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

Yup 😟

Not a total loss I guess. My library was starting to look more like an episode of "Hoarders" rather than a well curated collection of music I liked. And I've been using Spotify the last few months and was fine with it. But still, what a mess this is. It's not even worth it for me to call technical support. Nothing they can do.

Add me to the growing list of people impacted by this product defect.

Fortunately, I have a SuperDuper backup that I can use to restore from.

Has anyone already completed a restore of an old library? Before I take this step, I would like to borrow from the experience of this community to see if anyone has any tips or guidelines on the most appropriate steps to take to restore.

Any tips? thanks in advance

I would just like to send you a HUGE thank you!!! I was righteously ****** off because I also have a big music library that seemed I would never be able to fix after this disaster. Thank you for saving me hours of work and frustration!!!

Thank you. This worked for me. My playlists and ratings were all screwed up by iCloud Music and this restored it.

It looks @Zackadelic has the answer I am seeking. Will try this tonight.

The solution by going back to an old .til-file unfortunately does not fix this problem.

The files of all songs that are scrambled have been renamed and moved to the folders of the new artist/album-directory in the file system.

In my library of almost 18000 files almost 2000 files have been renamed and moved to other directories.

So even when you use the old itl-file, iTunes does not find the files that had been renamed.

Fortunately I do have a recent backup.

But I currently I do not want to think about the time that I have to waste to fix everything.

Yes Apple, well done!

I am also affected by this, banging my head against he wall for the better half of the day already. But i think i have found a solution - at least for me.

Reading through this thread, and a couple others, i was trying different solutions. Renaming the itl file etc. While this fixed the mess it didn't actually solve the problem. Activating iCloud Music library always screwed it up again.

In my case it was old iTunes Match information that always screwed me over. I had the subscription when it came out but canceled it about half a year ago (or even before that, cant't remember). But apparently activating iCloud Music library always looked up that old information.

So i reset iTunes Match according to this thread: How to reset iTunes Match (the process proved that it was still holding the old information even though i cancelled it a long time ago) and now i can resync my up to date library (yay for backup) with the iCloud Music library.

If you try this, make a backup beforehand, also important - give it some time. You might have to delete your songs a couple times. They came back a few times when i did it, like little Zombie songs.

One difference i noticed right away is that now a whole lot more songs are queued for upload then before when the old iTunes Match crap was messing things up, also a lot of songs now have the "deleted from iCloud" mark. But thats an easy fix, just click on them and chose "Add to iCloud Music Library"

Good luck all.

Make sure you have all the songs (go through your list). I replaced the .itl and when I looked, many songs were deleted in the upgrade/iCloud Music fiasco.

I have a TimeCapsule and so I went back to 8PM yesterday. Some albums that are showing missing songs indicate that the deletion coincided with the iCloud Music activation shortly after 8PM yesterday.

Don't think the .itl replacement will solve the issues.

Nice call. A quick and easy fix. What a weirdo move by Apple... This feature causes a disaster for anyone who didn't get the entirety of their library through iTunes. Wacky move Apple!

I've been shafted by it as well.

Spent 2.5 hours on to online chat. i told the problem to 6 people and got cut off 3 times and still didn't get any sort of answer at all. just basically put on hold for 20 mins at a time. asked to explain it aga. transferred to someone else, rinse repeat...

As much use as a chocolate *****.

My solution?

I had my library backed up in Google Play

I've redownloaded it and deleted the old library all together, and manually removed any music from Apple Music

The integration was the main reason for trying Apple Music.

Back to Spotify I think

bah spotify kinda suck too in its own way none of those streaming service is perfect,

Wait... are all the cool Apple Music features nested within iCloud Music library? It seems that if I'm playing streamed music and wanted to add one of these songs to a playlist of mine, it'll ask me to enable iCloud Music library again. I can either 'cancel' or face certain death to artwork etc.

You literally saved my life! Thank you

Anyone else lose all their playlists on their iPhone after the upgrade? Any idea how to get them back?

So i reset iTunes Match according to this thread: How to reset iTunes Match (the process proved that it was still holding the old information even though i cancelled it a long time ago) and now i can resync my up to date library (yay for backup) with the iCloud Music library.

The problem with this is that if you don't have a subscription, you have to pay $25 just to be able to clear your old library.