Kirk McElhearn offers up an insightful look at why his (and many other folks’) iCloud Music Library metadata is getting scrambled.
So why were so many of my tracks showing in iCloud Music Library as Apple Music tracks with DRM? The metadata matching that occurred on the iPhone meant that iCloud Music Library could not verify whether the tracks that device contained were my original rips or tracks that I may have downloaded from Apple Music for offline listening. As such, it assumes the latter, adding them to my library as Apple Music files.
If it didn’t do this, you could download a couple thousand songs from Apple Music, turn off iCloud Music Library, and then turn it back on, and those songs would sync to your library as Matched tracks, without DRM. In other words, it would be trivial to get DRM-free copies of anything in the Apple Music library.
It’s a bit of a long read, but interesting and informative.
The new Apple Music has been a complete clusterf_ck for me. So much so, I was motivated to open a Spotify subscription and I find it much easier to navigate, set up playlists, etc.
iTunes usability has been trending downward for many years now, but this may be the final straw for me. I’m really hoping Apple redeems themselves with a brilliant update, but all indicators suggest otherwise.
What the hell Apple? Get you shit together.
My library is also completely ruined. The only way to fix it is to replace the .itl file with the one prior to Apple Music and leave the iCloud library off. However, its then not possible to add music to your library from that computer.
I’m promptly going back to RDIO or Spotify after my free trial– both of which offer library matching without actually touching your files. I also find the UI/UX drastically better with either Spotify or RDIO. Very disappointed that Apple made it so complicated to accomplish simple tasks, such as shuffling an artist across all albums. Also frankly iTunes is a massive, hot, cluttered mess. “Simplify” apparently has been lost on the iTunes team.
My iTunes removed all downloads (movies, music, TV Shows etc.) over 500GB worth of downloads plus about 300GB imported movies from BlueRays and DVDs. But there is TimeMachine and Apple Care suggested I didn’t reactivate the iCloud Library in iTunes until the next update.