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

This has happened to me too, as you say, seems to be when you accept to turn on "iTunes Music Library" and sharing across multiple platforms comes into play.

The data transfer between all devices goes haywire and the metadata scrambles. Not all of my iTunes Library is scrambled, but there's missing artwork, files with incorrect names, authors, genres. When you click on a file to play, it plays something completely different and there's absolutely no way to manually re-label the file correctly, it makes things much worse.

Currently restoring a 50gb iTunes Library from Time Machine as it was on 28th June, hopefully this will revert the library to it's original state.

I tried to restore a "Previous iTunes Library" but this doesn't work for me. It corrects most of the errors, but if you look closely, and play a few select files, the errors are still there.

It's absolutely crazy that this can happen. I expected a seamless integration of "My Music" and "Apple Music" but the effect is just to destroy 50gb of data in the process. Was this ever tested by Apple?

As someone has pointed out, Apple are obsessed with integrating everything into one single app, but that over-complicates the single app trying to do many things for many people. A better an more logical solution would be to keep the "My Music" as entirely separate entity, as it's own app and a localised music player shared across Mac, iPhone and iPad, and then create an "Apple Music" app that allows users to listen to iTunes Radio and stream iTunes songs, create Apple Music Playlists and differentiate between "Apple Music" streamed services and bought hard copies of your own music. By doing this, they could also create an Apple Music Streaming Web Player that you can sign into from any;location and any computer (ala Spotify).

Combining the two is massively confusing and over-complicated and causes this very problem.

Poorly though out and poorly integrated, what a mess!

Their cardinal sin IMO is to think that people want "the same music on every device". They should have done it the other way round and inject Apple Music into the local library, not "cloudify" my whole music library (which is even larger on my Mac than on iPhone but I don't want them to be "merged")

I am unable to delete any songs from iCloud within the newly created empty library. They re-populate 10 seconds after hitting delete.

Did you use a special trick or setting ?

I agree entirely. A better solution is to take an iTunes library and choose what music you share between iPhone and iPad and vice versa, keep this sharing between your local library and devices, pick and choose flexibly what you want to see on each device.

Seperately, create an "Apple Music Streaming App" which is a separate entity, pay £9.99/month and use it stream radio and songs and create playlists within the app itself. This two apps would be all things to all people, satisfying those who want to keep control of their music, and those interested in streaming without corrupting data and destroying local iTunes libraries.

Seems really incredibly obvious to me, but the two services are so totally different and warrant two totally different apps. As soon as you start to merge, upload and download data into a million hard drives, you begin to corrupt data.

I fixed it. All you need is a back up of your music folder and the previous itunes library .itl. What I did was:

1. I started a virtual machine -> windows. (can be a other pc as well)

2. Open iTunes, login with your apple id and turn on Apple Music's iCloud library. iTunes will ask you to use this one.

3. Go on your iDevices (iphone,ipad etc.) turn off the music library feature in settings > music.

4. Now delete all the music on your devices because these original files are damaged.

5. Go back to the pc, delete all the music that pops up in batches with a maximum of 999 files.

6. Close iTunes on the other pc / virtual machine

7. Delete the music library in the iTunes Media folder en replace it with the back-up music folder

8. Now rename the iTunes Library.itl (Music>iTunes folder) to iTunes LibraryFUCKED.itl (or whatever) and do the same to the XML file.

9. Copy Paste the most up to date iTunes Library file (in my case iTunes Library 2015-07-01.itl) from the previous itunes library folder in the iTunes folder.

10. Start iTunes.

This worked for me.

Great, I think this will work for everyone as long as you have a recent library backup.

When my iPhone was screwed up I still had the old version of iTunes on my Mac so that's why I could re-sync metadata without issues, but I'll check and if I see something fishy I'll use your method.

Also before getting rid of the iTunes on the VM you can delete all tracks that were synced from iCloud, in this way you will erase your iCloud library

iTunes library when you turn on iCloud Music show me duplicity. For speedy deletion I marked the whole album and I deleted the downloaded songs (Remove Download) and iTunes have deleted my original songs - without any warning. I can not find the original restore files ...

yeah that's what i meant with delete all the music that pops up. I meant the music thats in the cloud. It is needed to get a empty music library in iCloud

Same here, turned 'iCloud Music Library off', restored my iTunes library from my Time Machine backup, and on my Mac everything is in good order again.

After fixing the iTunes part on my Mac, I synched my music to my iPad and iPhone 6 (both with the latest iOS 8.4 version). There I still have issues where mainly the pictures of the artists or completely mixed up.

I don't dare to turn 'ICloud Music Library' on, when I did that initially i completely screwed both Album Art, titles of the tracks, broke albums up in multiple albums. It was really a mess.

Yeah to recitfy the issue I restored my mac from Time Machine.

Went into my iPhone settings and deleted all music from there and then synced with iTunes via USB with iCloud Music turned off.

Everything seems to be back to normal no issues but still annoyed I can't use Apple Music properly.

Is iCloud Music Library on by default when you update to iTunes 12.2? It was on by default for my iOS devices but I overlooked checking this on iTunes earlier - I will be checking for this later when I get home. I was using traditional iTunes match prior to the update so maybe it would be on by default. It's making me nervous to look at my iTunes later, I didn't notice anything was amiss. It does make me wonder whether I am dodging the issue because I have avoided joining apple music and just sticking with match. I notice most of the reports are coming from people with Macs. On the windows forum here for apple music I cannot see similar reports. Doubtful but perhaps this is significant.

No If I remember correctly you ahd to turn it on. It prompts you when you first attempt to add something to your library from Apple Music.

It didn't happen instantly but once I tunred it on on both my phone and mac I notice my phone straight away because it reloads your library and it instantly looked wrong then onc ei looked at my mac I could see signs that was going the same way.

It happened to me only after I enabled iCloud Music Library on iTunes on my Mac, then the corrupt data synced across to iPhone via iCloud.

Looks like iTunes and iCloud can't handle the data correctly and corrupts, the "Merging" of data really should be labeled "Random Screwing Up"

I'd check your trash for any deleted songs. Gosh this is a mess.

I had a backup of my library so it's fine. I decided to try to set up a new iTunes library and use just Apple Music & iCloud Music Library. And I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that it works *really* well. Everything syncs in seconds from my mac to my iPhone. I have not tested adding albums to this library from my old one yet. It might work really easily. It might not. I think the big issue is iTunes Match, which has always been horrible. So essentially, Apple Music works great (besides the UX problems. It needs a lot of work to be consistent across the whole design. It's like they kept half the old interface and added a new interface for parts of Apple Music.) They just did a sucky job integrating it with our previous iTunes experiences.

i have iTunes Match and have switched on Apple music as well...the problem I have is that my three devices (iPhone, iPad and macbook) are all now operating in isolation. Libraries are fine on all three and music is playing/streaming ok...but any changes I make to playlists or adding music dont feed through to the other two devices. How did you manage to get your devices syncing so well? Do I need to switch match off, and if so how do I do it?