Apple Music I dont understand Apple Music

[DavidQPR]

Hi. I am totally confused. I am trying Apple Music on my Mac that had thousands of local music tracks. When the music had all uploaded I removed my local music tracks to make some free space but now every track I click on gives me a message "the track can not be located."

I thought the point of using Apple Music was to stream the music. I have used Spotify and Deezer and they didnt require a copy of all the music to be on the device. I guess im being totally thick here?

 

[bruinsrme]

hmm, my new phone isn't acting that way. Were they on a playlist?

 

[DavidQPR]

Mixture of albums and my playlists. I know its not the way it should be behaving, I think I will delete everything from Apple Music and start again, see what happens.

 

[bruinsrme]

Mixture of albums and my playlists. I know its not the way it should be behaving, I think I will delete everything from Apple Music and start again, see what happens.

do you have another device with the music on it? Just a thought

 

[Soondae]

I believe you have the two different Apple Music services confused. Apple Music is the subscription streaming service which you stream their tracks and albums from the Apple Music library. The second service that Apple offers for an additional fee of I believe $25 annually is called iTUNES MATCH; this is the service where you upload your library to the Apple servers and they will use the matching AAC tracks on their server in place of your tracks, the tracks that they don't have (Match) they then keep copies of those tracks in your iCloud so that you can stream those as well. (This does not use your existing iCloud space).

Hopefully the iTunes Match service has improved I tried it back in 2013 when it first came about and I had a mess of duplicates in my pristine library. I think part of the issue was that you need good internet for the upload and matching process which I didn't have back in those days. Now that I have a phone with 256 GB so I see no use for the service. Back then (2012) our phones were only 16GB.

 

[Soondae]

Here is a good explanation of iTunes Match:
https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-itunes-match/

 

[DavidQPR]

Thanks all for the help. I’ve decided to just continue with Spotify. I don’t like the lack of crossfade anyway or the UI particularly.

 

[Bucks_Fizz]

Crossfade is under settings, playback. Toggle on / off. I agree with you on the UI though. Still needs a lot of work. All of a sudden, I can't select multiple tracks in Apple Music (browsing). Used to be able to hold ctrl, and click multiple songs. Seems that functionality is gone.

As to the uploading of songs debacle:
My understanding is that one you have uploaded all your songs and turn on sync library, it will then match your songs with it's library. This is a hit and miss with the matches. But I have found about 85% to be accurate. Once the sync is complete (library synced and no further activity taking place), you can select all your tracks and REMOVE DOWNLOAD. If you select delete from library, it will delete all the files AND remove them from your music icloud library. Thus having no music anymore (I ran foul of this the first time). So not sure if this is what happened to you.

And as far as I know, Itunes Match is part of Apple Music if you subscribe to it.

 

[DavidQPR]

On the Mac I have crossfade selected for around five seconds but it never actually works. On the iPhone there is not even an option, although obscurely on Android there is. You may be right how I lost the music I’m not sure what happened.

 

[Soondae]

Crossfade is under settings, playback. Toggle on / off. I agree with you on the UI though. Still needs a lot of work. All of a sudden, I can't select multiple tracks in Apple Music (browsing). Used to be able to hold ctrl, and click multiple songs. Seems that functionality is gone.

As to the uploading of songs debacle:
My understanding is that one you have uploaded all your songs and turn on sync library, it will then match your songs with it's library. This is a hit and miss with the matches. But I have found about 85% to be accurate. Once the sync is complete (library synced and no further activity taking place), you can select all your tracks and REMOVE DOWNLOAD. If you select delete from library, it will delete all the files AND remove them from your music icloud library. Thus having no music anymore (I ran foul of this the first time). So not sure if this is what happened to you.

And as far as I know, Itunes Match is part of Apple Music if you subscribe to it.

iTunes Match is a separate subscription

 

[Bucks_Fizz]

I agree, it is offered as a separate subscription, but as an Apple Music subscriber, the functionality is included. If you want Icloud syncing but not the apple music stuff then Itunes Match is for you.