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

May I ask how to "wipe the cloud clean"? How do you delete information about matched songs from iCloud?

On my iMac, which has no local music database, I authorised it & iTunes to use my online music library. So anything I add to it from the laptop database will be seen on the iMac. It only sees what is in the cloud. To remove from the cloud I simply right click an album or artist and select delete. I am at work now and can't remember if it asks for confirmation but I presume so. The album or artist is deleted from the cloud and the laptop (which has my music library) now shows a cloud icon with a cross next to all the songs I just removed. I have had no problem with removing music in this way. It also works with individual songs.

I have had problems if I try and multi-select songs (using highlight & drag) then select delete - often that seems to be ignored. I have also seen that selecting more than 999 songs at a time will fail. So I just stuck to the rightclick on artist name, delete. Laborious, but it worked.

I don't know if there is a better way to solve this, but I have solved the problem by following these steps:

1. Disable iCloud Music Library on iTunes.
2. Quit iTunes.
3. Open a finder window showing your iTunes library (~\Music\iTunes\).
4. Open Time Machine, and find the latest backup of the Music folder under your iTunes library folder, that hasn't been affected.
5. Select the "Music" folder, and Restore. (If it gives a disc space error, temporarily move some other files to an external drive, delete the local copies, and make sure there is more free space than the size of the Music folder.)
6. Go to the iTunes library folder. Find the file named "iTunes Library.itl", and change its name to something like "iTunes Library mess.itl".
7. Look under "Previous iTunes Libraries", and find the latest "itl" file dated before the mess. Copy it.
8. Paste the old version of the itl file that you had copied, under the iTunes library folder. Change its name to "iTunes Library.itl".
9. Open iTunes. DO NOT ACCEPT TO ACTIVATE ICLOUD MUSIC LIBRARY WHEN THE POP UP WINDOW ASKS YOU!
10. Enjoy your fixed library.
11. Do NEVER turn on iCloud Music Library again, unless you feel like giving it another chance, and are ready to do all these again.

Note: After following these steps and repairing the library, I noticed that some star ratings are also missing, and following these steps didn't fix that.

I noticed that it has just downright deleted some of music. It also won't let me sync it between my MBP and my iPhone. There are songs that aren't on Apple Music that I want on my phone...

Thanks for my suspicions about anything new that says iCloud... I actually did not choose to use the iCloud Music Library.

This thread I found out by mistake as I was just looking some general information about Apple Music. Thank God I did! Now I know to steer away from the iCloud library option! I myself have a lot of special editions of albums as well as some old bootlegs and other music that is not found in Apple Music or digitally in general!

I really don't understand (or I do but I still don't) what Apple engineers have though about when building this thing? Great idea to have my music library in the cloud but how can they expect that they are able to match all the worlds music files? Also I don't understand how they have come up with the idea that overwriting metadata (as people here complain) on my files is a good idea??? This is the issue that puzzles me the most!!!

If Apple is not willing to have my file in their cloud they still should not simply change it with their file!!!!

Instead they could just have allowed songs from Apple Music to be added in the cloud or simply just to the device (let it be iTunes or iPhone).

Having Apple Music files seamlessly in my library together with my own files would be the REVOLUTION Apple has been advertising!

The fact that Apple has ruined people libraries is far from revolution... from the customers point of view.

As it is now... Apple Music is just another Spotify (and actually worse) without possibility to have songs available for offline use or playlists!

Hope they fix it soon!

I tried creating another library, allowing iCloud to populate it and then deleting the entire thing, but after I tried to upload my real library to it again, I still had mismatched song titles and album artwork.

I can't determine if that happened after I turned iCloud Music back on on my phone or not, since I can't seem to remove anything off of it through iTunes anymore.

Hello from Munich, guys!

At first, let me say sorry for my sometimes bit poor english….I try my very best! 😉

Still without this creepy update to 12.2, I ask myself if this way could be a solution to get it installed WITHOUT messing all the things up:

I myself have 2 ITunes libraries, huge ones nearby 1TB each, all perfectly tagged, artwork, equalizer settings, crops, playlists aso. …..imagine what kinda time I invested into that. Naturally, I am really not interested into crashing anything, so I thought by myself: Would it work if I open ITunes 12.1.x with pressed "alt"-key (as I do everytime to change the uses library) and create a new, empty library first. Then close ITunes, do the update, and start ITunes then, it should start in this new created library, and mess up the contant there (which is not there). After closing ITunes then again and opening it with one of my other libraries, it shouldnt do this messy thing, huh? Or, do I have to de-activate sth in 12.2 then first?

I am not interested in using ICloud, so I wouldnt miss that in any way.

Thxs, guys, maybe its an idea that would work BEFORE messing up things…...

I was saved by having a large music library (over 25,000 songs) because I was unable to complete the iCloud Music Library transition. So, my experience was with iCloud Music Library enabled on my iPhone only.

Here's why I turned it off:

1. lots of artwork replaced with wrong/weird stuff

2. Looking at an album on-device and the same album in Apple Music: in Apple Music, some album tracks would have the little phone icon and some not; other tracks would be greyed out; others would play the wrong song from Apple Music, but if I played it from "My Music", it would be the correct song

3. no play counts synced over for songs that I own and that were on my device

4. my first try of iCloud Music Library deleted all of my personal playlists, but an "off-and-on" + re-sync brought them back.. that's when I noticed the play count issue

5. no last.fm integration

6. other randomly weird things that many previous posters have mentioned

I'm pretty disappointed that I can't add anything from Apple Music to My Music, and can't download anything for offline listening. I went from being excited to disappointed. I loved it before I realized that basic things like syncing play counts were gone. After reading a bunch of messages on this thread, I'm glad that I couldn't complete the process on my iMac and I'm going to have to see if/how they fix things when the song limit is allegedly raised to 100,000 tracks around the launch of iOS 9.

Wait, what's this about a song limit? Could this explain why it mostly seems to be affecting users with very large libraries?

Unfortunately, 100,000 tracks will still only get me to around 2/3 of my library, and working with a partial library will be an exercise in frustration. I'm with you - I've been looking forward to this "solution" for years, but am seriously disappointed. I know Apple is solving some really hard problems here, but it honestly feels like it was extremely rushed and almost no testing was done with real-world music libraries.

Yup, the limit is 25,000, just like for iTunes Match. But I read in another thread on here (sorry, not sure which one) that with iOS 9 will come a limit increase to 100,000 songs.

So if you have more than 25,000 songs, you'll get a message from iTunes telling you that the process has stopped because your library is too large.

I just have 2684 songs and my library has seen the destruction of its 20 years life in the most wondrous way by iTunes 12.2's iCloud sync. I tried to sync it twice but same outcame. So at least in my case it was not connected with having a lot of songs.

And yes I had iTunes Match when it first came out and some of them had been purchased from iTunes.

Why don't you restore the backup you keep of "20 years work"

You do backup your work right?

Backup should always be done no matter what. Apple should have just kept to streaming and left all the libraries alone. Spotify, Pandora and who knows what else do not muck around with your personal info/libraries as far as I can tell...they just stream music. Cancel your subscription you no longer stream. Piece of cake.

Evidently Apple doesn't eat cake.

Depends on the cake.