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

It asks you to turn it on when you try to add any music to your library. I did it and lost the BPMs I had entered into my songs I had not purchased from iTunes. I reverted using Zackadelic's solution and tried again, now it's fine.

iMac and iPhone user here.

I am also giving it a new try.

Here's what happened: Both my .itl library and my folder structure on the file system (Mac) went totally fubar. Zackadelic's solution did not help me - even .itl libraries  before June 30th were broken - maybe a problem in iTunes 12.2 itself.

However, ID3 metadata in the media files still seemed to be okay, even though some of them had DateModifieds from the last few days which totally creeped me out. But as I said, nothing seemed to be changed there.

This is what I did so far:

1. Remove  Music from the iPhone. I have no synced music files on my phone, I only stream. Before June 30th, I simply used Spotify. After disabling iCloud Music Library and  Music from the phone, I still had a few stale library entries from music I bought at the iTunes store. I deleted them all, there are no traces of music on my phone right now.

2. Turn off all iCloud Music and  Music from iTunes 12.2.

3. Create a new iTunes library by holding Option when starting and start from scratch. I added all my media files. This fixed the folder structure since it re-read all the ID3 metadata and moved the files to the right place. Afterwards I had a fully working local iTunes library. It did not get in touch with iCloud so far. Of course, playlists, play count, stars etc. are gone now.

4. Backup the fresh .itl and all the media files, just to be sure

5. Now the critical part begins, which is still running: In iTunes 12.2, I logged into  Music and activated iCloud Music Library. Right now it matches and uploads the remaining music. Local iTunes library still looking good, cover art, everything. Everything seems to run smoothly. No error messages connecting to iCloud.

(6. Future step. I will not reactivate  Music and iCloud Music Library on my iPhone until the iMac has 100% synced everything to the cloud. Let's see when this is done.)

So yeah. Fingers crossed.

Thats Not the only problem, if you try to deselect any music that you dont want on your iphone but you want it on your itunes library and than sinc with your gedget, the music will still on the iphone!! SO the only way to put this music out of your iphone is by deleting it of your library !.... The other one is that if you are using the Icloud music library and you add any apple music on your iphone and than delet it, you will see tha the music was not reaaly deleted !

Thanks so much!  This worked perfectly!  I've been having this issue ever since updating to iTunes 12.2 on my MacBook Pro, and I now feel stupid for having opted-in to the iCloud Music Library in the 1st place.  Thank God iTunes automatically created a backup of my library before the whole iCloud Music Library fiasco destroyed some of my library.  Ok, maybe not destroy it, as most of my library was still intact.  But when I was experimenting with it, I mistakenly cancelled some of the downloads going on, and when I did that, the songs that I cancelled the downloads on had a grayed out download icon (cloud with a down arrow) or just a grayed out cloud and I couldn't do anything.  I didn't even get the option to restart the download on those songs, only a cancel download option.

It works fine with iCloud library enabled or with it off?

Yes, it does work just fine.  After performing the steps that Zackadelic put here in this post, be sure to click the "Not Now" button when it asks if you want to activate iCloud Music Library.  With it turned off, iTunes will act just as it has in the past.

My iTunes library is the result of a ten-year project: 125,000 tracks, 10,000 albums, almost all lossless, painstakingly digitized from my own LP and CD collections and those of a handful of hard-core music collectors. The collection currently stands at around three terabytes. I have painstakingly entered perfect metadata for every single album, and am passionate about high-quality album art - as part of this process, I have personally photographed or scanned over 1,000 album covers for the artwork I couldn't find online. Almost half the collection consists of rare/out-of-print material.

This collection is not some trivial side hobby - it has been one of the biggest undertakings of my life. The prospect of it being irreparably messed up  by a software "upgrade" is more than I can bear.

Still, I enjoy discovering new stuff. I love the new Apple Music - I'm  finding tons of great material in it (even if the audio quality is poor compared to my lossless material), but I would really like to be able to create playlists. Unfortunately, there's no way to create playlists without turning on iCloud Music Library. And for obvious reasons, there's no way I'm going to do that until this issue is resolved. So I'm stuck without being to create playlists (of cloud music) for now.

If I understand the problem correctly, iTunes is rewriting ID3 data in the files themselves, which means there's nothing Apple can do to fix the problem for users. The damage, once done, is permanent.  If iTunes messes with my library as it has for others, literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours of personal time investment will be scattered to the winds.

No words. Just posting in case Apple reads these posts.

Does anyone know (after calling Applecare  or any other way) wether Apple is actually working on it ?

For me i just reverted back from iCloud Music Library and everything went back to normal. But i can't add Apple music songs to my library. I wished they had a better solution to this.

My first attempt with the Apple Music iCloud library failed quite spectacularly. I firstly merged my phones 9000 songs into the cloud, then later merged the rest of the library from itunes on my laptop. The online and offline libraries were all over the place. 19000 songs appears to be a medium to large collection compared to others on here and it certainly felt overwhelming to try and fix it. Luckily I had the tools to do so. The central library is on a laptop, and I have  an imac to test and fix the online library. So the first thing I did was to wipe clean my online presence (looks like being a former subscriber of iTunes Match didn't help me here). Then I needed to recreate my local iTunes collection from a backup of the music files. (I had tried to use an old itl file for the library, but my files metadata had been trashed.)

Attempt two was to try and merge my entire iTunes library from the laptop into an empty cloud. Whilst my local library now was untouched, the cloud version was rubbish. The matching just does not work. I had live songs being substitued for studio versions, and vice versa. I had albums where each song had a different album art. I had some songs that were actually cover versions by other bands appearing as the original songs. I had hundreds of examples of wrong artwork. I had artist profiles featuring incorrect photos (lots of Squeeze and Sparks photos for some reason). And I had the first four songs of the debut White Lies album replaced by Hip Hop duo Da Muzicianz. It was inexplicably bad.

Last night I wiped the cloud clean again. And this time I decided to dip my toe in rather than jump. I started with Abba Gold. An album that had been destroyed by the matching service despite it being one of the most purchased abums ever. I uploaded it to the cloud - same issues. Wrong art on every song. And a couple of Euro Disco tributes. I had a look at iTunes tore, and it was in there with a difference to my tags. I had Artist=Abba, album=Gold. They had Artist=Abba, album=Abba Gold. So I deleted the album from the cloud and redid the tags and re-uploaded/matched. Voila...a near perfect match. A couple of songs with wrong covers, but fixable. So i fixed it and continued through my A's. I uploaded an artist at a time, Al Green, Alt J etc etc. Had a wobble with Ash. The b-sides album "Cosmic Debris" was assimilated into the "Intergalactic Sonic Sevens" album in the itunes store, so that needed a bit of work there (I basically changed the tags to match iTunes Store again). Most of the rest had the odd song uploaded rather than matched and needed the album art reuploaded. I finished the A's. I moved on to a band called Genesis. For no reason other than I knew that they were in poor shape the day before. I altered tags to match the itunes store versions (i.e. Duke (original version) became just Duke) and they all got matched perfectly. Finally I turned to the Beatles. Here, iCloud uploaded the lot, rather than matched them. With a few exceptions. For example: Aint She Sweet from Anthology 3 was matched to the 1961 version with Tony Sheridan. So I had a brainwave. I removed that from the cloud and tagged the anthology song as Aint She Sweet (1970). This then uploaded the correct song from my collection - presumably because it could not match it in its own database. And then I changed the name back to Aint She Sweet in the cloud. I tried the same approach with the other one or two incorrect songs and that worked.

So this morning, I have a 1000 song icloud library. All the right songs, with correct tags and correct art. It took 3 hours or so. There is a long long long way to go, but this bit-by-bit approach looks like it will work for me (although I am dreading the first time I try and do a live album), and in a month's time or so I might even start being able to enjoy the rest of Apple Music.

May I ask how to "wipe the cloud clean"? How do you delete information about matched songs from iCloud?

On my iMac, which has no local music database, I authorised it & iTunes to use my online music library. So anything I add to it from the laptop database will be seen on the iMac. It only sees what is in the cloud. To remove from the cloud I simply right click an album or artist and select delete. I am at work now and can't remember if it asks for confirmation but I presume so. The album or artist is deleted from the cloud and the laptop (which has my music library) now shows a cloud icon with a cross next to all the songs I just removed. I have had no problem with removing music in this way. It also works with individual songs.

I have had problems if I try and multi-select songs (using highlight & drag) then select delete - often that seems to be ignored. I have also seen that selecting more than 999 songs at a time will fail. So I just stuck to the rightclick on artist name, delete. Laborious, but it worked.

I don't know if there is a better way to solve this, but I have solved the problem by following these steps:

1. Disable iCloud Music Library on iTunes.
2. Quit iTunes.
3. Open a finder window showing your iTunes library (~\Music\iTunes\).
4. Open Time Machine, and find the latest backup of the Music folder under your iTunes library folder, that hasn't been affected.
5. Select the "Music" folder, and Restore. (If it gives a disc space error, temporarily move some other files to an external drive, delete the local copies, and make sure there is more free space than the size of the Music folder.)
6. Go to the iTunes library folder. Find the file named "iTunes Library.itl", and change its name to something like "iTunes Library mess.itl".
7. Look under "Previous iTunes Libraries", and find the latest "itl" file dated before the mess. Copy it.
8. Paste the old version of the itl file that you had copied, under the iTunes library folder. Change its name to "iTunes Library.itl".
9. Open iTunes. DO NOT ACCEPT TO ACTIVATE ICLOUD MUSIC LIBRARY WHEN THE POP UP WINDOW ASKS YOU!
10. Enjoy your fixed library.
11. Do NEVER turn on iCloud Music Library again, unless you feel like giving it another chance, and are ready to do all these again.

Note: After following these steps and repairing the library, I noticed that some star ratings are also missing, and following these steps didn't fix that.

I noticed that it has just downright deleted some of music. It also won't let me sync it between my MBP and my iPhone. There are songs that aren't on Apple Music that I want on my phone...

Thanks for my suspicions about anything new that says iCloud... I actually did not choose to use the iCloud Music Library.

This thread I found out by mistake as I was just looking some general information about Apple Music. Thank God I did! Now I know to steer away from the iCloud library option! I myself have a lot of special editions of albums as well as some old bootlegs and other music that is not found in Apple Music or digitally in general!

I really don't understand (or I do but I still don't) what Apple engineers have though about when building this thing? Great idea to have my music library in the cloud but how can they expect that they are able to match all the worlds music files? Also I don't understand how they have come up with the idea that overwriting metadata (as people here complain) on my files is a good idea??? This is the issue that puzzles me the most!!!

If Apple is not willing to have my file in their cloud they still should not simply change it with their file!!!!

Instead they could just have allowed songs from Apple Music to be added in the cloud or simply just to the device (let it be iTunes or iPhone).

Having Apple Music files seamlessly in my library together with my own files would be the REVOLUTION Apple has been advertising!

The fact that Apple has ruined people libraries is far from revolution... from the customers point of view.

As it is now... Apple Music is just another Spotify (and actually worse) without possibility to have songs available for offline use or playlists!

Hope they fix it soon!