@ Scot Hacker,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

1. Regarding right clicking those grayed out songs, I'm not getting it. When I right click on the song, I do not see an option "Add to Music Library". Hate to be so thick, but where is it?

2. Are you saying my original library in its unaltered form is in "My Music" on my iMac and all the matches and stuff are only in the Cloud?

3. The only way I would ever sign out would be if I decided to no longer participate in AM and the Cloud library. Once again, if you do that will your library return to its original form?

All of this cloud stuff and uploading and matching has almost taken the joy out of just listening to music. Gadgetizing music so much just ruins the experience. I spend more time on organizing my library and EQing stuff that I hardly enjoy my music library any more. Know the feeling?

JazzmanJohn wrote:

 

All of this cloud stuff and uploading and matching has almost taken the joy out of just listening to music. Gadgetizing music so much just ruins the experience. I spend more time on organizing my library and EQing stuff that I hardly enjoy my music library any more. Know the feeling?

Ha! That is exactly the feeling I used to get back in the analog days of the 70s and 80s when I had about 3000 LPs. Everything required endless fussing. Now, I just leave the EQ flat, use decent headphones/speakers and call it "done".

@ BradPDX,

Great cartoon! Maybe I should just take your advice and be done with it.

By the way, what headphones do you like?

I own a mix of Bose, Grado and Sony headphones. The Sony MDRV6 is honest but brutal, good for recording but tiring. The Grado SR-60s and 80s are sweet, dynamic and leaky as all get-out. The Bose noise cancellers are still best of breed and sound great. I use Bose in-ears when on the go, because the warm profile they use is really good for that application and I don't like having my ear canals stuffed.

That all said, I haven't had any problems with AM to speak of. Some items, like the Beatles box set, have to be really tricky as they contain multiple versions of the same songs - a tagging nightmare. While I love the Beatles, I don't have any of the mono mixes and alternate takes, and so haven't had any problems.

I've got the Bose QC-15 and QC-20i along with a pair of non-noise cancelling Sennheisers. I've always liked Sennheiser as a brand. I'd like to purchase a pair of wireless, Bluetooth noise cancellers and am currently trying to decide on that. I'm looking at Sennheiser Momentum Wireless, Beats Studio Wireless and Plantronics Back Beat Pro. That's quite a range in prices, but I have narrowed it down to those three. Any thoughts on using Bluetooth and noise cancellation in the same package? I bought a highly rated pair of Definitive Technology Symphony phones back in June, and they were absolutely terrible. Not only was the noise cancellation mediocre, but the overall sound for just playing music was sub-par.

I've been enjoying AM as well. I'm having a lot of fun with "For You" and "Connect".

Do you have a favorite place to listen to music at home with a favorite setup?  Like I have my iMac connected to a Yamaha amp with 2 old Cerwin-Vega speakers in basic stereo along with an old Infinity subwoofer. Just wondered what you meant when you said "a decent set of speakers and calling it done".

I quit on consumer grade ear/headphones a while back, I recently switched from my (somewhat old now) Shure E2C's to the Shure SE535 earbuds, and for 'via the air' listening it's an old pair of K&H medium field monitors. Either of which reveal that the onboard converters in an iMac are quite mediocre, so I don't use them.

Scot Hacker wrote:

 

I've written up a walkthrough for Medium.com detailing why many users end up with duplicate tracks and bad cover art, and how to fix those two problems in most cases:

 

https://medium.com/@shacker/remove-duplicates-fix-broken-album-art-in-icloud-mus ic-library-d58cff364fb1

Great article. Now if you could also find a simple method for correcting all the mis-matched tracks (original studio tracks being substituted for live album tracks or alternative versions) I will give you a big wet kiss!!!

@kim hill1: I don't consider this technique  a hack, nor do I consider it fragile. One of the points I tried to make in the article is that Apple is basically forced to do some guesswork when importing some content. In the cases where those guesses go wrong, there is a method to replace the bad data with good. It's not like Apple is constantly refreshing the uploaded content - I have no reason to expect or be concerned that my work would be undone in the future.

Of course I would prefer that, when there is ambiguity, they would simply upload my content as-is rather than guessing. But the downside of that for them is that then a lot of people would actually end up with inferior content (lower bitrate, worse metadata than what they have on file, etc.) Still I'd like to have the option!

@jctez: Wow, I was going to suggest pre-tagging your rare stuff uniquely, e.g. renaming the album "Beatles [Mono Live]" or whatever, but sounds like you've already tried that and it failed? Wow, not what I would expect.

Remember that I am stuck uploading one album at a time via right-click, so I haven't experienced the situation of Apple trying to process my entire library. Also, I waited a few months after iCloud Music Library was released before even attempting it, to give them time to work out some of the kinks I had been hearing about. Maybe some of your experiences happened early in the life of ML?

Believe it or not, I have not yet experienced any cases of metadata being rewritten or messed up - all of that has been fine. It's just duplicate tracks and bad cover art I've had to deal with.

@jazzmanjohn:

1) You can only do this if the tracks have a plain cloud icon - i.e. status is "waiting" or "not uploaded". It doesn't work for tracks in other states. BTW Apple has a really helpful table showing all the possible cloud statuses: About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support

2) Correct.

3) Yes.

@ Scot Hacker,

Thank you for being so helpful.

I have a few songs with the plain cloud icon, but when I right click I see no option to add it to my library. What am I missing? I do see that option when I go to File/Add to Library but that doesn't work either.

In general, if I understand AM correctly, your original music library remains on your iMac. In addition to that, I have a 128 GB iPhone 6+ that has my original music database on it as well. So the iCloud music library would only be available to my iPad which is signed in to AM and the Cloud but has no music locally stored on it. Any mismatched album art or songs would only appear on devices like my iPad that are only signed in to AM and the Cloud but have no locally stored music. Am I getting it?

@jazzmanjohn If I understand your question correctly, you're asking what happens if you have multiple devices storing original content, rather than just one "master collection" on a desktop and multiple client machines. I haven't tested, but I would imagine that you simply add music to the cloud from any devices, and that shared music shows up on all other machines using the same account.

To your first question: If you see tracks that have a plain cloud icon but when you right-click you don't see an option to add them to the cloud, it's usually because your selection also includes some tracks that have a different icon. Make sure all tracks in the selection have the same icon, no exceptions.

@Scot Hacker

Regarding #1 I'm pretty sure you are 100% right.

On #2 on the right-click issue, I see what you mean. On my iMac I was referring to 2 songs that are the same. The only difference is one is obviously on my hard drive without the little cloud. The second has that little cloud next to it. Do I delete one and keep the other or what? Which one do I delete?

@Scot Hacker is correct. I have 4 devices connected to my AM account, and iTunes Match. 2 Macs, an iPad and an iPhone.

ANY changes made to the music collection on one device will affect all the others. Any device may contain downloaded files, and they will sync to all the others. Hence there is no notion of a "master local library" - that is only a starting point. Once the account is populated, all connected devices are equal peers. Add, delete, rename, reorder - everybody gets the changes, and that's great.

Every so often I've found the same song in both local and iCloud versions. I usually do a quick check to see if there is any real difference (e.g., version of song, file quality) and delete the lesser of the two. All devices then show the correct single version. I've done a lot of experimenting, and haven't lost anything in the process.

Thanks for confirming BradPDX. As for the duplicates (cloud and local versions), that's one of the scenarios my article attempted to address. You should be able to merge them rather than deleting one of the two sets. Not sure whether that would make any difference if they're all reflected in the cloud anyway, but somehow feels cleaner to me (and keeps the play counts in sync).