It’s been an interesting and confusing day. I arrived at Apple this morning to talk to them about my issues with Apple Music and to hopefully fix my problems. The good news is that I have about 99 percent of my music back.
Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. The missing and duplicate song issues that we’ve all seen in Apple Music are being fixed shortly. They are certainly aware of what’s been going on, I can assure you.
Now to talk about my missing music. I am an iTunes Match customer and have been since the service started. This allowed me to have all of my music in one library, match it to iCloud and then stream my songs from any device. It worked flawlessly for me. When I bought a new device, I just logged into iCloud, turned on iTunes Match and all of my songs were there.
Apple said my music was never deleted and that it was in the cloud the entire time. Before Apple Music, iTunes Match would show me all of my songs—matched, uploaded, and purchased. However, if you turn off iCloud Music Library and Apple Music, iTunes Match will only show your purchased content now. There is no way to separate iTunes Match from the iCloud Music Library. Before, you would turn off iTunes Match—now you would turn off iCloud Music Library.
So now I have the iTunes Match service that I pay for separately, and Apple Music, both of which use iCloud Music Library. There is really no way to get away from them if you want to use the latest and greatest from Apple.
I’ll admit, I’m still trying to get my head around how this works.
Some of the songs I own were incorrectly tagged as Apple Music, but that’s been fixed too, which means they show up correctly in iTunes. That is great news.
However, I’m still missing a couple of hundred songs. Apple’s theory is that I deleted them—that when I was trying to fix Apple Music, I mistakenly deleted my own files. While I concede that it is within the realm of possibility that I deleted my own files, it doesn’t make sense to me.
Here’s where my confusion comes from. I own all of Ozzy’s albums and quite a few compilations. I can’t think of a single reason why I would download an album I already own, and album that is in my iTunes Library, only to delete it. I can’t think of a good reason for that.
Here’s one possibility. Perhaps I deleted an Ozzy compilation album (I believe I did do that) that contained tracks that were also on some of his studio albums. I’m wondering if iTunes Match deleted my version of those same songs—songs that I own from my own CDs, purely because the titles were the same as those on the compilation album.
At any rate, I have most of my music back in my library. Since I don’t have access to my original Ozzy library, I will have to buy those tracks again because he is one of my all time favorites.
At this point, I’m just glad to have most of music back, but I still have no idea what happened to the other songs, for sure.
Update: I corrected the description of iTunes Match being bundled with Apple Music. They are separate services. 7/24/15 4:03 pm