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

I've had my library destroyed by iTunes Match and will not try anything from Apple now, had tons of problems with my first iPod Classic years (and years) ago. Problems they denied existed but were finally fixed in a software update, so they did know of them! Obfuscation is the name of Apple's game when things go wrong, ever increasingly it seems

I avoid Apple products like the plague and stick only with my iPod Classic and 2nd gen Apple TV. Only use those because my 20K song library is in Apples m4a proprietary format and all star rated

18,815 songs ... 1400 full and complete albums with covers ... hundreds of hours of work, thousands of dollars of cd's that are now gone. Random, unexpected hard drive crash, no time to back up.
  iPhone6 128gig was my only back up, 90% of the music files on my phone are scrambled garbage now

SO MAD AT APPLE RIGHT NOW

I, too, have a tale of Apple Music woe, and Apple incompetence/indifference. Almost the same tale, but with an interesting wrinkle.

So, almost from the second I subscribed to Apple Music, things started going wrong in my music collection. Artwork I'd spent hours accruing was replaced by incorrect, and sometimes even ludicrously wrong, album covers. And, as many of you have experienced, I would find that random tracks were just... gone. Replaced by either a different version of the same song by the same artist, or a live version (ugh), or - in the worst case, replaced by a completely different track by a completely different artist.

Still, I liked Apple Music's wide range so much that I tolerated this. And hey, at least I had the original tracks on my Mac, right?

Wrong.

About two months ago, after the latest iTunes update, I found that EVERY SINGLE TRACK ON MY COMPUTER had been uploaded, without my permission or without any warning, to the iCloud Music Library. And the same problem now afflicted my Mac: if the iCloud Music Library didn't have the track in question, it simply replaced it with something different. And, again, often completely wrong.

As I'm a TV soundtracks junkie, I had spent years assembling a major library of tracks that it's virtually impossible to get through the iTunes store. Most of those are now gone. My beloved copy of the Sledge Hammer! TV theme tune, for example, has been replaced by a dreadful 6-minute remix of the Peter Gabriel song, Sledgehammer. Many other albums have been severely compromised. Some have even been deleted.

I've called Apple twice about this. Both times they were utterly powerless to help. Their solution: restore it manually from a back-up. Which would take about a day. My response to them: this wasn't my mistake. It's up to them to fix it.

I'm going to try some of the solutions posted here, and then turn off iCloud Music Library if successful and never speak of it again. But just wanted to get that off my chest.

Thanks for listening.

Angry,

Not Really From Tunbridge Wells.

(1) If you have iCloud Music Library, the basic idea is that any songs that their "matching" does not recognize as being available through Apple Music will be uploaded - as opposed to "matched". This is automatic and why - assuming that you had ICML turned on before the update - it was not done before indicates something wrong with your original sign up for AM/ICML.

(2) While I have seen some issues with artwork appearing which I don't remember seeing before, I have never had an occasion where the version of the track that was physically on my iMac's hard drive (in this case an external HD) changed to another version by Apple. What was occurring is that on my other devices (another iMac, two iPhone 6's and two iPad Minis) that did not have the tracks on them would play incorrect versions. (Live for studio tracks for example.) But that NEVER happened on the iMac that was using the external HD as it's iTunes library source.

(3) Expecting Apple to correct your library from their end - well that's not going to happen - even if the current issue is legitimately their fault.

I assume that the tracks you are complaining about are still on your computer's hard drive? What you can do is first remove the incorrectly matched tracks/albums from your iCloud Music Library FROM ANOTHER DEVICE - NOT THE ONE WHERE THE TRACKS ARE PHYSICALLY STORED. You then tell iTunes to ADD TO LIBRARY from the original computer library. That should correct the issue. (I have a large library - over 60K of tracks - and over 11K are live tracks of which many were "mis-matched". Doing what I suggested - I read it in another tread - has corrected all the mis-matching tracks when I play them on my other computer/devices.