all iTunes Library garbaged

Try Empty/corrupt iTunes library after upgrade/crash.

tt2

Hi turingtest2, thanks for your suggestions. They do work to recover the old library, but well: As soon as I do reactivate the Cloud-Service of Apple Music, the library becomes incomplete again. Seems to be an issue with DRM or such. But well, there are still a lot of files in the crashed library, which weren't originally purchased with iTunes.

I'd make sure you have a thorough backup of your own content before trying again. Do you get an option to replace or merge when you try to enable it? It seems merge would be the correct response. Perhaps iCloud Music Library isn't for everyone. Or you could make a second library and gradually move content into it.

tt2

No, the software doesn't give me the option to merge or replace. It just wants to be enabled ;-) I did all the backups, yep.

Okay, here is what I did to solve my problem (hopefully) - although the solution is ugly, it seems to work. It's more or less the "gradually move content into a new library"-solution. And I want other readers to know what to expect of this process, so they can decide, if it's worth the trouble:

- Apple Music just crashes normal playlists. The content of the library with all its ratings etc isn't touched. So intelligent playlists are unaffected too.

- The fault seems to be, that not all of my library is uploaded in the cloud-library so far. Well, I've got more than 25.000 songs, but it didn't give me a notification and anyway: no reason to fidlle with my playlists. BUT I can tell the system by hand to import/sync a file or bunch of files in/w the cloud.

- If i export my playlists by hand from my old library and reimport them to the new one, they seem to stay stable.

This would have been a tedious and frustrating process anyway, but customer-experience was further enhanced by three bugs, I encountered during the process in this software-component out of ****. I really would like Apple to fix this stuff. It's absolutely unworthy and disappointing. Wasn't there any beta of the synch-mechanism? HOW COME?

- First Bug: Even if i delete a playlist (or playlist-folder) from my local iTunes-library, it doesn't necessarily delete from the half-completed cloud-library. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Anyway, if you are replacing your playlists with reimported ones, you will have pretty annoyingly the old playlists or folders pop up again. So you have double playlists. You can tell which ones are the reimported ones, by the "not-in-the-cloud"-symbol - and delete them again ... and again ... and again. Some of them stay deleted. Not-Synching seems to happen, when the system is busy uploading, but that's just a guess. So I guess in the end i will succeed against this hydra. Shame on you Apple!

- Second bug: I would have liked to export/import my whole library, but the system gives me an unidentifiable error.

- Third bug: For some playlist-imports, iTunes gives me an error "Songs not found" or so. Which is annoying, because of course the songs are perfectly at the same place in the library as before, and by hand i can fit them in the playlists again. But this occures just for every 10. playlist or so and is manageable, even if it's frustrating. And some playlists are of course less important than others ;-) So I just fix this in a few cases.

Bottomline: For people with just a 150 playlists or so (like me) this seems to work. (I hope it doesn't crash again.). I really like the possibilities of Apple Music. But it's not for early adopters. The synching-mechanisms of the software are a catastrophe and Apple should revisit it completely.