I'm using the three month free apple music service, but songs of which I added the cd or an mp3 file to my iTunes library ages ago now have the iCloud status of Apple Music. What happens when the free trial stops? Does this mean I need to re-add all those files?
OS X Yosemite (10.10.4), itunes and apple music
iCloud status "Apple Music" means that Apple already had that same song and recongnized it.
So if you play the song from another device (iPhone), it plays that song which was already in the cloud without the need to upload your song from your personal, local, iTunes database.
But make sure you do not delete the file on your harddisk, because then you ONLY have Apple's version in the cloud, which you cannot access anymore after your subscription ends.
You can check what songs are only in the cloud by looking at the "location" attribute.
If it points to a real file (.mp3/aac/etc) it's local on your disk.
If it is "icloud" the file is only in the cloud .
If it indicates only a subfolder "Apple Music" in your iTunes folder, then it's an iCloud song which made available locally. (Downloaded, but with DRM, not usable after subsription ends)
That's fine, but if you want to use your actual owned songs (not purchased through Apple) in 3rd party apps, this feature is absolutely terrible.
My kids use Video Star and any songs that get matched prohibit them from being downloaded.
The problem is that I can't sync these songs locally because if you have iCloud Music On (required to have ANY offline music) you can't sync locally, as it acts akin to iTunes Match.
I really don't want to have to throw down another $25/year on something I shouldn't need to spend money on.
iCloud status on songs
