Q: WARNING: iCloud Music Library just destroyed my Mac's iTunes Library

AcerBen wrote:

 

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It's so ridiculous that they have had zero consideration for people who have spent years maintaining a tidy Library and think nobody would care if they started replacing tags and artwork.  And that nowhere on the website or on iTunes does it explain exactly how iCloud works.  It just does whatever it does without asking!!

 

 

Typical Apple I'm afraid - they think they know best.

They screwed over iWork users with loss of functionality, killed MobileMe functionality for inferior iCloud ones, annoyed iPhoto and Aperture users with a half baked replacement for both with loss of simple and advanced features, buh hey you can 'follow' some bands you don't want to and a load of other nonsense......but control over time you've invested in getting a mature library together, nah....

This happened to me, going back to Spotify after the Apple Music trial ends. Absolute **** show. Apple should be ashamed... another botched launch.

Worse still, if you take a look at the screenshots below of mismatched artist images, playing the tracks actually plays a third, completely unrelated artist!!

AcerBen wrote:

 

 

I'm annoyed because the main reason I was willing to give Apple Music a try over Spotify was that it seemed like it was going to be easy to integrate streaming songs with my library.  I didn't want it to touch my existing library - I just wanted to be able to add songs to it.  It ought to give you this option.

Same for me, but the truth is that they didn't integrate Apple Music with the local library, they did the opposite: they integrated/matched the local library with the cloud. Why? I have one Mac with all the music and one iPhone with what I want on the go, why can't I just have music from Apple Music appear on both without all this matching garbage? Let it be an option, not the standard way.

For those of you like me who don't have a Time Machine backup (I know, my own fault, long story), if you try just copying the "Previous iTunes Library" as suggested in the solution to replace the destroyed library, it doesn't actually fix anything. The metadata was written to the actual music files. When I try and play a messed up file, I get the beach ball as it trying to figure out what's going on, then the song disappears from my current view, it starts playing, but the artist and title are completely wrong. If I go to that artist in my library, there it is currently playing next to the file with the same name. When I pull up the files in Finder, there they are full of duplicates (but not actual duplicates, since the actual songs are still there and play fine, but the filename and metadata is just completely wrong). Besides manually correcting the corrupted metadata or giving up entirely and throwing my library in the trash (over 130GB worth), there's really no solution.

Since I have never used Match will I be safe in using the new Apple Music Service?

JonD25 wrote:

 

The metadata was written to the actual music files.

Oh that stinks... do you have iTunes set up to automatically manage imported tracks and put files in its own folder?

rblmac wrote:

 

Since I have never used Match will I be safe in using the new Apple Music Service?

You will be safe if and only if you don't turn on iCloud Music Library when asked. Check it in Music app preferences.

GGuess I have been lucky. I checked my iTunes and the iCloud music library was enabled already on by default but I see no issues. Playlist changes are syncing across devices. I'll reserve judgement for now though. I guess it's because I am only a match customer. Apple music is something i skipped so it's not messing my library. At least not at the moment.

If you are a Match customer you probably already have a matched library with what Apple has on its server, then iCLoud Music Library and Apple Music should do no harm to you. My iTunes library was safe because it still was the old version

Yup

Not a total loss I guess. My library was starting to look more like an episode of "Hoarders" rather than a well curated collection of music I liked. And I've been using Spotify the last few months and was fine with it. But still, what a mess this is. It's not even worth it for me to call technical support. Nothing they can do.

Add me to the growing list of people impacted by this product defect.

Fortunately, I have a SuperDuper backup that I can use to restore from.

Has anyone already completed a restore of an old library? Before I take this step, I would like to borrow from the experience of this community to see if anyone has any tips or guidelines on the most appropriate steps to take to restore.

Any tips?  thanks in advance

I would just like to send you a HUGE thank you!!! I was righteously ****** off because I also have a big music library that seemed I would never be able to fix after this disaster. Thank you for saving me hours of work and frustration!!!

Thank you. This worked for me. My playlists and ratings were all screwed up by iCloud Music and this restored it.

It looks @Zackadelic has the answer I am seeking. Will try this tonight.

The solution by going back to an old .til-file unfortunately does not fix this problem.

The files of all songs that are scrambled have been renamed and moved to the folders of the new artist/album-directory in the file system.

In my library of almost 18000 files almost 2000 files have been renamed and moved to other directories.

So even when you use the old itl-file, iTunes does not find the files that had been renamed.

Fortunately I do have a recent backup.

But I currently I do not want to think about the time that I have to waste to fix everything.

Yes Apple, well done!