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

you can turn it off and your original library--hopefully--will be there, but with some stuff still messed up, like my Beatles stuff as mentioned. but then when you turn it back on, depending on the size of your library, it will take forever and all your stuff will be messed up again. Unless you do what he mentioned above I guess. But that is why I think you would have to keep doing all that, but he says no. Not sure he has tried that far though. See if he answers. But that is what happened to me. I am not trusting it. Not paying for it. I would love it to work, was so excited for it, but not at this cost.

@jctez: Yes, sync to my iDevices is identical to the sync on my 2ndary Mac. The vast majority of my "rare" stuff is perfect in the cloud because Apple couldn't find a match, and so used my content and metadata exactly as I've stored it. In the case of your Beatles boxes, that's not what I would consider rare content - there are probably a lot of users who have uploaded the same or similar, and I can imagine that causing problems if either: 1) Those users' copies were badly tagged or 2) Yours were. That would indeed be a gray area.

@jazzmanjohn:

1) That sounds like the scenario described in my article. You need to select ONLY the tracks with the plain cloud icon and right-click Add to Music Library. They should then consolidate as a single unified set.

2) Correct - your original tracks on your "master" machine should not appear altered *unless* you sync them to the cloud and then alter them from a second computer. So you're seeing your original art on the host Mac and badly art-matched versions on your phone. The fix for this is described in the article.

3) Yes

4) I wouldn't dream of signing out - wouldn't want to risk any of this work being undone, and wouldn't want to have to wait for it to re-process. Why would you want to sign out?

5) Your host Mac will continue to show your original library *unless* you use a 2nd Mac to alter tracks that are already in the cloud.

Scot Hacker wrote:

…And yes, $10/month is incredibly cheap for what we're getting here - I'm finding the combination of Apple Music + iCloud Music Library be musical paradise. I'm "all in."

I agree that $10/month would be cheap — if Apple Music could be trusted with my curated collection. But it can't be trusted. I'm basically heartbroken that Apple Music's problems prevent me from using it- i.e. album art and metadata being completely messed up. If it weren't for that, Apple Music's integration of private collections and public cloud library would be alsolcutely unbeatable. Ironically, it's Apple's effort to integrate the two that lead to this problem. It's a hard problem to make the two coexist in a predictable way.

Thanks for your research and for having the patience to explain it all so that others may benefit. But I don't find this to be a solution for me, because in essence you're hacking Apple's system (although not in a bad way) to solve the problem. If Apple changes something on their end, your solution might break immediately and completely. There's no guarantee that it will work next month, or even tomorrow. It would be a huge job for me to do this with my library. I have 8,400 albums. 5% of them would be 420 albums that I'd have to "massage," and without knowing whether it will last, it's just too much work. Also, if their system changes, it's possible that my years of curation would be at risk.

Apple talks a lot about "passion" for music, but sadly, a large number of Apple's most passionate music fans can't use Apple Music. I let my subscription lapse, and I won't be renewing unless they can fix these problems. Which I unfortunately find unlikely.

@Scott....did not mean the released Beatles boxes were ''rare content'' and no mine are not ''badly tagged" and what I mean by rare content are live and/or alternate and/or not commercially released, therefore not in iCloud. But instead of Apple doing what they say,ie, upload those tracks to the cloud, they replace all of them with studio versions. I even tried the ''tag them as live 1,2,3, etc" and still got the studio versions. I reread your article and you talk about using right click to cloud for duplicate tracks etc, have you tried this to replace apple's versions of tracks to your own distinct versions? And do they stay that way? I cannot imagine how long it would take me to do that, especially with how slow it takes already for icloud to sync. And yes I have fast internet. I am not trying to be negative, I really wish it would work. With so many all over the internet calling Apple out on this you would think they would at least acknowledge, but they don't and they won't. Eddy Cue is a rich, out of touch windbag who should be fired over this. Hate to say it, but Steve would never have let this beta of a mess have been released. Funny how all of a sudden they are not trumpeting the number of subscribers since the end of the trial like they did before the trial period ended. Tells me the numbers are way low, and this is surely a big part of the reason why.

@Kim Hill--I agree completely.

@ Scot Hacker,

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

1. Regarding right clicking those grayed out songs, I'm not getting it. When I right click on the song, I do not see an option "Add to Music Library". Hate to be so thick, but where is it?

2. Are you saying my original library in its unaltered form is in "My Music" on my iMac and all the matches and stuff are only in the Cloud?

3. The only way I would ever sign out would be if I decided to no longer participate in AM and the Cloud library. Once again, if you do that will your library return to its original form?

All of this cloud stuff and uploading and matching has almost taken the joy out of just listening to music. Gadgetizing music so much just ruins the experience. I spend more time on organizing my library and EQing stuff that I hardly enjoy my music library any more. Know the feeling?

JazzmanJohn wrote:

All of this cloud stuff and uploading and matching has almost taken the joy out of just listening to music. Gadgetizing music so much just ruins the experience. I spend more time on organizing my library and EQing stuff that I hardly enjoy my music library any more. Know the feeling?

Ha! That is exactly the feeling I used to get back in the analog days of the 70s and 80s when I had about 3000 LPs. Everything required endless fussing. Now, I just leave the EQ flat, use decent headphones/speakers and call it "done".

@ BradPDX,

Great cartoon! Maybe I should just take your advice and be done with it.

By the way, what headphones do you like?

I own a mix of Bose, Grado and Sony headphones. The Sony MDRV6 is honest but brutal, good for recording but tiring. The Grado SR-60s and 80s are sweet, dynamic and leaky as all get-out. The Bose noise cancellers are still best of breed and sound great. I use Bose in-ears when on the go, because the warm profile they use is really good for that application and I don't like having my ear canals stuffed.

That all said, I haven't had any problems with AM to speak of. Some items, like the Beatles box set, have to be really tricky as they contain multiple versions of the same songs - a tagging nightmare. While I love the Beatles, I don't have any of the mono mixes and alternate takes, and so haven't had any problems.

I've got the Bose QC-15 and QC-20i along with a pair of non-noise cancelling Sennheisers. I've always liked Sennheiser as a brand. I'd like to purchase a pair of wireless, Bluetooth noise cancellers and am currently trying to decide on that. I'm looking at Sennheiser Momentum Wireless, Beats Studio Wireless and Plantronics Back Beat Pro. That's quite a range in prices, but I have narrowed it down to those three. Any thoughts on using Bluetooth and noise cancellation in the same package? I bought a highly rated pair of Definitive Technology Symphony phones back in June, and they were absolutely terrible. Not only was the noise cancellation mediocre, but the overall sound for just playing music was sub-par.

I've been enjoying AM as well. I'm having a lot of fun with "For You" and "Connect".

Do you have a favorite place to listen to music at home with a favorite setup? Like I have my iMac connected to a Yamaha amp with 2 old Cerwin-Vega speakers in basic stereo along with an old Infinity subwoofer. Just wondered what you meant when you said "a decent set of speakers and calling it done".

I quit on consumer grade ear/headphones a while back, I recently switched from my (somewhat old now) Shure E2C's to the Shure SE535 earbuds, and for 'via the air' listening it's an old pair of K&H medium field monitors. Either of which reveal that the onboard converters in an iMac are quite mediocre, so I don't use them.

Scot Hacker wrote:

I've written up a walkthrough for Medium.com detailing why many users end up with duplicate tracks and bad cover art, and how to fix those two problems in most cases:

https://medium.com/@shacker/remove-duplicates-fix-broken-album-art-in-icloud-mus ic-library-d58cff364fb1

Great article. Now if you could also find a simple method for correcting all the mis-matched tracks (original studio tracks being substituted for live album tracks or alternative versions) I will give you a big wet kiss!!!

@kim hill1: I don't consider this technique a hack, nor do I consider it fragile. One of the points I tried to make in the article is that Apple is basically forced to do some guesswork when importing some content. In the cases where those guesses go wrong, there is a method to replace the bad data with good. It's not like Apple is constantly refreshing the uploaded content - I have no reason to expect or be concerned that my work would be undone in the future.

Of course I would prefer that, when there is ambiguity, they would simply upload my content as-is rather than guessing. But the downside of that for them is that then a lot of people would actually end up with inferior content (lower bitrate, worse metadata than what they have on file, etc.) Still I'd like to have the option!

@jctez: Wow, I was going to suggest pre-tagging your rare stuff uniquely, e.g. renaming the album "Beatles [Mono Live]" or whatever, but sounds like you've already tried that and it failed? Wow, not what I would expect.

Remember that I am stuck uploading one album at a time via right-click, so I haven't experienced the situation of Apple trying to process my entire library. Also, I waited a few months after iCloud Music Library was released before even attempting it, to give them time to work out some of the kinks I had been hearing about. Maybe some of your experiences happened early in the life of ML?

Believe it or not, I have not yet experienced any cases of metadata being rewritten or messed up - all of that has been fine. It's just duplicate tracks and bad cover art I've had to deal with.

@jazzmanjohn:

1) You can only do this if the tracks have a plain cloud icon - i.e. status is "waiting" or "not uploaded". It doesn't work for tracks in other states. BTW Apple has a really helpful table showing all the possible cloud statuses: About iCloud Music Library icons and status - Apple Support

2) Correct.

3) Yes.