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

I hope you recover, did the emergency services arrive yet?

Csound1 wrote:

 

I hope you recover, did the emergency services arrive yet?

That's just the problem — they never arrived.

Really , Csound1… It’s tedious to pick at language as you've done here. In an era when so much of our life and work is in electronic form, the idea that “disaster” is somehow an inappropriate usage here — is ridiculous.

The silence from Apple is deafening!!!!

I can not believe they're not addressing this....  I've tried restoring "Previous iTunes Libraries" going back to January 2015 and still have the same problem and it is across ALL my devices, MacBook, iPhone, iPad & Apple TV.  My music library is now just a waste of space!!  Am going to try to restore from a Time Machine back up, if that doesn't work then I'm seriously considering dumping the lot and moving over to Spotify so I can at lease have music to listen too.  Wonder if I can invoice Apple each month the cost of my Spotify subscription since they're the ones that have created this problem!

Since my last post, I have managed to discover how it should have been solved.

This doesn't solve much for people who have irretrievably lost their playlists; but is a work around for people who can get them back.

For some reason, when the new system has been installed the new iTunes physically can't update pre-existing playlists through iCloud; so whatever you try and update them they will automatically restore them to what they were LAST saved as before the change over.

It's infuriating, but after a lengthy discussion with an "expert" when the system had updated, and they'd changed "iTunes Match" to "iCoud Music"; and had not clearly promoted this fact with the users; I was discovered (and actually "told" by the "expert") that in truth the people who have created it actually know very little about what the new system actually does and how it actually reacts to certain algorithms. 

(They were pushed to release as fast as they could to keep up with the Music Streaming fraternity, which actually has little interest to a lot of genuine music lovers; as they collect and download the Music they want...so the system didn't have the opportunity to have the same level of scrutiny as previous iTunes releases has)

I doubt that this problem will be fully assessed by iTunes developers now, as too much time has passed; and in fact no music has actually been lost, it's just been un organised by the iTunes library.

Anyway; I digress.  Here is how to fix it.

1.  (If you can) go to Time Machine and restore iTunes to a point in time when your library was playlisted the way you wanted them.

1b.  (If you can't do 1a) it's more time consuming, but if you have an iPod of some description, don't sync it, but go through it and physically add the songs back to the list. (Again if you can). 

1c. If you can't do either of these, then I'm afraid that post iTunes changeover there's little you can do to restore your pre changeover playlists to the way they were since the changeover. (As I said this is not a solution, but it is a work around)

2.  Make sure that iCloud Music is currently turned off.  If not switch it off now.

3.  Create a New Playlist. 

4.  Go to your existing playlist and select all the songs in it (it can be done through edit much easier than selecting individually).

5.  Drag all of the selected music from your existing playlist to your New Playlist.

6.  Delete your old Playlist.

7.  Rename the New Playlist to the name of the old Playlist.

8.  Switch on iCloud Music. The entire system should now be able to update automatically.

Is it the iTunes program or the iTunes library that you restore from time machine?

To be honest, those parts I was just referring to what other people have done to restore th their library.

I'd imagine resorting the library from that date would be fine. 

I used my iPod to inform me what music should be on my playlist, and did it manually.  Then followed the steps I discussed above

It worked! I just replaced the whole iTunes folder in my Music folder.  I don't trust it yet to turn iCloud Music Library, but at least if I do, I now know what to do to fix it.

Thanks!

It messed up my library of over 10000 songs too. I restored my library using Time Machine as you suggested, and all is well, except I've lost all my ratings! Grr.

I thought I learned my lesson with iTunes Match. This iCloud Music thing is almost as bad.

**** Apple. itunes update killed all my playlist content in Apple Music. Gone. I didn't have a backup. **** of an organisation.

I can only hope that Apple quickly and with great care solve this matter with iCloudlibrary editing metadata on tracks in iTunes. To me what happened was that:

a) content I purchased in iTunes Store didn't show up in the library and the support people from Apple couldn't solve the issue after trying several times. In the end they made a refund and said please try a repurchase after three weeks.

b) content I have purchased from other suppliers had it's metadata changed and suddenly iTunes said that I got it from iTunes Store, with dates of purchase added etc. A little bit funny was, that the content that had it's metadata changed in a incorrect way, was in Apple Lossless format, and to my knowledge iTunes Store isn't selling any content in Apple Lossless format at all.

And adding to the problem is that the support staff said that to fix the issue I had to bye some kind of support plan! And furthermore there wasn't any possibility to a mail a response to their reply. Customer satisfaction, where did it go?

To me this is a serious problem. My OWN content suddenly being changed to "Apple content" on my OWN computer.

This all happened after I started Apple Music. I'm very worried why Apple has let this out in real life. A carmaker that has a new car out with this kind of major flaws, would have to be calling it back at once.

I'll add a data point here. I have a small 24,000 track iTunes library (I own a lot more, but that subset is fine for my iTunes setup.) iTunes Match is ON, synced across 4 devices, no problem.

When I first enabled Apple Music/iCloud Music Sharing, I saw a bunch of goofed up artwork and album assignments - but I was not able to deal with it at the time, as I was traveling. I noted that within 48 hours, the problem had essentially taken care of itself, and names/albums/playlists pulled themselves back together. Even though my collection is small, it required time to crank through it all.

At this point, I've got Apple Music/iCloud Music Sharing syncing across 2 Macs, an iPhone and and iPad. I've got a mix of store tracks, ripped CD tracks, and original music that no one else has. Zero problems syncing changes of all kinds.

BradPDX,

You are one of the lucky ones. 535 users have posted on this thread, and only a handful have reported no problems. As I said, you are extremely lucky. I only have 17,500 tracks in my library, but I quickly saw what iCloud was doing to it and I stopped it immediately and restored it from a Time Machine backup. I am not an iMatch subscriber, and I have a mix of tracks similar to yours.

I guess you're saying that, if a person is willing to wait until iCloud has uploaded one's entire library and worked its magic, everything will come together in the end. I wish I were willing to trust that would happen, but I just cannot do it. After following this thread from the beginning and reading what iCloud has done to 98% of the larger iTunes libraries out there, I'm just not willing to involve myself in a procedure that might cause me to have to restore my complete iTunes library again.

You are one lucky dude. You backed into a solution to the problem because you were traveling when it occurred. I guess you saw that it corrected itself before you really would have had to correct it yourself. I wish I had enough faith in Apple to just check the iCloud box and let her rip and see what happens. Maybe it would end up just like yours. I would need a whole lot of encouragement to do that. Glad it worked for you.

Similar experience here - although with a smaller library.

But what REALLY grinds my gears is that Apple Music SWAPPED some of my tracks with theirs. If I was just getting a bit rate uptick I'd probably be fine with that but they've swapped out incorrect versions!!! I've lost dozens of rare remixes that I can likely never get back.

I don't have and have never had iTunes Match. Apple Music was on for 2 days during the trial and as soon as I noticed what it was doing to my library I killed it with fire.

Repeated requests to support and their Twitter account have yielded....absolutely nothing. Complete blanking of the issue. No response. Nothing. Nada.

I understand that folks on this thread are having real problems, not dismissing that. But the very nature of support issues is that one only hears from those who are having problems - if stuff works, people rarely post messages or contact support to say so. The fact that there are 535 users on this thread does not, alas, tell us very much about the scope of the problem. It may be 10% of Apple Music users, it may be 0.01%, we really don't know. Of the 4 other people I personally know who are using Apple Music, no one has any significant issues - an equally meaningless figure.

I am an iTunes Match user, and so my library was already available in iCloud prior to Apple Music. I never had any significant issues with iTunes Match, either - it always worked as advertised.

I hope that matters resolve themselves well for you.

Im sorry but these instructions made no sense to me is there an easier way to explain them or include pictures step by step please.