Apple Music Starting to hate Apple Music…

[Danorak81]

Hi all,

I’ve been building my music collection since my first iBook in 2000: I have quite an extensive library.

I made the switch to Apple Music as part of the whole subscription in 2019 (fitness, news etc). First of all, it made a mess of it all. Took days (not surprised, lots of music) and about a week of faffing to get the playlists right.

Anyway, some of the music I listen to is quite niche, and over the last month, a few of my regular albums/songs that I’ve downloaded through Music+ are ‘No longer available in this country/region’. So, I’ve resorted to buying the albums on CD and importing to my library on my iMac. Thing is, if I then try to add said album to a playlist, I get told I need to download my entire library from the cloud. If I do this, I then can’t browse Music+ and add stuff to my library, which has been a great way of discovering new music and one of the things that sold the service to me in the first place.

So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m sick of the service and I’m coming away from it. I used to manually manage all my music and playlists via my iMac and good old fashioned USB: I’ve just gotten lazy. However, if I remove all of my music from the Cloud, then I’ll lose all the music that I’ve downloaded via Music+, and there has been a lot of it. Is there a way, in Music on my desktop, that I can generate an XML list or similar of all the music in my library that has been downloaded from the Music+ service? I know you can export an XML of playlists, but not sure If you can find out exactly what you’ve downloaded. Or, is there a download history somewhere on my account?

My plan is to purchase outright all the music I’ve downloaded so I can take back full control of how I manage my library.

For reference, my iMac is a 2014 running Catalina, so whatever version of Music that is.

Also, if I move away from the cloud library, what exactly can I then do with the Music+ service? I subscribe to Apple One as I pretty much use all the other services, but just curious as to what it can offer after I go back to manually managing my library.

I hope that’s made some sense, and feedback welcomed.

Cheers,
Dan

 

[JamesMay82]

Your freaking me out! ha it's like I wrote that!

I'm exactly the same position as you. Although my listening habits don't tend to go past 2014 so my logic was I own all the music I want and with Apple Music I'm effectively paying to listen to music I already own. However, through my phone provider or broadband I occasionally get free offers for Apple Music and I use them on and off and do tend to subscribe to them after the free trial for a few months and I must admit I do enjoy it. My main gripe with it is they tend miss out songs on soundtracks and even some greatest hits albums.. i.e the Song will be greyed out so then you have to find it on a different album by the artist.

I also start feeling guilty about all the money I've spent on the music I own and I feel like its wasteful to be paying for apple music account when I own most things.

I imagine I'll keep flopping back and forth between them both as the free trials keep coming up.

Re your question, I'm not sure. but what I would do is create a fresh iTunes/music library and re import all your tracks again. I did this a few years ago as the apple match service seemed to mess up all my artwork on my managed library. it took a bit of time but wasn't quite as painful as you'd think. plus you know its a fresh library without the years of bloat.

When I use Apple Music now I always just create a separate library from main one.

 

[JamesMay82]

Also when I use apple music if its missing an album I rip that cd to my library on the Mac which then stores it locally but then uploads to my music cloud account which then automatically appears on my phone.

 

[Danorak81]

Also when I use apple music if its missing an album I rip that cd to my library on the Mac which then stores it locally but then uploads to my music cloud account which then automatically appears on my phone.

It’s just so frustrating. I spent *years* putting my playlists together as I have so much music. Every single track had been organised into a playlist as I’ve bought and added songs: but there’s now a 30GB disparity between the size of my original playlists and what is in my library (my original playlists equate to 81GB, my music library is 111GB). I have a folder for Apple Music and that only equates to 5GB, which means there is 25GB worth of music missing from my original playlists.

I just had a look through a couple of playlist folders in iTunes/Music and can see that the preview image in the top left corner on some playlists is showing the album art of the albums that should be in there, but there is no music in it. Quitting/restarting does nothing. It has just made a mess of my entire library. However, if I then open Music on my iPhone and look at those same playlists, all the music is there. Go figure?

Thing is, I have considered deleting the entire library and reimporting because all the music is still there on the external HD’s, but 1) it would take an absolute age to import and organise all over again, and 2) I don’t think I could handle doing that again and Apple Music messing it all up again.

I’m also not sure what effect cancelling the service would have on my HomePods. It is handy having access to my Music and just asking Siri to play it, but I have two young children, and they regularly listen to music on these just by asking-and can often be found listening to music whilst playing or drawing etc rather than the TV being on, which I much prefer. There’s a lot of functionality I feel I’d lose from cancelling.

This is the first real time I fell pi$$ed off by Apples setup and it’s really frustrating.

 

[Danorak81]

Oh, and another thing: some of the music I’ve downloaded from Apple Music isn’t available to buy from iTunes, so if I cancel, then I lose some pretty good albums.

Locked in proper.