Apple Music syncing with iTunes destroyed my music library

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Apple Music syncing with iTunes destroyed my music library

I just signed up for Apple Music yesterday, excited to transfer my 150+ playlists and 20-year-old mp3 collection to the cloud. I started syncing from iTunes yesterday afternoon. My library is huge and it looked like it was gonna take hours (if not days) to complete, so I left it alone to do its thing. Checked in a few times and all was well, albeit moving very slowly. The last time I checked in, I had an error message that the sync had failed. (I don't remember exactly what it said, but it was very vague.) So I figured I should just start over and try again.

Looking at Apple Music, I could see that a number of my playlists came through, although many many tracks were greyed out... Tracks that are definitely licensed by Apple so I'm not sure why they were unplayable in my library. So that is frustrating.

HOWEVER. I haven't even had time to explore this problem yet because....

I went back to my iTunes library and opened a familiar playlist. Except it wasn't familiar because all the tracks were wrong. Why were my playlists altered? I started playing the first track and discovered that the song was right -- it was the meta data tags that were wrong.

As you can see, the songs unavailable for play in the Apple Music cloud are the only ones that have the correct tags. All the others are mislabeled (although they still have the appropriate album art, apparently).

I am flabbergasted. Can't get over how something like this could happen. Has anyone else had this problem? What on earth do I do about it? 36,679 tracks..... all mislabelled. And I'm terrified to re-try syncing my library for fear of losing everything altogether. HELP??!!!

iMac, macOS 10.13

Posted on Aug 3, 2020 3:30 PM

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Answer 1

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turingtest2

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Aug 14, 2020 1:13 PM in response to alanna182

Restoring a Time Machine backup of the state of your library will work, provided you do so when you're not connected to the Internet, and then turn off Sync Library before you reconnect. Your local library would then be separate from the cloud library, and merging them would likely create a mess again. Having restored your local library the solution would be to create a separate library to access the iCloud Music Library, delete everything that it is in it, then (if you're even interested in exploring Apple Music further) gradually import copies of your local media or add content from the Apple Music catalog, switching between libraries when you want to go back to your full library.

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Answer 2

turingtest2

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Aug 4, 2020 6:38 PM in response to alanna182

See Identify cloud status icons in your music library on your Mac or PC - Apple Support. In principle nothing in your original library should be affected when you enable iCloud Music Library, but you should nonetheless maintain a backup.

Use File > Library > Update Cloud Library to restart the process of matching or uploading your content.

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Answer 3

alanna182 Author

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Aug 10, 2020 11:10 AM in response to turingtest2

Yes, you would think that "in principle" nothing would be affected. In reality, there is a KNOWN ERROR that syncing with iCloud Music will ruin the meta data for your entire iTunes library, regardless of where you downloaded or purchased the music.

If you search this forum, you will see YEARS of posts where people are reporting this issue. Apple simply doesn't care to fix it.

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Answer 4

turingtest2

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Aug 15, 2020 4:19 PM in response to Greg Sparkman

See my post just above yours. Do you have a backup to restore? What happened prior to your library disappearing? If you've been using Apple Music has your subscription expired?

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Answer 5

turingtest2

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Aug 10, 2020 2:12 PM in response to alanna182

Most of my content is not from the store. Checking the old memory banks I do now recall that iCloud Music Library and I have argued over capitalization from time to time with my purchases, which I solved by hiding content from my purchase history and then adding my own content back to the iCloud Music Library. I also use scripts to enforce my preference for Strict Title Case.

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Answer 6

alanna182 Author

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Aug 12, 2020 11:29 AM in response to turingtest2

In my case, it's not a matter of the capitalization of a song title. Every single track has been renamed to be another track. Like, it's labelled as a song by Johnny Cash, but when I play it, it's actually Janelle Monae. Like it just shuffled the names of the songs onto different tracks and the only way to fix it is to manually go through and relabel it all myself.

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Answer 7

alanna182 Author

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Aug 14, 2020 12:34 PM in response to turingtest2

Yes it is 1000% a total mess. I'm running on a Mac of course... unfortunately. I am confused about whether Time Machine would work. I asked the support person I talked to on the phone, and she said that because syncing with Apple Music changed the files themselves, restoring a backup of the iTunes Library wouldn't make a difference. But I haven't tried it because I don't want anything to get more messed up than it already is.

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Answer 8

Aug 15, 2020 4:02 PM in response to alanna182

Just happened to me, moments ago. 100's of hours of organization and ripping almost 20K songs. Playlists, Songs, Albums. Gone. If this doesn't come back I am finished trusting iTunes. I've spent way too much time over the years dealing with its idiosyncrasies. Music library gone off my laptop, desktop, iPhone and iPad.

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Answer 9

alanna182 Author

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Aug 4, 2020 4:30 PM in response to alanna182

I just wrote an update that Apple was unable to fix this issue because it is a "known error" that they don't care to fix. And they deleted my post. WOW. Stay away from Apple Music, everyone ever.

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Answer 10

turingtest2

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Aug 10, 2020 11:52 AM in response to alanna182

I use Apple Music, and used iTunes Match before that. My metadata hasn't been changed, although I am currently fighting Music over its inconsistent application of the compilation flag.

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Answer 11

alanna182 Author

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Aug 10, 2020 12:28 PM in response to turingtest2

From my understanding, if your library is mostly music that you purchased originally from Apple, you will be fine. But if it's a lot of independent music and personal files, it breaks itself trying to copyright everything, which is impossible for music that has not been released commercially. So it punishes indie musicians and indie music fans.

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Answer 12

turingtest2

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Aug 12, 2020 11:39 AM in response to alanna182

Ouch. Sounds like a total mess. If you were running Windows I have a script that can potentially restore corrupted metadata but I don't have an AppleScript equivalent. I assume there is no going back to a Time Machine snapshot of the library from before this happened?

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Apple Music syncing with iTunes destroyed my music library

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