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

I had the exact same issue: iTunes library corrupted after accepting the iTunes Music Cloud prompt thingy. What a mess Apple.

SOOO frustrating, I have spent hours on my iPhone updating all of my music perfectly, deleting and canceling my membership to Spotify, SO stoked on what Apple did with music, then I thought, "let me see if everything synced to the computer" so I did all the updating to get the new iTunes and everything, tried to sync...and now all of my album artwork is completely messed up, the iTunes on the computer has random music I selected from my phone but not even half of it, and I am scared to play any song for fear what others have said will happen...the wrong song will play.

APPLE!! I have always had your back, a common phrase from my mouth is, "Sometimes it takes Apple a while to catch up with advancements in the industry but whenever they do they BLOW it out of the water, they make sure it works before they release something." Which has always been my experience.

PLEASE fix this!! Music for me, like you, is a huge part of my life and I will for sure go back to Spotify until this is taken care of.

Takeaway:  Don't apply updates--any updates--right away. Wait a few days or a week. And if you don't need the "improvements", don't update at all unless there are significant security issues.

I've noticed that my iTunes Match content only updates on my phone when I add Apple Music content to my library, otherwise the updates work fine across my Mac and PC.  Anyone know of a solution to this or have a similar problem?

Well, I spoke too soon. This solution originally worked for me, but upon further inspection my problem wasn't just about bout tags and organization. Turns out whole album folders would contain entirely incorrect songs, from random other artists, all with random album art. Total absolute chaos. Not sure of proper way to fix, but I'm trying to rebuild manually from scratch:

I held down option when starting itunes and created a new library. When it opened I could see a great deal of my music library, now correctly organized, except all in the cloud. So I am downloading all the cloud-stored stuff to rebuild a new music folder. Then, I am going back into the old itunes library music folder and manually adding the albums that are not ruined and not included in the cloud.

Much of my music will be lost, but at least it will be straight. Horrible mistake from apple on this.

I have been in contact with an Apple specialist about this issue and this is his message to me today:

"Its good to see that the restore worked for the most part, and thank you for those links, after our call yesterday I reached out to some other advisors and explained the issue and had one or two chime in on similar situations. At this point we are not going to want to use the features on a temporary basis until the issue has been resolved on our end. I don’t have a time frame for that as of yet, but we are pretty good at taking care of things that affect things this drastically so I imagine it wouldn’t be too long. As far as iTunes match goes, if we wanted to put together a refund and cancel it that is certainly an option however, if iTunes match seems like it would be an ideal feature for you when working correctly, I would suggest holding out until the issues are resolved and then hopefully when its fixed, iTunes match will give you your optimal iTunes experience."

This did not work for me. I guess it's the iTunes setting to automatically organize my library, but the files are still messed up. I am going thru a full restore when I'm back home tomorrow night...

Well yay, looks like I'm in the same boat. What a bloody disappointment.

Got Apple Music on Tuesday and really loved it. So I started making playlists, planning to move over from Spotify when the trial ends. About two hours ago I clicked on a playlist that I had just created as I wanted to listen to it. The counter stated that the playlist contains over 50000 songs A bit of scrolling revealed that a Bob Dylan track I had added from Apple Music, had been added thousands of times. I was shocked to find that the same ginormous Playlist appeared on my phone. I tried to delete the track from the playlist without any luck. iTunes started to freeze up and crash. After a short while, I was no longer able to open iTunes properly, as it crashed after mere seconds. I found a fix on this forum and renamed a previous iTunes Library (from yesterday) to become my current iTunes library. All the playlists I had built on Apple Music were lost, of course. I also declined to enable iCloud Library, as others have suggested. However, although Apple Music still works, non of the tracks in My Music do. I get the spinning wheel every time I click a local track. So I guess it's safe to assume, that my music library is well and truly screwed.

Any suggestions on what I could try to at least get my local library to work again? Has anybody else encountered that playlist bug? And I guess not being able to safely switch on iCloud Library means I can forget making playlists that sync to my phone?

I use itunes on my Mac to maintain a lossless library ripped from CDs.  Am I at risk of damaging my Mac itunes library if I only turn on icloud library on my iphone?  I'm concerned that any change on my iphone may eventually sync back to my mac and corrupt the library.  Hope that make sense.

Amen!  I've spent years picking my artwork and cleaning up metadata.  I couldn't believe it was all gone.  All back now.

THANK YOU!

20,000 song library is so jacked up. Have 5+ same name artists on Apple TV + iPhone. Different artists combined into one album........ Yuck. How could this not be checked during testing..... Brand new Macbook Pro, Brand new Apple TV, old 4S iPhone..... Thinking they would have seen this coming and fixed before letting the masses destroy years of prep. Have all on External Drive, just want to rock out on my Bday today and have to scroll through 10 of the same artists. Where was documentation on this? Is iCloud Library free?? I bought match so I could have my library on my telephone wherever I go, not so I can download songs where ever I go. I guess 25 bucks isn't much wasted if it is free, but now I have hours of work in front of me.  Where do you mention this change on Software Update??? I don't evan remember hitting OK to turn on iCloud Music Library, but mb I did.

Same **** here...

Apple is trying again pushing me to use new covers, exchanging things without any request after using i**** library.

Apple, did you realized that there are DIFFERENT covers all over the world for similar CDs?

Similar issue like my change to iTunes match.

Bad playlist managing tools.

Mixture of bought and "leased" music.

Your worst performance since years. 

Hello spotify.

@tnorris

I have it turned on on my iPhone with no issues there. Just MAKE SURE YOU DON'T TURN IT ON IN ITUNES. And if you find that it is on, turn it off ASAP. I had no issue with iTunes even though my iPhone was connected to the iCloud music library UNTIL I turned it on / updated iTunes. Stay away from any iTunes updates until this is fixed, I say.

Also, do you have iTunes match? That seems to be a big part of the problem. :/

ntomallen,

thanks for the reply.  I DO have itunes match but it's been disabled for 11 months and about to expire.  I subscribed to it almost a year ago, and quickly disabled it when I experienced all sorts of issues similar to what's being reported now with APM's icloud library.  That experience is what made me thing twice about activating ICL when presented in itunes 12.2.

I've got the same issue. I sorted out all my album artwork ages ago after iTunes match botched it. Now it's done it again. Jimi Hendrix has inexplicably become a white man, a Metallica album cover is now replaced by 'Boris Yoffe' whoever the **** he is? And many have the right artist but the wrong album cover.

If apple thought the maps saga was embarrassing, then this is catastrophic by comparison!