Tuff Ghost

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

I have a 13000 song library on my iMac. Installed iOS 8.4 on my iPhone this morning and had Apple Music and iCloud Music Library going...Everything was working fine on the device. Got home and installed 10.10.4 and iTunes 12.2 on my iMac. It asked to turn on iCloud Music Library and I accepted. All of the sudden it starts overwriting my album art with completely wrong art (example: Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) on both my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadata by putting random songs in albums where they didn't belong (there was a Cursive album where the first track was listed as a Foo Fighters song). Even worse, when I'd click to listen to certain songs, it would play the wrong song/artist, like the metadata was hijacked. What in the ****?  I've had this library organized perfectly for the better part of a decade and Apple Music screwed it up in minutes.

 

I was able to restore everything through a Time Machine backup and made sure NOT to turn on iCloud Music Library when I re-opened the .itl file. What a disaster. Hopefully someone from Apple reads this. Thinking it may have something to do with a iTunes Match account I had briefly a few years back. But yikes, can't believe how much damage it did in 5 minutes.

Posted on Jun 30, 2015 7:45 PM

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

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  • by fishdoggy,

    fishdoggy fishdoggy Jul 6, 2015 4:11 AM in response to fishdoggy
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 4:11 AM in response to fishdoggy

    8 of my XTC albums and/or singles now have the same artwork as each other on iCloud. XTC also appear to have morphed into Jools Holland era Squueze as have Tin Maxhine and Wings. Tame Impala and the Waterboys are represented by Ron and Russell from Sparks. Shack's photo is of Scriitti Politti. Scritti themselves are portrayed by Sparks again.

  • by JazzmanJohn,

    JazzmanJohn JazzmanJohn Jul 6, 2015 5:03 AM in response to strannik
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 6, 2015 5:03 AM in response to strannik

    What NAS drive do you use?

    Do you use this just to store your music the way you want it and to keep Apple from have any write permission to your music?

    Then do you use the iTunes player on your computer and mobile devices?

    When do you use the Amazon player?

    I am a little confused as to how you do this. Please clarify.

     

    I have a large, customized collection and am petrified at the thought of anyone messing it up. I have it backed up to two external drives and on my 128 Gb iPhone 6 Plus. An alternative system that I control, like another music database and player package that I own, sounds interesting to me.

  • by fishdoggy,

    fishdoggy fishdoggy Jul 6, 2015 6:28 AM in response to Tuff Ghost
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 6:28 AM in response to Tuff Ghost

    Found another bug with Apple Music iCloud. On the artists view of my music, you could have two separate artists, say 'Billy Bragg' and 'Billy Bragg and Wilco'. Or 'Elvis Costello' and 'Elvis Costello and The Attactions'. Press the icon of either and it will begin to play music. However the play icon appears on both artists. Another example of this implementation being rushed and not fit for market. the richest company in the world needs to employ some testers and some better coders. All the information is available to make this work.

  • by robjlee,

    robjlee robjlee Jul 6, 2015 6:38 AM in response to JazzmanJohn
    Level 1 (10 points)
    iPhone
    Jul 6, 2015 6:38 AM in response to JazzmanJohn

    so i don't think i have the exact album art/match problem, but a very related sync question i thought made sense to ask here (and apologies if it's been mentioned in this thread - i scanned the thread and didn't see it, but super long so may have missed it):

     

    so i've spent the past 3 days pretty much manually importing my playlists from spotify to iTunes (the exportify + apple script solution helped a little, but left tons to go back and fix manually)...finally got it perfect yesterday afternoon, then i tried to reset all the plays in my 20k song library for a fresh start - and the apple server got ****** at me: bottom line is i had to turn off iCloud lib on computer. no problem, i thought, i had backups on my computer and it was great on my phone. so overnight i let iCloud library re-initate on my computer...looked fine when i woke up, but i just now realized a bunch of the playlists i worked on yesterday no longer have the apple-music-only songs i'd added (not grayed out, not an - just simply not there) - so a lot playlists went from, say, 50 songs to 20 (and they are all local). all the playlists are there in their respective folders. so i went into time machine and got a backup from yesterday where all the songs are in the playlists.

     

    so my question is: i turned off music on my phone, deleted all the songs on there, and this time plan to LEAVE it off until my computer finishes getting going on iCloud. any thoughts on whether this will do the trick? it seems like the two different versions of my lib got crossed - not every single playlist is local-track only...so it seems like it stopped syncing at some point and i didn't realize, then when i re-started everything last night, the one with some missing tracks on playlists [i guess my phone] took precedence. so, i thought it might help to just do it all from one device before turning on any others.

     

    i'm only asking now in the event that someone can confirm that it will not work, because it'll take all day and i wanted to avoid wasting the time if possible. it looks like some people in here had to set up a new library to clear out their iCloud library, but it seems like my problem might be different and not require that additional step.

  • by PghMike2,

    PghMike2 PghMike2 Jul 6, 2015 7:07 AM in response to Tuff Ghost
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 7:07 AM in response to Tuff Ghost

    I turned on Apple Music, and iCloud Music Library, but never have used iTunes match, and nothing bad has happened to my library.  I'd guess that this is an iTunes Match problem, which also makes sense to me, since I'd imagine that iTunes match has to deal with replacing music in your library with cloud items.

  • by helenecolin,

    helenecolin helenecolin Jul 6, 2015 9:01 AM in response to PghMike2
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Apple Music
    Jul 6, 2015 9:01 AM in response to PghMike2

    Just like you, I wasn't a Match user, so nothing is wrong in my Music Library... on my Mac. Everything is perfectly in order, with correct artwork for all albums, but when I go on my iPhone and iPad, it's sometimes a right mess!

     

    Some of the album don't have the correct artwork like many of you who posted here since this new iCloud Music has been released, but I also have trouble with songs! I don't know why, but some of the songs in my iTunes Library don't upload in the iCloud Library, with no reason, and when by miracle they do upload, when I listen to them it's not the right song anymore...

    For example, for Taylor's latest album 1989, I had the song "Bad Blood" 3 times in the album, the first time at the correct place under the correct title, and the two other times under other titles of other songs?!?! That's just insane, because when I checked my iTunes Library on my Mac the files were fine... I had to delete the whole album and reload it back in iTunes to have it once again correctly in the iCloud Music Library, and I would prefer not to do that everytime there's something wrong with the iCloud system because it's really annoying.

     

    Did someone else had that problem with songs being replaced like this?

  • by JazzmanJohn,

    JazzmanJohn JazzmanJohn Jul 6, 2015 9:28 AM in response to robjlee
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jul 6, 2015 9:28 AM in response to robjlee

    For my money, leave iCloud Music Library unchecked on all devices. Make sure you have a backup dated before this Apple Music fiasco ready to restore your music to your computer. Delete all music from all devices. Restore your music to iTunes on your computer with your backup. Make sure it's aok. Back it up again. Sync it to your devices when you know the music is right.

     

    There is no way to guarantee Apple won't mess up your music files again with future updates. So always have a backup. Also consider a separate database that you own for your music that has no connection with Apple or any other third party that can tamper with you music.

  • by PghMike2,

    PghMike2 PghMike2 Jul 6, 2015 9:30 AM in response to helenecolin
    Level 1 (9 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 9:30 AM in response to helenecolin

    Interesting.  I really only use iCloud Music Library in a very limited fashion: I never upload anything directly, and only use it as a way of accessing music purchased on different computers with the same Apple ID without having to download the music directly.  So, if I purchase (and usually download) 1989 from the Apple store on my laptop, I'll use iCloud Music Library to listen to it on my iPhone without having to download it; it just streams.

     

    It sounds like the part of the system that handles building metadata for uploaded stuff, whether it is using the Apple Music's iCloud Music Library mechanism, or the older iTunes Match, doesn't really work.  Bad marks to Apple for rolling out a buggy product!  Hopefully they'll roll out a fix soon.

  • by cackhand,

    cackhand cackhand Jul 6, 2015 1:19 PM in response to Zackadelic
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 1:19 PM in response to Zackadelic

    Well done dude.
    iCloud Music totally screwed years of hard work and love. Your fix has resolved the issue.
    I can confirm to anyone that might be a tad hesitant. The fix works and can be trusted.

  • by strannik,

    strannik strannik Jul 6, 2015 2:22 PM in response to JazzmanJohn
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 2:22 PM in response to JazzmanJohn

    I have a WD My Cloud Mirror (4TB). All of my media files are arranged in a folder structure that makes sense to me: Genre, Subgenre, Artist, and Album, with either a "folder.jpg" in each folder for artwork, or the artwork embedded in the files. iTunes always tries to use its own folders on the machine it lives on. I keep the NAS drive mounted, and if I drag files and folders to iTunes, the default behavior is to copy them, but the setting can be changed in preferences by unchecking "copy files to iTunes media". Now when I drag files/folders to itunes, it creates a record which is a link to the file on the NAS drive. I dragged one album at a time during setup to ensure that tracks, albums and artwork are correct.  I frequently had to make manual corrections, but now my representation of music in iTunes is perfect, and I have no intention of letting iTunes screw it up.  I occasionally use other clients such as Clementine or VLC, and bypass iTunes entirely.

     

    The WD cloud mirror has a DLNA server as well as a Firefly Server for iTunes, so I can actually use a shared iTunes library directly from the NAS box, except for artwork and ipod syncing, which is why I did the above on one machine.  There is also an icecast server option if I want to stream any playlist over the internet. There is a WD app that allows me to play and access all files from anywhere. I have just discovered Air Playit for iOS (with a piece of server software for the Mac or PC), which looks like a good streaming music alternative for my collection too.

  • by jesuisravi,

    jesuisravi jesuisravi Jul 6, 2015 3:12 PM in response to Tuff Ghost
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 3:12 PM in response to Tuff Ghost

    I'm dealing with a large library that, when I enabled iCloud Music Library, became corrupted and unusable. Beyond re-titling the song in the iTunes interface, the actual song files were renamed and moved into different folders. This means that reloading from a previous .itl file would not work for me.

     

    After paying for TuneUp, I realized I could backup from my Time Capsule, so I did. Hopefully that works.

     

    I believe however, there is a possible solution that may have to do with the fact that I had iTunes Match enabled a year or two ago, but then disabled. It occurs to me that my information/library remained active on the Apple server after I deactivated it. When I reenabled it, it looked at my Library and started to download/re-sync my library-- jumbling everything up in the meantime.

     

    This is just a theory, and I will test it when I get back to my computer. Here's how I will test:

     

    1) Temporarily rename my iTunes Library (that I just retrieved from backup)-- take it out of harms way.

    2) Open up iTunes, starting a new iTunes Library under my AppleID.

    3) Enable iTunes iCloud Music Library... see what happens

    4) If my music shows up, I simply delete everything from iCloud. Then I can reinstate my main music library and enable iCloud Music Sharing again.

     

    I'll post when I see how this goes, but someone might be able to try this sooner and see if it works.

     

    Cheers,

  • by fishdoggy,

    fishdoggy fishdoggy Jul 6, 2015 3:21 PM in response to jesuisravi
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 3:21 PM in response to jesuisravi

    Hi, I tried this. Whilst my local library seems to be more secure now, the results in the cloud are entirely unpredictable. The Apple matching system that attempts to replicate a library in the cloud is so broken as to be unusable. I have albums with studio tracks replaced by live versions (and vice versa), I have songs replaced by different bands altogether, and hundreds of examples of incorrect album art. I don't know what algorithm they are using but sure as he'll isn't 'match artist, match album title, match song name'

  • by AppleLoverWindowsHater,

    AppleLoverWindowsHater AppleLoverWindowsHater Jul 6, 2015 3:22 PM in response to jesuisravi
    Level 1 (5 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 3:22 PM in response to jesuisravi

    I think you all have to remember, Apple didn't go out and was like "Hey let's mess up everyone's years of work, it will be fun!"

     

    It's a bug, albeit a major one, but I am more than positive they are working on a fix for it.

     

    Apple didn't do this on purpose.

  • by Frank Berzau,

    Frank Berzau Frank Berzau Jul 6, 2015 3:23 PM in response to jesuisravi
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jul 6, 2015 3:23 PM in response to jesuisravi

    I don't know how to link to a specific post, but when you jump to page 18 and scroll down to the second to last post on that page, I have listed all the steps in detail. Essentially what you are attempting to do.

    One other piece of information, after I was finished. I tried to import my saved playlists and noticed they were initially not showing up on other devices. Just by chance, because one playlist was missing a song that I manually added, I discovered that as soon as I change something about the playlist, even if I just re-order a single track and back to its proper place, the playlist pops up on other devices. Magic.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Jul 6, 2015 3:49 PM in response to Frank Berzau
    Level 9 (50,841 points)
    Desktops
    Jul 6, 2015 3:49 PM in response to Frank Berzau

    Frank Berzau wrote:

     

    Here's how I fully recovered from a destroyed iTunes Library and to a working state of how  Music was intended to be used.

     

    Lessons learned:

    1) No longer is watching a keynote sufficient. I have to read blogs, support articles and call Apple support in order to get things fully understood and working.

    2) iTunes Match is, for the most part, replaced by what  Music does, but one important piece is not. Downloading DRM free versions of tracks on other devices.

     

    Step 1 - Disabling iCloud Library

     

    In iTunes Preferences under General uncheck 'iCloud Music Library'. I also, following some other folks advice disabled the option to automatically download Artwork. I'm not sure, but the thought of giving iTunes control over not just filling missing artwork but potentially overwriting existing... No.

     

    Step 2 - Deleting my entire iTunes folder

     

    Emptying the trash right after it. This looked like it gave me enough disk space for the next step, the Restore. However, it did not! When I tried to copy the iTunes Folder from my Time Machine backup, Finder reported it had 'Not enough disk space'. At that point, I ran Disk Utility to Check the disk. I got errors and a prompt saying I should do a repair from the Disk Util run from the Recovery Partition. This was on a MacBook Pro with a 1 TB SSD, a little over a year old. Did that, and then magically there was enough disk space to copy in my good iTunes Folder from the Time Machine backup.

     

    Step 3 - Restoring my iTunes Library from a Time Machine backup

     

    I chose to not simply run Time Machine to go back, but rather first made another copy of the backed up iTunes folder. In my case this was hundreds of Gigabytes copied over WiFi, but - for the sake of making me feel better - worth doing. There are KB articles on the topic of remotely mounting a Time Machine backup file. One thing to be very careful is to NEVER modify or delete any of the content of a Time Machine backup, just simply copying it over to another drive (or in my case another Mac).

     

    Once the copy process was done, which took a few hours (the 4 hours of sleep I granted myself in the process on Friday), I Option (alt) clicked iTunes, which prompts to create or open a different Library. I chose the one I had copied in from Time Machine. Took a while watching the spinning wheel but ultimately it opened my Library and it was all fine.

     

    Step 4 - Creating a clean Library

     

    I did this on another Mac (brand new iMac 5k) but this should - provided you have enough disk space - be possible by switching between libraries by Option-clicking the iTunes icon and choosing the respective (old and new) library. In my case, on the new Mac, I created a new, empty Library and first subscribed to iTunes Match, then enabled the iCloud Music Library. I deleted everything that popped up (thousands of tracks that were already imported during the initial disaster), and just left purchased songs untouched.

     

    Step 5 - Exporting Music and Playlists

     

    Going into my old Library, no iCloud Library enabled still, I copied all Music to my new Mac, by simply dragging and dropping into a Finder window where I had the new Mac's drive mounted. Of course if you do this on a single Mac, this step is obsolete. As far as exporting Playlists, I export them as XML.

     

    Step 6 - Importing Music and Playlists

     

    On my new iMac running the clean new Library, and iTunes Match and  Music iCloud Library enabled, I import all Music. I do this with just a couple of thousand tracks each, wait for the cloud upload and a clean state, then continue with the next. I am not done yet, but things look really good. Once all my tracks are imported and uploaded to the Cloud, I will import the XML Playlists and I should be done.

     

    Step 7 - Cleaning up my iPhone Music Library

     

    I noticed that when I enable iCloud Library on my iPhone, even when I chose the option to 'Replace Music with iCloud Library' it doesn't do what I expect. It still has my previously synced Music (from iTunes via cable or Wifi Sync) in addition to what's in the Cloud. So I disabled the iCloud Library again on my iPhone. Opened my old iTunes Library on the Mac and removed the check box for synching Music. This cleared the iPhone. I then went back into settings and enabled the iCloud Library again. Now all the content of my iCloud Library shows up, I can choose to make tracks or albums, or entire Genres, available offline. This part already works great, and as I'm importing more Music into my new iTunes Library and the Cloud gets populated it all shows up on the iPhone pretty instantly.

     

    Very disappointing along the way:

    A f****d up iTunes Library (thank you Apple for Time Machine)

    Missing DRM-free Music, aka. lack of explaining what iTunes Match still does

    Subscribing to iTunes Match took two days and maybe 50 attempts and several calls with Apple Support until it worked

    Getting a clean iPhone is not as simple as it looks

     

    It just works - No.

    There ya go

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