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

Thanks for the response. My iOS library is not nearly as large as my desktop, so it would be easier to fix. Playlists are not an issue as I only have a couple, but I also would not be happy with messed up album art. Did you lose all album art?

I stopped trusting iTunes a long time ago. My entire collection is on a NAS drive, with links in iTunes for the purpose of a desktop player plus syncing my ipod. But I do not allow iTunes to have write permission to my music collection, EVER. I clicked to turn on iCloud Music, but then found this thread and quickly turned it off. Perhaps the music would have been safe, but I added the links to iTunes album by album in order to make sure that the Album and Art work is correct.

It would be cool to have the iCloud capability, but streaming and not download. I have over a terrabyte of music and a 16GB iphone. I have been using Amazon Player, which duplicates the collection and allows streaming from devices, roku, etc. Maybe I'll stick with that.

Hi! Need help here. Apple Music is in the brink of messing up my library of 40K+ of songs.

Over the weekend, on my iPhone 6+, i updated to Apple Music. Chose the Merge option since replace sounds too absolute. Apple Music integrated wonderfully with my existing songs and playlists.

When i got home Sunday, I tried to add songs and revise my playlists on my iMac. Now i do not have internet connection except on my mobile thus my iTunes on my iMac is not up to date. iTunes didn't allow me to add songs to my device with the prompt, "cannot add because this device it using iTunes Match". I did not subscribe to match but i understand that it came with Apple Music. With that i decided i didn't need Apple Music nor iCloud Music Library. I turned them off on my device. My whole previous library on my device got deleted.

Now I thought it must be an upgrade issue. I decided to back up some songs and playlists on an external hard disk which i plan to load on my phone using my Macbook Pro. I went to work using my Macbook Pro. At work i have pretty decent internet connection. On my Macbook Pro, i urged my iTunes to the latest available. Still I can't load my playlists on my iPhone using the latest version of iTunes. Upon loading my playlists, no songs were included therein. How do fix this problem?

I'm still on a journey with this product. I want to embrace it but it keeps biting me. At first I merged my phones library into the cloud. I was a prior Match user but not for months. I didn't realise my old Match albums were still there. I then merged the rest of my library from my laptop. What happened next was that nearly all id3 tags and artwork were incorrect. Even albums I had added to my library from Apple Music. Using an old itl file did not work. I could select a song, a different one would play. With artwork from somewhere else entirely.

I deleted everything from the cloud. Turned off Apple music iCloud. Removed all music from my phone and iTunes library, then rebuilt the itunes library from a backup. I backed it up again. Then I did this......(feel free to laugh)..... I thought I'd try again.

FIrst, I uploaded my entire library to the cloud from itunes. So far this has not broken my local library. I then told my phone to pick up songs from the cloud. It did so, but with bizarre results. The cloud matching service is simply broken. I only tested three artists. With about 350 songs. But what a mess.

Artist 1: Abba. I only have one Abba album. It's called Gold. It has been estimated at 28 million worldwide sales. One of the biggest selling albums EVER. iCloud has matched the first 5 songs with the cover art for the original albums (I.e not the Gold album). When you get to track six, Super Trouper, the song played is a cover. Some kind of tribute. Euro Dance Tribute To Abba!!! ***?

Artist 2: Genesis. In band view, Abba are the first in the list. Under album view its Abacab by Genesis. This albums opener has album art from an album call RKIVE. Track 2 gets no art. The rest seem fine. The damage is more pronounced on an album called Duke. Two songs (Misunderstanding and Behind The Lines) are versions from a live album that I've never owned (Three Sides Live). Turn It On Again is matched to the greatest hits album, also not in my collection. Duke has sold a couple of million worldwide. It's no Abba Gold, but also this is hardly The Mountain Goats we are talking about.

Artist 3: Nick Cave, one of my favourites. I've not yet assessed the full glory of the match for old Nick, but I have noticed that all three versions of O'Malleys bar on the B Sides and Rarities CD are the same. And they all appear to play at the same time when one is selected. (The little graphical equaliser is animated next to all three).

Three artists. All three wrong. I have little hope for the rest of my online library. Why does Apple try to be so smart? Can't we just upload our libraries to the cloud without all this matching nonsense?

Hahaha just also noticed that the main picture of Grandaddy is actually a Jools Holland era Squeeze, and the majority of the Elvis Costello artwork is wrong. To quote everyone in Star Wars ever: I have a bad feeling about this.

8 of my XTC albums and/or singles now have the same artwork as each other on iCloud. XTC also appear to have morphed into Jools Holland era Squueze as have Tin Maxhine and Wings. Tame Impala and the Waterboys are represented by Ron and Russell from Sparks. Shack's photo is of Scriitti Politti. Scritti themselves are portrayed by Sparks again.

What NAS drive do you use?

Do you use this just to store your music the way you want it and to keep Apple from have any write permission to your music?

Then do you use the iTunes player on your computer and mobile devices?

When do you use the Amazon player?

I am a little confused as to how you do this. Please clarify.

I have a large, customized collection and am petrified at the thought of anyone messing it up. I have it backed up to two external drives and on my 128 Gb iPhone 6 Plus. An alternative system that I control, like another music database and player package that I own, sounds interesting to me.

Found another bug with Apple Music iCloud. On the artists view of my music, you could have two separate artists, say 'Billy Bragg' and 'Billy Bragg and Wilco'. Or 'Elvis Costello' and 'Elvis Costello and The Attactions'. Press the icon of either and it will begin to play music. However the play icon appears on both artists. Another example of this implementation being rushed and not fit for market. the richest company in the world needs to employ some testers and some better coders. All the information is available to make this work.

so i don't think i have the exact album art/match problem, but a very related sync question i thought made sense to ask here (and apologies if it's been mentioned in this thread - i scanned the thread and didn't see it, but super long so may have missed it):

so i've spent the past 3 days pretty much manually importing my playlists from spotify to iTunes (the exportify + apple script solution helped a little, but left tons to go back and fix manually)...finally got it perfect yesterday afternoon, then i tried to reset all the plays in my 20k song library for a fresh start - and the apple server got ****** at me: bottom line is i had to turn off iCloud lib on computer. no problem, i thought, i had backups on my computer and it was great on my phone. so overnight i let iCloud library re-initate on my computer...looked fine when i woke up, but i just now realized a bunch of the playlists i worked on yesterday no longer have the apple-music-only songs i'd added (not grayed out, not an ℹ - just simply not there) - so a lot playlists went from, say, 50 songs to 20 (and they are all local). all the playlists are there in their respective folders. so i went into time machine and got a backup from yesterday where all the songs are in the playlists.

so my question is: i turned off music on my phone, deleted all the songs on there, and this time plan to LEAVE it off until my computer finishes getting going on iCloud. any thoughts on whether this will do the trick? it seems like the two different versions of my lib got crossed - not every single playlist is local-track only...so it seems like it stopped syncing at some point and i didn't realize, then when i re-started everything last night, the one with some missing tracks on playlists [i guess my phone] took precedence. so, i thought it might help to just do it all from one device before turning on any others.

i'm only asking now in the event that someone can confirm that it will not work, because it'll take all day and i wanted to avoid wasting the time if possible. it looks like some people in here had to set up a new library to clear out their iCloud library, but it seems like my problem might be different and not require that additional step.

I turned on Apple Music, and iCloud Music Library, but never have used iTunes match, and nothing bad has happened to my library. I'd guess that this is an iTunes Match problem, which also makes sense to me, since I'd imagine that iTunes match has to deal with replacing music in your library with cloud items.

Just like you, I wasn't a Match user, so nothing is wrong in my Music Library... on my Mac. Everything is perfectly in order, with correct artwork for all albums, but when I go on my iPhone and iPad, it's sometimes a right mess!

Some of the album don't have the correct artwork like many of you who posted here since this new iCloud Music has been released, but I also have trouble with songs! I don't know why, but some of the songs in my iTunes Library don't upload in the iCloud Library, with no reason, and when by miracle they do upload, when I listen to them it's not the right song anymore...

For example, for Taylor's latest album 1989, I had the song "Bad Blood" 3 times in the album, the first time at the correct place under the correct title, and the two other times under other titles of other songs?!?! That's just insane, because when I checked my iTunes Library on my Mac the files were fine... I had to delete the whole album and reload it back in iTunes to have it once again correctly in the iCloud Music Library, and I would prefer not to do that everytime there's something wrong with the iCloud system because it's really annoying.

Did someone else had that problem with songs being replaced like this?

For my money, leave iCloud Music Library unchecked on all devices. Make sure you have a backup dated before this Apple Music fiasco ready to restore your music to your computer. Delete all music from all devices. Restore your music to iTunes on your computer with your backup. Make sure it's aok. Back it up again. Sync it to your devices when you know the music is right.

There is no way to guarantee Apple won't mess up your music files again with future updates. So always have a backup. Also consider a separate database that you own for your music that has no connection with Apple or any other third party that can tamper with you music.

Interesting. I really only use iCloud Music Library in a very limited fashion: I never upload anything directly, and only use it as a way of accessing music purchased on different computers with the same Apple ID without having to download the music directly. So, if I purchase (and usually download) 1989 from the Apple store on my laptop, I'll use iCloud Music Library to listen to it on my iPhone without having to download it; it just streams.

It sounds like the part of the system that handles building metadata for uploaded stuff, whether it is using the Apple Music's iCloud Music Library mechanism, or the older iTunes Match, doesn't really work. Bad marks to Apple for rolling out a buggy product! Hopefully they'll roll out a fix soon.

Well done dude.
iCloud Music totally screwed years of hard work and love. Your fix has resolved the issue.
I can confirm to anyone that might be a tad hesitant. The fix works and can be trusted.

I have a WD My Cloud Mirror (4TB). All of my media files are arranged in a folder structure that makes sense to me: Genre, Subgenre, Artist, and Album, with either a "folder.jpg" in each folder for artwork, or the artwork embedded in the files. iTunes always tries to use its own folders on the machine it lives on. I keep the NAS drive mounted, and if I drag files and folders to iTunes, the default behavior is to copy them, but the setting can be changed in preferences by unchecking "copy files to iTunes media". Now when I drag files/folders to itunes, it creates a record which is a link to the file on the NAS drive. I dragged one album at a time during setup to ensure that tracks, albums and artwork are correct. I frequently had to make manual corrections, but now my representation of music in iTunes is perfect, and I have no intention of letting iTunes screw it up. I occasionally use other clients such as Clementine or VLC, and bypass iTunes entirely.

The WD cloud mirror has a DLNA server as well as a Firefly Server for iTunes, so I can actually use a shared iTunes library directly from the NAS box, except for artwork and ipod syncing, which is why I did the above on one machine. There is also an icecast server option if I want to stream any playlist over the internet. There is a WD app that allows me to play and access all files from anywhere. I have just discovered Air Playit for iOS (with a piece of server software for the Mac or PC), which looks like a good streaming music alternative for my collection too.