Apple Music plays wrong version of a song when playing an album

Well....I have gone through about 1/3 of my iTunes Library - deleting any album that I did not get from Apple Music and then re-adding the albums to my library. And while the "matching" seems MUCH, MUCH better than it has ever been, there are still the very occasional glitches. But so far they have been very rare.

Thanks Jnlybbert, your 'trick' really helped. It's a major pain in the neck to have to do that for the TONS of live/demo music I have in my library but it's something, and it's a start. I hope that when Apple release the new version of Apple Music (I heard it's coming out this June?) they will address this issue. Most real music lovers aren't just going to have standard songs that can be matched and replaced in the standard way.

iTunes will update or match anything added to iTunes period...

While you can cancel the process. there should really be a checkbox "Never match or upload till i manually want to"

Matching is done by 'duration' and title info (song name only). That's why modifying any of these would work upload always. if it doesn't upload, then the modification needs to be done better. It's been covered already amount all articles online and at Apple's website

Plus, if there is trouble with Apple music, I'd like to hear these same issues with Google music, since they do exactly the same comparing... There is no difference in how either service match..

If there is be a better way then point in to the direction of an article showing proof there is an alternative.

For playing incorrect songs, update iTunes... Apple has fixed this. I had the same issue,

The problem for me is that albums now play ok in my library, but if I am using Apple Music, it still plays live versions.

TBH Ive followed this thread with interest and does it not strike you that telling people to reset libraries / stop Music , add Match etc just cannot possibly be the right thing to do with this.

What i've noticed is that if Apple matches the album correctly and the song correctly then yes you seem to get the right version. If however all it has that matches , from what i can work out (and like others it appears mainly to impact my live/bootleg/alternative versions) , is the song title then you get whatever it has ....even if thats NOT the same version. That appears to be the crux of this. Surely it would be better for Apple to say 'hey i cant match this but do you want this studio version instead?' and we can say 'no' then we know we need to move our unmatched music through the use of iCloud as it will , no idea if it does , move the right version off my local machine up into the cloud and then down into any one of my devices thus preserving all the metadata and the right version..

I have a wonderful live version of Rolling Stones - Sweet Summer Sun - Hyde Park live in 2013 that Match/Music just replaced with studio versions of the same songs even though they are all much shorter and i note that iTunes store doesn't have the actual album ...

it shouldn't match things that don't match - Apple don't seem to care though do they...?

Think I will just manually sync stuff now ....

David Selevan wrote:

The problem for me is that albums now play ok in my library, but if I am using Apple Music, it still plays live versions.

Because your "library" - which I will assume is on your computer - is playing the actual music tracks/files that you have there. When you stream (or even download and then play) from Apple Music on your devices like an iPhone, it is playing the version that Apple Music tried to "match" and that is where the errors are occurring.

Gkinghrn wrote:

TBH Ive followed this thread with interest and does it not strike you that telling people to reset libraries / stop Music , add Match etc just cannot possibly be the right thing to do with this.

What i've noticed is that if Apple matches the album correctly and the song correctly then yes you seem to get the right version. If however all it has that matches , from what i can work out (and like others it appears mainly to impact my live/bootleg/alternative versions) , is the song title then you get whatever it has ....even if thats NOT the same version. That appears to be the crux of this. Surely it would be better for Apple to say 'hey i cant match this but do you want this studio version instead?' and we can say 'no' then we know we need to move our unmatched music through the use of iCloud as it will , no idea if it does , move the right version off my local machine up into the cloud and then down into any one of my devices thus preserving all the metadata and the right version..

I have a wonderful live version of Rolling Stones - Sweet Summer Sun - Hyde Park live in 2013 that Match/Music just replaced with studio versions of the same songs even though they are all much shorter and i note that iTunes store doesn't have the actual album ...

it shouldn't match things that don't match - Apple don't seem to care though do they...?

Think I will just manually sync stuff now ....

Have the same album by The Stones. And after my initial Apple Music setup I saw a lot of errors in the "matching". And yes that album, since it is not in the Apple Music Library (which BTW is not the same as the library in the iTunes Store) should just be uploaded.

I recently was playing with my library - trying to correct the matching errors - and decided to do a total reset and "match" of my iTunes Library. And while there was A LOT LESS mis-matching (I have a LOT of Live albums that are not in Apple Music), there were still some. However, someone else - perhaps earlier in this thread - pointed out that to get Apple Music to try to re-match, you should first delete the version from your iOS device and then re-add it from your computer where the original track resides. (I was deleting and re-adding from my iTunes library) and that seems to work much better. Have a live bootleg by the group The Rides and probably half the album was mis-matched, even after I did my library reset. But after I deleted the album from my ICML BUT FROM MY IPHONE and then re-added the album from my computer, all the tracks were uploaded.

So perhaps there is a light at the end of the Apple Music tunnel!!!

I know that this is an old question, but it comes up as a first result when I searched Google for an answer and still couldn't find one, so I thought I'd post what worked for me in this case.

In my example, I'm an Apple Music subscriber, who also allowed Apple Music to "match" my library in order to play it from the cloud on all of my devices and other computers. It works correctly most of the time, but for somewhat obscure albums or remixes in my case, Apple Music matches the songs to the original, and not the remixed version.

Apple supposedly fixed this error by allowing users to choose to "REMOVE DOWNLOAD" in iTunes 12.2(see below),

but I found that that still didn't work.

The fix that did work was to DELETE the files from iTunes, without moving the files to trash, and then adding them back to iTunes manually. I then changed one of the attributes of the album title or name of the songs (add a character, or remove a space), and I found that instead of matching, ITunes uploaded the song to my iCloud library.

Here's a more detailed guide to the fix:

It goes without saying that you should first backup your entire music library before you do this.

In this case, I'll be replacing an entire album of songs that were incorrectly matched in iTunes:

Instead of playing all of the remixes of this song, it just matched it to the original (hence the identical length of each track)

1. Open a finder window and navigate to the folder that contains the music that you wish to replace in iTunes. If iTunes keeps your folders in order, it should be in ITUNES > ITUNES MEDIA > MUSIC > (Artist Name) > (Album Name)

2. Highlight the files, control + click (or right click), and select DELETE.

3. in the popup menu, select "DELETE SONGS"

4. In the next menu, select "KEEP FILES"

5. Then, replace the songs you just deleted from iTunes by dragging them back into the program from the finder window.

6. Once you see the files are back in the list, IMMEDIATELY select them all, control + click (or right click) over them, and select "GET INFO"

7. In the next popup window, select "YES"

8. Then, change one of the attributes of the song -- in my case, I deleted the space between "Alright" and the "[Single]".

9. Wait a few minutes for the files to update (in my case, it took 6 minutes), and voila!

Hope that helps you as much as it helped me!

I have this problem too. And it is not just live songs. On the Beatles album it plays a demo version of Day In The Life! I hate to think about all the young people who are hearing this classic song incorrectly. Apple, please fix!!!!!

I was having this problem Select an Album on my Iphone using "Apple Music" it was replacing some songs on the album with Live versions of a song, and on another song it was replaced with a studio outtake of the song. What appears to be happening is when selecting an Album, it's incorrectly including songs of the same name from MY library. Don't know if this fixed the problem or the problem just went away over night. But I searched up these songs in my library and edited the song titles with a ! at the end. What disturbs me about all of this, is although these songs may of had the same names, they clearly indicated they were part of a different "album".

This happens pretty predictably for me too. Apple seems to match on artist name and song title and nothing else. So you get live versions, demo versions, or whatever randomly comes up, rather than the actual track from the album that you own.

I have the exact same problem. Mostly with U2 songs; since I have many versions of one song... I'm still looking for a solution.

I have the exact same problem

This solved my problem.

For me, the specific problem was that Apple Music played a version of the song on the iPhone that Apple has licensed for Apple Music, rather than my version of the song, which was often an mp3 created from an old vinyl record, or something I recorded from a source other than a CD- or iTunes-purchased version of the song.

More specifically, I have mp3's from the vinyl record Rockin' and Romance by Jonathan Richman, and Apple Music kept playing a version of Vincent Van Gogh from a greatest hits album available in Apple Music, and not the version from the vinyl record. It was driving my crazy to hear the less rockin' version.

To make the process faster for me, I made sure that all the songs for which I was having this problem had 4 or 5 star ratings and were in a 4 & 5 star playlist I'd created automatically based on star ratings. After turning off iCould Music Library in iPhone's Settings->Music, I synched just that playlist. I turned the iCloud Music Library setting back on, selected the merge option ("Keep Music") and I was good to go.

If I did it over again, I would have made a new, much shorter playlist just of the handful of songs that weren't synching the way I wanted them to sync. I'm sure the Apple Music versions of many of my 4/5 star playlist are higher quality than my versions.