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

herberr wrote:

Did that, restored my iTunes library on my Mac which made everything look like before. Then I deleted all from my phone and resynched. Most artwork and descriptions are good. It's mostly the artwork related to the Artist which is still a mess. It seems that Artwork of artist in my collection is randomly applied to other artist's in the collection. Album artwork seems to be OK, same for titles of the track.

This will be a hard nut to crack for Apple I guess. My suspicion is that if you are a Match user, or like me was a Match user in the past, these issues arise. My daughter's libraries are clean still, and they haven't used Match in the past.

I Use Match and my library is fine thanks.

The first sync attempt performed by Music failed.

Apple support has suggested me to switch iCloud Music Library off and then back on.

I'm going to try as soon as I get e decent wifi connection.

Guys, the situation is a lot worse than I thought. Yesterday I discovered that all my music were corrupted with duplicate files and wrong album art. Now the music library is even messier than yesterday. The songs that I added from APPLE MUSIC are showing wrong album arts. As you can see here.

I added Ghost Stories album to "My Music" yesterday but when I am playing it today it's showing an album art from Basshunter. I mean...really?

Thanks all for the helpful info.

iTunes has been trashing my podcast library for many months, deleting files and shuffling things about erratically. I've taken to backing up the library manually, and am seriously considering an iTunes alternative app. Apple products are becoming less stable and less intuitive, IMO.

After completing the steps I outlines in my previous post, here are the final results:

On my MacBook Pro:

My iTunes library looks correct. Specifically:

• Artist pictures are correct
• Album art is correct
• Ratings and other meta data are correct

On my IPad using iCloud Music Library only:

• Nearly all of the artist pictures are correct. A few are not. For instance, the artist picture for the Beatles shows AC/DC, Genesis displays Metallica. There does not appear to be a pattern to what caused this.
• Nearly all of the album art is correct. There are a few misses. At least the incorrect image used album art from the same artist.

On my iPhone using iCloud Music Library only:

Results are nearly identical to my iPad. Specifically, artist and album art misses are the same. What's odd is that the incorrect image being shown is different. For instance, the Beatles does not show AC/DC, it shows Rush. Genesis also shows Rush.

Overall, Apple Music and the iCloud Music Library are no better than a beta release right now. Hopefully, Apple will get this cleaned up soon.

I'm having a few issues with wrong artwork and files, interestingly only on my phone - my actual iTunes library is totally fine. But one problem I'm experiencing is this: any song I purchased from iTunes over the years and put into a compilation album is instead showing up on the iPhone as it was originally purchased. For example, if I bought one from song from album "A" and put it in a self-made compilation of other songs in "A" s genre, it's organized fine in my library and on my iPod Classic, but through the Cloud/Music on the iPhone, that one track is back to being in its own solo album. I have a lot of tracks like these, so it really clutters up scrolling through the albums!

Any ideas on how to get the customized ID tags to go to the Cloud with the tracks?

I had the exact same issue: iTunes library corrupted after accepting the iTunes Music Cloud prompt thingy. What a mess Apple.

SOOO frustrating, I have spent hours on my iPhone updating all of my music perfectly, deleting and canceling my membership to Spotify, SO stoked on what Apple did with music, then I thought, "let me see if everything synced to the computer" so I did all the updating to get the new iTunes and everything, tried to sync...and now all of my album artwork is completely messed up, the iTunes on the computer has random music I selected from my phone but not even half of it, and I am scared to play any song for fear what others have said will happen...the wrong song will play.

APPLE!! I have always had your back, a common phrase from my mouth is, "Sometimes it takes Apple a while to catch up with advancements in the industry but whenever they do they BLOW it out of the water, they make sure it works before they release something." Which has always been my experience.

PLEASE fix this!! Music for me, like you, is a huge part of my life and I will for sure go back to Spotify until this is taken care of.

Takeaway: Don't apply updates--any updates--right away. Wait a few days or a week. And if you don't need the "improvements", don't update at all unless there are significant security issues.

I've noticed that my iTunes Match content only updates on my phone when I add Apple Music content to my library, otherwise the updates work fine across my Mac and PC. Anyone know of a solution to this or have a similar problem?

Well, I spoke too soon. This solution originally worked for me, but upon further inspection my problem wasn't just about bout tags and organization. Turns out whole album folders would contain entirely incorrect songs, from random other artists, all with random album art. Total absolute chaos. Not sure of proper way to fix, but I'm trying to rebuild manually from scratch:

I held down option when starting itunes and created a new library. When it opened I could see a great deal of my music library, now correctly organized, except all in the cloud. So I am downloading all the cloud-stored stuff to rebuild a new music folder. Then, I am going back into the old itunes library music folder and manually adding the albums that are not ruined and not included in the cloud.

Much of my music will be lost, but at least it will be straight. Horrible mistake from apple on this.

I have been in contact with an Apple specialist about this issue and this is his message to me today:

"Its good to see that the restore worked for the most part, and thank you for those links, after our call yesterday I reached out to some other advisors and explained the issue and had one or two chime in on similar situations. At this point we are not going to want to use the features on a temporary basis until the issue has been resolved on our end. I don’t have a time frame for that as of yet, but we are pretty good at taking care of things that affect things this drastically so I imagine it wouldn’t be too long. As far as iTunes match goes, if we wanted to put together a refund and cancel it that is certainly an option however, if iTunes match seems like it would be an ideal feature for you when working correctly, I would suggest holding out until the issues are resolved and then hopefully when its fixed, iTunes match will give you your optimal iTunes experience."

This did not work for me. I guess it's the iTunes setting to automatically organize my library, but the files are still messed up. I am going thru a full restore when I'm back home tomorrow night...

Well yay, looks like I'm in the same boat. What a bloody disappointment.

Got Apple Music on Tuesday and really loved it. So I started making playlists, planning to move over from Spotify when the trial ends. About two hours ago I clicked on a playlist that I had just created as I wanted to listen to it. The counter stated that the playlist contains over 50000 songs 😮 A bit of scrolling revealed that a Bob Dylan track I had added from Apple Music, had been added thousands of times. I was shocked to find that the same ginormous Playlist appeared on my phone. I tried to delete the track from the playlist without any luck. iTunes started to freeze up and crash. After a short while, I was no longer able to open iTunes properly, as it crashed after mere seconds. I found a fix on this forum and renamed a previous iTunes Library (from yesterday) to become my current iTunes library. All the playlists I had built on Apple Music were lost, of course. I also declined to enable iCloud Library, as others have suggested. However, although Apple Music still works, non of the tracks in My Music do. I get the spinning wheel every time I click a local track. So I guess it's safe to assume, that my music library is well and truly screwed.

Any suggestions on what I could try to at least get my local library to work again? Has anybody else encountered that playlist bug? And I guess not being able to safely switch on iCloud Library means I can forget making playlists that sync to my phone?

I use itunes on my Mac to maintain a lossless library ripped from CDs. Am I at risk of damaging my Mac itunes library if I only turn on icloud library on my iphone? I'm concerned that any change on my iphone may eventually sync back to my mac and corrupt the library. Hope that make sense.