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Apple Music Delete matched or uploaded songs in iCloud Music Library without connection to original library?

S

sevenseconds

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 18, 2013
84
17
I have a large music library in Apple Music on my Mac, right about ~95,000 songs total. At some point, iCloud Music Library lost its "link" to the files on my external hard drive (about 70K songs) where the songs live. This means I have lots of songs that are seemingly un-deleteable from my iCloud Music Library. The result is that I can no longer add music to my library (because I'm at the 100K limit). No matter what method I use to delete these songs I previously uploaded, these songs will reappear in iCloud Music Library.

Things I have tried:

  1. Signing out of Apple Music on every device. Deleting every matched and uploaded song from my library on my Mac. When I attempt to add a song to my library again on my Mac, all the deleted songs magically reappear. Their location: "Cloud" :rolleyes:
  2. Creating a test user account. Same result.
  3. Safe Mode. Same result.
Apple Support has been, surprise, sending me in circles, barely understanding the problem and requesting copious amounts of documentation that take hours to complete before I'm allowed to speak to anyone who understands how iCloud Music Library actually works. So I'm turning here.

Does anyone know if it's possible to delete matched or uploaded songs from your iCloud Music Library without connection to the original library?
 
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Reactions: Reggaenald
And here I was thinking I had problems with Apple Music. I hope that eventually you’ll find a way and the one Apple Employee that actually knows what they are doing.
Note the number if you do.
 
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Reactions: sevenseconds
resolution!!! ? so finally spoke with a guy named Anthony at Apple Support who was able to help me fix.

Here's what happened:

Somehow, Genius, which has some undocumented way of syncing your library with Apple's server, had gotten shut off. I don't know how but it had. So I had "Sync Library" ON but Genius was OFF. For the normal user, this should never happen. If you turn on Apple Music (aka Sync Library), Genius is automatically turned on and you can't manually turn it off. My theory is that when you hit 100K songs, there's a bug where Genius might get automatically shut off? However it happens, when Genius is off, your library contents stop syncing with Apple's servers. So double-check that it is on. If it isn't (like mine wasn't), here's what to do and what we did:
  1. Turned OFF Sync Library
  2. Turned ON Genius
  3. Wait for Genius to show confirmation that it is on
  4. Turned ON Sync Library
I'm currently waiting for 75K songs to upload but I was able to delete all those matched and uploaded songs I originally posted about quickly and the results were reflected on all my devices - all this after Step 4.

Leaving this all here for the unfortunate soul who encounters this in the future.
 
Does anybody know if this is working on Monterey 12.3 has fixed this?

I have a 725 GB library that I just made some big changes on (Converting old MP3 files to AAC) so don't want to risk a sync issue..
 
sevenseconds said:
it wasn’t really broken before so much as the solutions were undocumented when things went wrong. See this post, in case things go wrong

Post in thread 'Delete matched or uploaded songs in iCloud Music Library without connection to original library?'
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ion-to-original-library.2331495/post-30837167
Click to expand...
Bummer i Guess I didn't have the same issue as you, I logged out of iTunes Store + Apple Music on all 3 of my computers, both iPads, 3 apple TVS, and my phone. FOllowed your steps with genius. Turned it back on and I have about 4K in deleted songs that came back again which as happened before. My iCloud Music Library renews next month o at least I can cancel it before it renews for the year.

And on top fo that over 25 playlists

I tied to change the genre back on a few songs and within 5 mins they changed back. Super frustrating

And on top of that over 25 playlists deleted playlists came back and the ones I replaced with different names are now gone. Hours of work down the drain.
 
yeah, can't tell what's going on from that. I assume the location of your library is the same and you're not moving it off/on an external drive. Also that you're on the latest macOS. I would check your Finder to see what happens when you delete files from Music - does it also delete from Finder? If not, something is up with the Music app/macOS.
 
sevenseconds said:
yeah, can't tell what's going on from that. I assume the location of your library is the same and you're not moving it off/on an external drive. Also that you're on the latest macOS. I would check your Finder to see what happens when you delete files from Music - does it also delete from Finder? If not, something is up with the Music app/macOS.
Click to expand...
Just updated to 12.4 and was decided to revisit this. Yes all my music is on a single hard drive.
 
My feeling is you need to delete everything from Music.app and re-sync with Genius. Obviously, to do this, you need to have room on your hard drive to store the deleted files in Trash, which you will then restore back into Music.app. The downside of this is you will lose ratings and customization of metadata you have done in Music.app. The upside is that after this is done, everything will work again. I did this and it's been smooth sailing since. YMMV.

So:

  1. Turn OFF Sync Library
  2. Select all songs-Delete
  3. Turn ON Genius
  4. Wait for Genius to show confirmation that it is on (at that point, Library should be blank except for Apple Music playlists)
  5. Turn ON Sync Library
  6. Re-import all songs
 
sevenseconds said:
My feeling is you need to delete everything from Music.app and re-sync with Genius. Obviously, to do this, you need to have room on your hard drive to store the deleted files in Trash, which you will then restore back into Music.app. The downside of this is you will lose ratings and customization of metadata you have done in Music.app. The upside is that after this is done, everything will work again. I did this and it's been smooth sailing since. YMMV.

So:

  1. Turn OFF Sync Library
  2. Select all songs-Delete
  3. Turn ON Genius
  4. Wait for Genius to show confirmation that it is on (at that point, Library should be blank except for Apple Music playlists)
  5. Turn ON Sync Library
  6. Re-import all songs
Click to expand...
BLEH! Unfortunately, that's a "deal-breaker" for me. I have 965 GB music library (96K songs) and a few dozen playlists and smart playlists that I am very meticulous about. About a decade ago I started using the song ratings and once I got it setup well it made SmartPlaylists very very useful.

I do backup my playlists monthly but sometimes restoring from M3U or .XML doesn't work if only 1 song has changed. Plus I don't have an extra TB on my drive to cache the music.

Bummer my iCloud Music Library just renewed and I liked sharing playlists via Apple Music and can't figure out how do that with iCloud Music Library off.

I was annoyed the last time I tried to turn ti back on and it reverted the Metadata of about 3500 songs. I made sure to log out on to every device I had. I almost wish I could just delete whatever is stored in my iCloud music library now and just re-upload but of course not a thing in the Apple Ecosystem.
 
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