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

Thank you for this! So annoying that Apple can't get it together with iTunes stuff. I was thinking about joining iTunes Match again but after this debacle I won't be.

Yes, I had this issue and then restored my library from a Time Machine backup. I am disappointed that the iCloud Music Library doesn't work as smoothly as I expected it to. It seems like it's just a renamed failed iTunes Match.

I hope that Apple comes up with a fix to this issue as this was one of the primary things I looked forward to with Apple Music.

I've only just managed to register with Apple Music a couple of hours ago through iTunes (as the iTunes Windows version came out really late last night UK time and I don't have a compatible iDevice). I'd already read about people's problems with artwork and knew not to turn iCloud on - it didn't ask me to! It came up with a message on the right saying it was uploading to iCloud or something. I panicked and turned it off in Preferences. Thank goodness I did!

It's so ridiculous that they have had zero consideration for people who have spent years maintaining a tidy Library and think nobody would care if they started replacing tags and artwork. And that nowhere on the website or on iTunes does it explain exactly how iCloud works. It just does whatever it does without asking!!

I'm annoyed because the main reason I was willing to give Apple Music a try over Spotify was that it seemed like it was going to be easy to integrate streaming songs with my library. I didn't want it to touch my existing library - I just wanted to be able to add songs to it. It ought to give you this option.

I do understand that if you wanted to stream all of your library rather than storing it on your iPhone, rather than it allowing you to upload your whole library with all your tags and artwork in tact, it swaps it with a version already available - but I don't understand why it seems to swap it when the original file is available on the hard drive.

Hope they sort it out or I'm probably never going to be able to happily switch to a streaming service.

I second that

THANK YOU! You're a life savior!

Also, from a YouTube clip I saw of how Apple Match works, my understanding was that when it matches your library, that doesn't automatically replace matched songs with the iTunes Store version - it only does it if you delete the song from iTunes, and then tell it to replace it. So it's weird that the iCloud thing does do it automatically.

AcerBen wrote:

....

It's so ridiculous that they have had zero consideration for people who have spent years maintaining a tidy Library and think nobody would care if they started replacing tags and artwork. And that nowhere on the website or on iTunes does it explain exactly how iCloud works. It just does whatever it does without asking!!

Typical Apple I'm afraid - they think they know best.

They screwed over iWork users with loss of functionality, killed MobileMe functionality for inferior iCloud ones, annoyed iPhoto and Aperture users with a half baked replacement for both with loss of simple and advanced features, buh hey you can 'follow' some bands you don't want to and a load of other nonsense......but control over time you've invested in getting a mature library together, nah....

This happened to me, going back to Spotify after the Apple Music trial ends. Absolute **** show. Apple should be ashamed... another botched launch.

Worse still, if you take a look at the screenshots below of mismatched artist images, playing the tracks actually plays a third, completely unrelated artist!!

AcerBen wrote:

I'm annoyed because the main reason I was willing to give Apple Music a try over Spotify was that it seemed like it was going to be easy to integrate streaming songs with my library. I didn't want it to touch my existing library - I just wanted to be able to add songs to it. It ought to give you this option.

Same for me, but the truth is that they didn't integrate Apple Music with the local library, they did the opposite: they integrated/matched the local library with the cloud. Why? I have one Mac with all the music and one iPhone with what I want on the go, why can't I just have music from Apple Music appear on both without all this matching garbage? Let it be an option, not the standard way.

For those of you like me who don't have a Time Machine backup (I know, my own fault, long story), if you try just copying the "Previous iTunes Library" as suggested in the solution to replace the destroyed library, it doesn't actually fix anything. The metadata was written to the actual music files. When I try and play a messed up file, I get the beach ball as it trying to figure out what's going on, then the song disappears from my current view, it starts playing, but the artist and title are completely wrong. If I go to that artist in my library, there it is currently playing next to the file with the same name. When I pull up the files in Finder, there they are full of duplicates (but not actual duplicates, since the actual songs are still there and play fine, but the filename and metadata is just completely wrong). Besides manually correcting the corrupted metadata or giving up entirely and throwing my library in the trash (over 130GB worth), there's really no solution.

Since I have never used Match will I be safe in using the new Apple Music Service?

JonD25 wrote:

The metadata was written to the actual music files.

Oh that stinks... do you have iTunes set up to automatically manage imported tracks and put files in its own folder?

rblmac wrote:

Since I have never used Match will I be safe in using the new Apple Music Service?

You will be safe if and only if you don't turn on iCloud Music Library when asked. Check it in Music app preferences.

GGuess I have been lucky. I checked my iTunes and the iCloud music library was enabled already on by default but I see no issues. Playlist changes are syncing across devices. I'll reserve judgement for now though. I guess it's because I am only a match customer. Apple music is something i skipped so it's not messing my library. At least not at the moment.

If you are a Match customer you probably already have a matched library with what Apple has on its server, then iCLoud Music Library and Apple Music should do no harm to you. My iTunes library was safe because it still was the old version