on Apple Music yesterday... but that didn't do it. Some Googling found that it's where you mentioned -- in Settings --> Music --> iCloud Library. Turned that off so hopefully I'm back to before the fiasco.

It's a disappointment that I can't use the Apple Music playlists / offline capability. I'd prefer they just leave alone my personal library and allow me to use Apple Music separately. Sometimes integration is a bad thing. The fact that it replaces *my* CD ripped music with DRM versions is just unacceptable.

I'll follow developments for the next two months or so but I'm disappointed. It's just easier to keep that separate-ness in Spotify for now.
 
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So I've updated software on all my devices, but I haven't initiated anything for Apple Music or iCloud Music Library yet. My library is only 3000 songs, but it's organized the way I want it. I also don't want to mess up being able to sync my iPod the old fashioned way with my full library and my iPhone with select playlists. I don't want all of my music just in the cloud!
 
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tekchic said:
It's a disappointment that I can't use the Apple Music playlists / offline capability. I'd prefer they just leave alone my personal library and allow me to use Apple Music separately.
Click to expand...

See I thought that it could be separate so long as you just had iCloud Music Library unchecked. That would make the most sense to me. I should be able to use Apple Music and those songs sit in the app next to the existing songs with the phone icon which are on my device and they don't merge unless I tell them to. I don't really honestly want to go try it again though. Can anyone confirm?
 
obezcinnet said:
That's some scary stuff! I would have probably lost my mind if it happened to my library.

Luckily, I had no issues with the upgrade.
However, I was already subscribed to iTunes match since it's launch and didn't feel any difference with the iCloud music library update. I do have over 12000 songs, all matched to the cloud and plays on all of my devices no problem.
Click to expand...

I actually asked this question yesterday and didn't get a response. I don't want to update iTunes on my PC until I know, but I too have been a long time iTunes Match subscriber and was a subscriber before and then after Apple Music launch. I was curious if THOSE people had these issues too... Or if it's just people who had it at "one time" but had since gotten rid of iTunes Match before Apple Music came about?
 
BillyBobBongo said:
I call shenanigans, iTunes Match isn't that reliable. Now be honest, how many of those songs got uploaded...despite the other 90% of the album being matched?
Click to expand...
I'm actually up to over 15,000 songs on my match. It's bout half matched and half uploaded. Never had any issues on any devices. In fact, it actually FIXED a lot of meta data for me and added album art where it was missing.
 
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