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

person5598 wrote:

Hey, I'm having this problem. I have the correct album art on my Mac, but it's messed up on my phone, every time I try to sync, it just says it is not able to. Did you have this problem?

Looks like what happened to me, I just disabled apple music and icloud music library, all my albums on iPhone were without artowrk then, I then re-synced with the Mac and it got back to normal. You can try deleting all your music from your iPhone (through settings/usage) and then sync back with your Mac.

Eight pages of reporting issues, finding workarounds, discussing the sheer disaster that this iCloud Library is, and no tech-oriented blog has reported the issue yet. I think people should know that to use Apple Music properly you have to embrace a iTunes Match like approach. Tech support told me it's explained on their website, too bad when I switched it on there was no direct link or explanation on iPhone.

Apple shouldn't be a "me too" company, they used to come later but with better products, now the mechanism of merging my library with apple music is (when it works and don't trash everything in the process) exactly the same as Spotify or other streaming services. From a company that has the absolute and total control on developmente and integration of its apps I expected much more. For example apps like Stezza or Cartunes can play Apple Music songs you have in your library, but with no album art.

What a mess. Sort it out Apple.

Nothing much to add. Apart from: the Apple Music-cluster bomb hit my library too 😠

Well it looks like I have similar issues. My library is approximately 19,000 songs, of which about 10,000 were synced to my iphone. I had dabbled in the past with MATCH but I didn't really like losing control of my library so I turned it off.

One of the more appealing aspects of Apple Music was to integrate some new offline/downloaded tracks from the streaming function with my library. (I am a long time user of RDIO and it slightly annoys me that I need to use two apps to listen to music...). So, I downloaded IOS 8.4 to my phone, and it suggested I upload my music to the cloud - also a requirement if you want to use the offline listening feature. I did so. So that was 10,000 songs in the cloud. The following day we had the iTunes 12.2 update. I own both an iMac and a Macbook, but up to now have not used iTunes on the iMac, my music library is on an 128GB SD card in my laptop. (With a fairly recent copy on a NAS drive).

So, I upgraded my laptop, and thought I'd let it join the iCloud party. As this was the source of my music, it made sense to me to merge the cloud library with my laptop library. I thought that meant that the 9000 or so tracks that weren't on my phone would end up in the cloud.

That did not happen.

What did happen: almost every album in Itunes, the cloud, on my phone etc etc got the wrong art, almost every song got the wrong metadata. It is an absolute disaster area. I tried the renaming of old library files trick...but to no avail. So far I have had to delete all songs from the icloud library (instructions in a previous post on here - and you DO have to limit the deletes to 999 tracks at a time). Luckily I have the imac I can test that on. I can now see my icloud library is empty. I have tried to empty out the iTunes library and recreate it from the files on the SD card. No such luck - all I have is a complete mess of wrong metadata. I played an Idlewild song, it came up with ELO cover art and was actually a Godspeed You Black Emperer mp3.

I have now deleted everything from the iTunes music library, files included, and will rebuild it from the NAS version which I use for Sonos.

Honestly Apple, this is shocking. I have some degree of IT literacy - how are your core customers coping?

Follow up to my earlier post. After resetting the old iTunes Match information (without having a subscription for at least half a year) the library seemed fine at first glance. It took quite a while to upload the entirety. Lots of songs had the "removed from iCloud" tag, but they could all be added to the iCloud library.

No duplicate playlists, everything in the library was accessible not only on my mac but also on my i-devices.

However, after a closer inspection there are a lot of files mixed up. Tasmin Archer is now apparently with Porcupine Tree, c'mon. A Marc Cohn song is listed as Steve Winwood etc. In all those cases the matching algorithm thought it's a duplicate, with the correct song marked as the duplicate.

In this example the first song is in fact Push from Matchbox Twenty, the second one - marked as duplicate - is lovely PJ herself.

Bottomline, glad i have a backup. Will revert to my time machine backup and NOT ENABLE ICLOUD LIBRARY.

What a major cluster$%&!! Apple. Please get this sorted out ASAP

Woa, what a disaster! My situation is this one: iPhone updated with iOS 8.4, iTunes still not updated with the latest version. On the iPhone I didn't activated Apple Music, iCloud Music Library, etc.: there's only my "physical" music on it. On iTunes I have iTunes Match activated from the begining and now working fine, after years of fixings. When I will update iTunes and maybe activate Apple Music and iCloud Music Library will I have any problems? Again, iTunes Match is working fine on my iTunes and my library is perfectly organized: what should I do now? Thank you guys!

The same happened to me. Here is what I did. Delete the music off your phone using the settings/general/usage. I plugged in to sync, but cancelled immediately and then unchecked the music box, essentially again removing al music from device. I the did one more sync and added all music back. Phone seems fine now - cloud turned off on all devices.

This issue is getting coverage...hopefully Apple is listening and working on fixes.

Some tech site articles commenting on this issue are below. All refer to this thread.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2943532/users-experiencing-mangled-music-librari es-in-itunes-12-2.html

http://www.cultofmac.com/327897/did-icloud-music-library-break-your-collection-h eres-a-fix/

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8877129/apple-music-icloud-problems

http://mashable.com/2015/07/01/itunes-icloud-music-library-bug/

tried the previous itunes playlist but didn't work for me. Right now the music library is a total disaster. I would click on one song and it plays something entirely different, though the artwork is right. What a mess Apple! I would appreciate apple music but DONT mess with our local files!

I have just managed to get my iTunes Library back how it should be following some of the steps here with the .itl file so thank you for that. I spent hours on the phone with Apple yesterday and today they told me to try iTunes Match which did not work (Should say i tried iTunes Match when it first came out and it was a mess then!) since putting on iCloud Music Library Artwork and tracks are all wrong even though the albums appear in iTunes. As far as i can tell the free service still includes the radio stations so you are paying £9.99 a month for them to completely screw up your iTunes and be able to make music available offline.

Apple have not got a clue what to do to fix it and my case has now been sent to the Engineers.

I'm another victim of this debacle.

Overnight my iTunes library on my Mac has been wrecked, 580GB worth built up and curated over many years. Now I have missing/messed up artwork, tracks, albums, orphaned tracks, mixed up music playing when it should be something else - just a mess, I am lost for words.

The restore of the .itl file is pointless for me as the files have been physically altered on my server, I can see some 130 odd Artist folders were modified each containing any number of albums, including my vast Various Artists folder. I just don't know where to start.

Only thing in common is that I previously used iTunes Match but stopped when I hit the 25,000 track limit.

Has anyone else had this happen WITHOUT ever having iCloud Music Library/iTunes Match enabled? Installing Apple Music/iOS 8.4 has changed the artwork for some songs on my iPhone. The choices aren't entirely random, but for instance it will change all artwork for the tracks on a compilation to each single's artwork. Or in some cases a crappier version of the correct art (ie adding a "Deluxe Edition" sticker on top).

Not as bad as some of the people who's whole libraries were effed up, but still very irritating if you've spent a lot of time making sure each album had the right art.

Are users who were using iTunes Match previously also experiencing this problem? The reason I'm asking this is because I seem to be among the few for whom iCloud Music Library seems to be working perfectly as intended.

To elaborate: I am an active iTunes Match subscriber and therefore had iTunes library perfectly matched with the iTunes Match cloud (or whatever it is called). When I installed iOS 8.4 and enabled iCloud Music Library on my phones and iPads it simply picked up the already synced iTunes Match cloud library and put it under "My Music" on my devices. Next I went ahead and enabled iCloud Music Library on the machine (a Mac Mini) where I have actually stored my ripped music files (i.e. my offline iTunes library) and it didn't foobar anything at all.

So I was wondering if those who have an iTunes Match cloud sync prior to migrating to iCloud Music Library are immune to this issue.

Nope, I have an active iTunes Match subscription and I'm in the same situation as Ciarals: my iTunes-Match-based library has gone and now on my iPhone there are only few "physical" songs.