What exactly does iCloud Music Library store and what is Shared between OSX devices?
Please pardon the detail... I hope someone can explain this....
What exactly does iCloud Music Library store? I can confirm that my personal song files have indeed been uploaded to iCloud Music Library as I can play them on my iMac when the files are on an external disk on my MBP. When I stop using iCloud Music Library on my iMac the songs (song files) do become unavailable. I have home sharing turned off so the iMac has to be getting the songs from iCloud Music Library.
But I'm confused as to my iTunes "Library" which is "iTunes Music Library.xml" on each Mac. Is that stored on iCloud Music Library also? I seem to get conflicting indications on this. If I add a playlist on one Mac (iMac) it IMMEDIATELY shows up on the other Mac (MBP). That indicates to me that both machines are sharing the same library.xml file (on iCloud?). However, when I look at the library (xml file) on each Mac I see from the timestamp that each library (xml) has been updated. Also, de-bunking the "library.xml" in iCloud thought is the fact that I can't keep number of plays and date last played synced. I can go thru iterations of logging out of iCloud Music Library, turning it on/off, restarting iTunes, etc and get the play and date sync working but then I notice that at some point the sync is lost again. if both machines were using the same library they would have to stay in sync.
It almost seems better to me to run family sharing (share on local network) on the main iTunes machine. This provides the option of syncing plays or not. But even at that, the "slave" machine has to have iCloud Music Library on else those songs don't appear, even if they are downloaded on the main MBP.
SUMMARY... it appears to me that iCloud Music Library is storing song files in iCloud but not the actual library xml file. Yet, the item description on the iCloud Music Library option says "Store your Apple Music songs and PLAYLISTS in iCloud so you can access them from all of your devices."
It appears to not only store your Apple Music songs but also your own personal song files also. But does it store Playlists but not parameters such as "Plays" and "Last Date Played"??
