Reset AM library (AKA - delete all user music files from AM)

So these were the steps I took to eventually clear out all music in my catalog:

1. Turn off syncing on all devices.
2. Confirm Home Sharing is not enabled.
3. Delete ALL playlists.

At this point when I deleted the files using desktop AM, this seemed to work.

I then redownloaded my purchased music, checking both purchased and hidden locations. This restored 1748 files, and met expectations.

Turned ON syncing solely on the desktop and suddenly I am getting AAC duplicates of my purchased music and every time I delete the AAC versions, they get repopulated. When I turn OFF syncing, the AAC duplicates do not becomes available. This happens when you hit “update iCloud."

If you KEEP syncing on, the duplicate AAC files just keep repopulating. The ONLY time the files disappear from the desktop is if you have syncing turned off.

So it seems to me that Apple continues to persist your catalog and juts makes it invisible, even if it appears as if you deleted files, and then reconnects whatever is lurking in your history, instead of taking guidance from the desktop to remove that file. Those files can’t be coming from the iPad or iPhone because I have not turned on syncing with those devices. It’s also not ALL files that get duplicated, which is weird.

So I have to figure out how to make these AAC files go away in perpetuity before I can begin to start loading in my personal files, because I cannot have seven versions of the same song

Hi,

Thank you for responding. The delete instructions are for iPhone. This would require me to individually delete 80,000 songs so I am sure you can understand that this isn’t plausible. You used to be able to manage your personal collection from your desktop, which this post is about.

To be clear, we are not talking Apple Music files, meaning files Apple is providing as part of a subscription or matched as a part of Apple Music’s matching. Nor are we talking music I purchased from iTMS. We are talking MP4 files I have uploaded into my collection over the decades (under iTunes) and reside now in the cloud, but are mine.

Also, I have my collection archived on a separate drive which is disconnected from my Mac, so Apple Music is solely dealing with the drive that it is mapped to and the cloud.

I have attempted to delete files from my desktop, and the cloud just restores them. I have tried deleting from the web, and deleted albums sometimes are restored.

I have sync turned off on my iPhone and iPad. My Music is turned off on my Apple Watch.

Since the problem is that my music files’ metadata was tagged badly, and there are so many files, the easiest thing to do is just “blast and pave” my collection, fix my files locally and re-add to my library. There doesn’t seem to be any way to do this. And there is no way to fix the metadata as the cloud will always overwrite what I do.

If the answer is the only way to delete files from the cloud is from your iPhone, that is a bit disappointing. It’s going to take me weeks to delete thousands of albums. I was really hoping there was some setting Apple has buried or hidden that just blows you to reset your library like iTunes used to have.

Ok, I see that now - and I can confirm that the cloud just repopulates the desktop with all the songs just deleted using the desktop app.

Also confirming that Home Sharing is not utilized on any device. I’m going to try to deauthorize and reauthorize hardware. Perhaps there is a glitch in the matrix.

I feel like we may not be connecting the dots here.

My expectation is that sync should only be syncing literal files that exist. So, for instance, if I have song.m4p on my Mac, and an empty library on my iPhone and iPad; if I then I have syncing set on my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad, I should not get two files - an .m4p and an .aac of song.mp4 The m4p should be the only file that populates all three.

But the behavior I am seeing is that on each instance where a new device is added into the sync, Apple will not just populate the .m4p files I have re-introduced into the library, but also the previously *deleted* .aac files - including .aac files Apple recognizes as me uploading them, so we can’t even say Apple is “mismatching” to its own catalog.

The expected behavior, from the start, is that, regardless of device, should I delete a file, every device that is syncing to the same library should have that file deleted, and that the cloud library should also be deleting that file. The expected behavior should also be that *after* all files have been deleted from a library, when the user adds a file, duplicates are not suddenly being added.

But this is not what I am seeing. To wit: yesterday I added my iPad as a sync, and sure enough, I found a ton of duplicate files, which took about a half-hour to clear out. Some of these files that Apple added were identified as Apple as having been files I uploaded - except I had just finished deleting all my existing music yesterday and had just reintroduced my purchased music later that day. Technically, the only music that should be available to sync were the ~1700 purchased music files, none of them duplicates and none .aac.

And yet - when I added my iPhone, I’d say about a third of the music files resulted in Apple pushing duplicates into my library, which had to be deleted from both my iPhone library and the desktop. And the same behavior happened again when I added my iPad into the sync - duplicate files were generated which had to be manually deleted from the iPad and then the desktop.

The bottom line is that Apple is re-populating my library with old, deleted duplicates of existing files Apple should be well aware of since they are all files purchased from iTunes. If I have deleted all my old files and repopulated 1700 iTunes generated files (m4a, m4p), I expect all my devices to only have 1700 iTunes files. I should not see any aac files or any duplicate m4a or m4p files. And since I went out of my way to delete all my files before repopulating with only purchased music, where are the aac files coming from?

I went so far as to check to see if I had any older registered devices just to see if I didn’t properly decommission my old iPad or iPhone, but no - all my devices are current and active. The rest have been removed from my account.

This is why I say that none of the help advice Apple has is relevant. Because what Apple documented is expected behavior is not what is happening here - unless Apple’s expected behavior is that whichever version of Apple Music is active at the moment is the “driver” for the syncing, and Apple doesn’t delete any files out of your cloud, but rather just hides them and there is a bug in the syncing that invokes certain files back from being deleted if it somehow has been linked to another music file that iTunes detects as new.