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

So, i have this problem too but mainly with live tracks that aren't available on iTunes.

Since Apple Music came out, i decided to run some tests to see how far would the iCloud Music Library matching system would be effective. Keep in mind that i have a full backup of my library on an external drive.

I tried to rename the artist of the live songs by adding the mention "(Live)" at the end of the artist's name. The result was the same, even with an artist name iTunes doesn't recognize, iCloud still match the live song with the studio version as well as the artwork and the album title.

Then, tonight i tried to rename a couple of those live songs by adding a unique string of chars at the end of the titles (ex: adding the date the song was performed). A live Metallica song like "Blackened" would then show "Blackened (2004/11/05)". Still no luck, iCloud looks up the first word of the title and matches it with the studio version...

I then read somewhere that iCloud Music Library wont allow someone to upload a song more than once to save space even if that song is on completely different albums! That is REALLY dumb! A music library is not that simple and at least, Apple should give us the choice to force the upload of the song on iCloud (like Google Play does) or simply allow us to download tracks for offline listening without having to upload our whole library to the cloud!

I don't understand why we can't add songs to our existing library without uploading everything to the cloud and screwing everything up!

The main reason why i was excited to try Apple Music is that, unlike Spotify, everything would be in the same place with that great/easy iOS interface!

I'm not giving up on Apple Music but until that part is fixed (and i reaaaaaalllyyyyy hope it will), i'm staying with Spotify! Spotify doesn't screw up the work i did over many years on my library!

Please Apple, fix this! Very disapointing!

This will also ruin your music on your phone. My music and lots of albums I have messed up artwork.

I have lots of singles. They show the artwork for different albums. In some cases it thinks they are the real full album. If you tap on show full album, it shows the full album and all the songs change.

Basically anything that is not a standard apple album is messed up.

My current iTunes is still intact. I am not sure what to do with my phone. Maybe restore from back-up. However streaming makes Apple Music pretty lame to me. As I loved the integrated feature where I could see my music and other albums I listened too.

This fixed my problem! Thanks! You saved my music and my sanity.

This also happened to me. Once I activated Apple Music and turned on iCloud Music library:

-I had duplicates and even triplicates of 6000 songs in my library (appeared on iPhone and Mac)

-Half of those duplicates were mapped to random album artwork and tracks

-Many more issues

I have not had time to read through all the post here, but I have had NO solution. I even:

-Deleted the iTunes library file and deleted all music out of iTunes

-Deleted all the music off my iPhone

-Copied back all my music from a backup hard drive and kept it in a non-iTunes folder

-Then tried manually album-by-album copying music in...

But still things are scrambled.

Even crazier... I copied an album I ripped from a CD many years ago... and iTunes split it into 10 different folders (1 for each track), each with the wrong Album and Artist. It's like everything is possibly going wrong with the library in a random way.

I will call Apple tomorrow. So frustrating.

I signed in just to say you are awesome 😉😁 this works wonderfully!

This happened to me too. I fixed it by replacing the entire iTunes folder from a pre-disaster backup. All is back to "normal", but Apple Music is not living up to its promise. Wondering why it happened in the first place. My hypothesis is that it is related to my past use of iTunes Match (even though I quit it over a year ago). So I am wondering if others on this discussion thread were past users of iTunes Match?

I am very disappointed that Apple Music loses some important functionality without iCloud Music Library -- I can't add Apple Music to My Music or playlists. And being able to stream my own music on my iPhone would have been great.

Apple music on my phone is still better than the phone version of spotify which only allows shuffling. So i will still use it there, but i wish i could use the iCloud Music Library functionality

Finder -> Music -> iTunes -> Previous iTunes Libraries.

This should help you know where the actions should be happening

Yeah, it turns out my "solution" actually didn't work for me. Something is wrong in the files of my computer, not my .itl. I'll go to my library and everything will look okay, and then ill click a song and before my eyes the information of the song will change, all the metadata. But the song i originally clicked will still play. Interesting thing is, i synced the library with my phone, and all the music works correctly in my iPhone's music app.The song and all the information is correct. It's just too much work for me to try and salvage my library at this point. At least some people have their problem fixed form my solution but i guess i'm not one of them. Currently wondering if its illegal to illegally download music to replace all the songs i've bought over the years.

An interesting find i just made: every messed up song in your iTunes library will have a new time on "date modified" which will be on the same day that you downloaded apple music and started using iCloud music library. So Apple decided to somehow modify all the tracks in our library without our permission. As far as I'm concerned, asking us if we want to upload our music doesn't = asking us to modify our song collection.

Sorry man, after i posted that solution (which apparently worked for some people, i have yet to figure out why some were successful and others weren't) i discovered that my library too wasn't fixed, and upon clicking a song it would revert to a different song. I'm also not in the clear yet.

my playlists have been completely trashed!! signing up for Apple music was the stupidest thing I've ever done, I don't have a clue how to make things right again. Thanks, Apple.

Since the whole iTunes Library and all the files are not reliable anymore, I just deleted them and wanted to get them from a backup. Turns out, that I do not get the free disk space back and now do not have enough storage. (See my new discussion "How to recover the free disk space of deleted files?")

Is it possible, that the free space is not recoverable, because the music files have been touched by Apple DRM? I certainly cannot see them or do anything about it 😟 DaisyDisk shows them as not accessible for the user, admin in this case.

Might have to set up the machine from zero 😟

Hello all,

I've had the same issues here but I managed to restore my library from a recent Time Capsule back up.

However, I'd like to share with you all two thingsI noticed late last night in the hope it may lead to a solution. I have not had time to fully investigate this and what I've found may not explain all issues.

1. After installing iOS 8.4 I noticed that if I delete songs stored on my phone it deletes the file and then hides the song in my iTunes purchase history. Therefore as I was cleaning up my phone before turning on iCloud Music Library I was unknowingly marking many of my iTunes purchases as hidden. I don't remember this behavior occurring in previous versions of iOS.

For anyone not sure what I mean by hidden go to your iTunes account on a computer and look at the 'manage my hidden files' section. (This is where the dreaded free U2 album resides *shudder*)

2. The next thing I noticed was all the files that have had their meta data/album art ect. messed up were tracks I'd bought from iTunes. On further investigation all tracks I looked at were ones which I had stored on my Mac's hard drive but had been hidden in my iTunes purchase history.

I wonder if iTunes sees a purchased track on your hard drive and then looks for it in your purchased history - but then can't find it as it is in the hidden section - and then the bugs hit with messed up metadata and album art??

I hope this is useful and makes sense - suffering from a serious lack of sleep here!

Okay i found amazing solution,

Logout my account and relogin with same apple id, From

Steps

Step 1: Logout and Close iTunes.

Step 2: Click on For You > Join Apple Music > Login with same apple ID

Step 3: Now Click on My Music.

Step 4: Wait, for sync and Click on Play list and again move back and click on My Music.

i found all the music back.

Now you are done.