When Apple introduced Apple Music, one of the features they introduced was the iCloud Music Library which on the surface is similar to iTunes Match – it scans your library to see if there are songs it can match, after which it will let you stream those songs from the cloud onto all your devices.Sounds simple and convenient enough, doesn’t it? Unfortunately for many users it seems to be more trouble than it is worth. According to multiple user reports, it seems that enabling iCloud Music Library has destroyed the local iTunes libraries of many users, such as needlessly duplicating songs, messing up artwork, screwing up the tags which has resulted in artists and songs being misplaced, and more.
According to one user in the Apple support forums, “All of the sudden it starts overwriting my album art with completely wrong art (example: Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) on both my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadata by putting random songs in albums where they didn’t belong (there was a Cursive album where the first track was listed as a Foo Fighters song). Even worse, when I’d click to listen to certain songs, it would play the wrong song/artist, like the metadata was hijacked.”
Given that some users have spent days, hours, or even years organizing their iTunes libraries to the way they like it, this obviously does not bode well for them. Some have reported that they had to resort to using Time Machine to restore their iTunes libraries back to the way it is. It is rather unfortunate given the potential of iCloud Music Library and hopefully this is something Apple will address ASAP.
We should note that not everyone is experiencing problems like this. There are some for whom Apple Music and the iCloud Music Library just works fine with, but yet there are those who are extremely frustrated by the errors they’re encountering. Are you one of them?
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