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

You did not ask me, but here is what I did and do 🙂 Looking forward to feedback from everyone out there 😀

• I disabled Apple Music and iCloud in iTunes, then I replaced everything with an older backup.
• I'm uploading all my music to Google Music (since ages) and use it for streaming to Sonos.
• I'm buying and ripping CDs regularly, sometimes I buy them used or I get them from the city library.

After the Apple Music trial, which is still running on my iPhone, I might look into Spotify (again). But I am pretty sure I will not try Apple Music again. I did not use iTunes Match or something and still my iTunes library was destroyed.

Have a nice weekend, everybody out there 🙂 I really enjoy reading all your posts. Sharing the suffering takes a little bit of the pain away 👿

@jctez, well no, there is no solution. But I think the article is interesting nonetheless and offers a little more insight into how iCloud Music Library ticks.

As for the argument that Apple Music is just targeted at the mass market (or “teeny bopper market”, as someone put it) and not suitable for “serious music listeners” with heavily customized libraries: I gotta disagree. I absolutely consider myself a serious music listener, music is an integral part of my life. 95% of my music has been purchased on CD (the rest from iTunes) and I have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into organizing, tagging and perfecting my library - still, my experience with Apple Music has been great so far, I find it to be extremely enjoyable. Yes, it has bugs and it has flaws, but I’m sure it’ll improve and grow, like every new product.

“For You” is just delightful, the playlists are fantastic and the recommendations I get are spot on. I don't listen to Top 40 Music, mainly stuff from the 60s to the 90s, and I haven’t been a teenager for more than a decade... so I am definitely not part of the target market 😉 But Apple Music works for me - I’ve never gotten a single bad recommendation (no Miley/Justin Bieber anywhere to be seen ;D). Instead I get everything I like, from Post-Punk to Lo Fi, from The Velvet Underground to Pavement, and tons of stuff I’ve never heard of. I will never use Connect because I’m not interested in a feature like that, but “For You” has me seriously excited about music discovery again and I absolutely love the tight integration with my library and the fact that I can tag every album I add from Apple Music the way I like. That’s one of the reasons why I cancelled my Spotify subscription after almost exactly 5 years - Apple Music is just a better fit for me.

I understand that Apple Music might not be the right choice of service for everybody, that’s absolutely legitimate - and I am really sorry for everyone who had their libraries altered, this should never have happened. But I think it’s not true that Apple Music has no value for serious music listeners.

Good post, derzornigemarkus.

I have hod NO ONE problem

sweet-jane wrote:

…As for the argument that Apple Music is just targeted at the mass market (or “teeny bopper market”, as someone put it) and not suitable for “serious music listeners” with heavily customized libraries: I gotta disagree.

[…]

…I have invested an enormous amount of time and effort into organizing, tagging and perfecting my library - still, my experience with Apple Music has been great so far…

Are you saying that your album art has not been disrupted? Did you invest "an enormous amount of time and effort" in it?

If you've curated a lot of your album art, and Apple Music hasn't messed it up, then you're in the minority.

Kim Hill1 wrote:

Are you saying that your album art has not been disrupted? Did you invest "an enormous amount of time and effort" in it?

If you've curated a lot of your album art, and Apple Music hasn't messed it up, then you're in the minority.

Yes, most of my album art was either scanned by me or downloaded in high quality, partly edited, cropped, and embedded into the files. While that's not something you get done quickly in one afternoon, I've invested way more "time and effort" into adding extensive metadata to all my tracks.

Anyway, none of that data has been touched by Apple Music - it's all intact and correctly synced to my iOS devices (except that I can't see the "Comments" and "Long Description" tags on iOS, so I don't know if the information is actually there... but it's still present in iTunes).

I don’t know if I’m part of the minority or if there are tons of people out there like me, happily using Apple Music, and they’re just not posting about it online. I really don’t know.

Big Brother is monitoring these posts! That's right. I have posted two items seeking info, and Apple deleted them because they didn't like them. That's all the more reason to move on.

I just want to rethink something. I personally would like to retry something. If you sign in to Apple Music and the Cloud, don't you have two libraries: the one when you're signed into iTunes that includes all the Cloud stuff plus your old library and the one when you're signed out that is your original library? When I first signed in, I immediately went from 20 genres to 35 and saw all kinds of changed art work appearing. However, if I'm correct, the Cloud stuff is not actually on your computer unless you download it. If you want to view your original library, all you have to do is sign out of iTunes, right? If you want to see everything, including the Cloud stuff, you just sign in.

If what I'm saying is true, Apple may not be destroying any iTunes libraries as all the stuff they are matching is just in the Cloud. And it all exists along with your old library. They are not removing anything from the library on your computer. Everything in the Cloud, including songs uploaded from your computer, exists only for streaming or downloading as needed. If this is true, maybe nothing is getting messed up after all. Somebody please clarify this for me. If what I'm saying is true, it may be worth trying it again. Is it possible we have rushed to judgment?

I am trying my best to be positive here.

<Edited by Host>

nope. they replace them with DRM tracks. Some of them at least, some have reported all. Meaning you have to go thru all your tracks and look at ''Fairplay" in the track info. If it is marked ''2" they made it DRM. You no longer own it or can do anything with it, even though you PAID for the track. Also, Apple is deleting posts on the forums about this right and left. Instead of making an announcement and apologizing and fixing it they are keeping it under wraps and deleting forum posts. Check the Spotify posts on this forum. Ppl are saying they have been deleted right and left. They also troll and post positive comments too how it all "works fine." I wanted it to work too man. I wanted one place where I could stream and have all MY music in one place. AMusic is not it. Google is for now. Even if Apple say it is fixed I am not trusting it. Not with my photos or my music. I moved to Adobe for my photos and Google for my music. Lesson learned.

WOW! I am sooooooo disappointed.

jctez wrote:

You no longer own it

You never did own it, stick to reality. You bought a license to listen, you did not buy the music.

excuse me? I certainly do own it. In the sense that I can use those files elsewhere. If you are talking about licensing to use publicly etc well yeah duh but none of us are talking about that ,so perhaps you should stick to the thread. The cds I purchased I own. If I buy a cd and rip it to itunes and my hard drive, and they replace it with DRM files I cannot do anything with those files. Can't even play them on another device or computer or use them in another program.

Believe what you like, the RIAA get the last word on 'ownership' of music, not you.

move on troll. not what we are discussing here.

You're so cute when you're wrong.

Hi,

Just want to give some feedback about what worked for me.

I have a 60 Gb iTunes library which is mainly composed of albums ripped from cd. All albums had correct artwork etc., no duplicate tracks etc etc, I would say it was a very clean library. I was an iTunes match subscriber till September last year but didn't continue the subscription.

I activated iTunes music on my mac and activated iCloud library which resulted in mixed up artwork, wrong songs playing etc.

I have an old iPhone so I haven't activated iTunes music and iCloud music library on iOS before activating it in iTunes on my mac.

The iTunes 12.2.1 update didn't fix anything for me.

I put back the previous .itl file but this also didn't clean up everything.

After this I followed the apple support doc :

If your music library shows incorrect details with iTunes Match or Apple Music, and you previously cancelled an iTunes M…

even after doing this some tracks weren't right, so I restored both the .itl file and my complete iTunes music library from time machine to a point before the first time I activated iTunes music to be sure everything was like it used to be. All was good again 🙂 and I wasn't planning to turn iCloud music library back on again.

Out of curiosity I decided to create a new empty iTunes library (click option when opening iTunes and choose create library, and put it somewhere different from your other library. When iTunes opened and ask me to activate iCloud music library I chose "yes". I was signed in with my usual apple account so my newly created empty library started to populate itself with all my music that was synced with iCloud, probably a result of being a former iTunes match subscriber (although I reset the iCloud music library as described in the support doc mentioned above). Then I selected all the tracks in my new iTunes library and deleted them. I don't remember what the pop up window said, but it was probably something like "do you want to delete these files from iCloud" so I did. My new iTunes library was completely empty again. I quit iTunes and "option"-opened my regular iTunes library and reactivated iCloud music library and let it do it's work (i thought if something goes wrong again I ll just restore again from time machine and never activate iCloud music library again) I wasn't home so I have no idea how much it took to sync my library with iCloud

But now everything seems okay, all artwork is correct, all tracks are playing correctly, I can add music from iTunes music to my library,...

I guess the combination of resetting the iCloud music library (support doc) + deleting all the iCloud tracks from a new iTunes library did the trick for me.