“I don’t use Apple Music for my main music library, but do use it on a test library on my MacBook, as well as on an iPod touch. I recently added it to my iPad as well, to be able to use it more around the house,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Kirkville. “I don’t trust my main library to Apple Music because of the many problems that iCloud Music Library causes. As I’ve been adding music to my library, I’m realizing just how bad Apple Music’s metadata is. Here’s an example.”
“I wanted to listen to some Frank Sinatra. There’s a big set called Ultimate Sinatra, with more than 6 hours of his music. So I added it to my library. When I started listening to it, I noticed that I wasn’t hearing all the songs that I knew. I looked at this album in iTunes, and I was surprised to see how it displays,” McElhearn writes. “This is a single album, yet iTunes shows it as a number of different albums with different titles.”
“Here’s what I think is happening. I’ve seen that iCloud Music Library changes tags and artwork. Rather than assuming that your tags, the ones you may have manually changed, are canonical, it just decides what the tags should be on your music,” McElhearn writes. “This is terribly wrong, of course. Not only should iTunes not change metadata that I’ve edited, but tracks added from Apple Music, or downloaded from the iTunes Store, should have a unique track ID that can be used to prevent this.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What a mess!
This has been an ugly mess for me as well. I haven’t dug in to see if it’s affected my original library, but I would say every 10th album has an issue
But.. but.. but.. Apple said it was great, so MDN lauded it as the way things should be since before it existed.
I hope everyone has learned that you cannot assume Apple’s products will be great anymore. Today’s Apple must be treated like every other company — caveat emptor.
(In case this large number of responses encourages you, know that I didn’t read a word you wrote after the first sentence. None of us did. You’re wasting your time.)
And Apple wonders why it gets slammed on blogs for messed up software and hardware refreshes that don’t contain their newest tech, followed by back orders of its newest tech……a rutterless ship.
Why in the world would Apple have any interest in rutters?
Isn’t Samsung down there? Apple is following them down.
Couldn’t say. By why would you want a ship full of amorous stags anyways?
I’m disconnecting my main Mac from Apple Music and will try and put my music library back together this winter. I’ll keep my iPhone and MacBook Pro connected, but that’s it. I learned something useful from this article.
I pay for Apple Music and Match.
I record my own personal music. I use to be able to easily sync my iTunes with my iDevices so I can listen to my own personal music.
I have digitized a lot of my own CDs.
(I am going to yell now.) APPLE, I HAVE GIVEN UP TRYING TO SYNC MY OWN PERSONAL RECORDED MUSIC and my own ripped CDs with my iDevices. It use to be easy. Now it’s a nightmare.
The only thing music related I use from Apple now is their subscription service. I give up. I remember when I use to brag to my PC friends that everything on my Mac “just works.” I can’t say that anymore.
Will I leave Mac, hell no. It’s just sad those days are gone.
All my playlists of personnel music sync as they do before to all devices…. What’s so hard?
I get different results when I sync my iDevices connected directly to my main computer via a cable versus when I sync my iDevices through the cloud via Music Match. If Music Match doesn’t recognize my personally made music, My iTunes won’t upload it to my Music Match account, thus my iDevices can’t downloaded it.
My iPad is (almost) always synching tracks — when I’m just synching pictures or something — and I have no idea why. I haven’t added or removed any music from the library. There was a definite loss of music from ripped CDs for me, and a bazillion others — go look at Apple discussions, but that has seemed to stop for me for about the last year or so.
SOMETHING, an app, is on my iPad that iTunes keeps thinking was a purchase, and is not in the library, and will be deleted if I don’t transfer it. Do you think anything will tell me what it is? Stupid Apple.
If you won’t leave Mac, then they aren’t incentivized to be better.
That explains a problem I’ve been having. When the Apple Music compatible version of iTunes came out it munged my library, changing about 1500 songs from 256kbps to 128. With Music Match I would have been able to delete a song and redownload it as 256 without losing any metadata. Now, however, I lose play count and any lyrics that might have been loaded.
Gotta love those iTunes updates!
Goes to show that Apple Music should have been released as a separate app, with the ability to import music from your iTunes library, as opposed to being integrated with iTunes Music itself.
Even though iTunes Music & Apple Music are both focused on music, they are two different animals. They need to be broken apart.
Yes, but that would be sane. Remember, we’re talking about iTunes here.
This is not an iTunes problem. It’s a leadership problem.
I think Tim Cook needs to get better about not sending half-baked products and services to market. Admittedly, Steve Jobs was very hard to work for, but Apple’s customers benefitted greatly from his demanding nature.
Apple is now the home of the eternal beta.
As soon as they debug the shipping version of software they replace it with another buggy release.
Well, Apple and Alphabet do bother start with A.
I have a very large media library of track ripped from my CDs , video files ripped from my DVDs, TV shows and Movies recorded by my EyeTVs over the years-currently an EyeTV HD, podcasts, purchased indie video files, purchased iTunes music, TV and Movies. All running through iTunes, hosted on my Macs.
iTunes has never played well with metadata , iTunes Match also has issues with metadata and the addition of Apple Music- which I do NOT use has added DRM issues.
This weekend Some of my iTunes Match files refused to play despite showing up in my Library on my iPhone and being logged in to iTunes and iCloud ( I use different sign ins for iTunes and iCloud). It repeatedly denied me playing the file and others until I logged out of iTunes and rebooted my iPhone and logged back in.
How Microsoftian.
This kind of thing becomes more and more common on Apple software and hardware. So much for it just works. iTunes music files and iTunes Match files are not supposed to have DRM, yet I got a message ” you are not authorized to play this content”.
What a effect up mess.
iTunes Match files don’t have DRM, but Apple Music files do.
With the release of the Apple Music version of iTunes, many Match files got DRMed. I had a few dozen files that happened to and I never tried Apple Music.
Exactly, but the files that would not play were not Apple Music files. They played after a reboot.
Is Apple responsible for the metadata tagging or do they still link to Gracenote and pull the metadata from their database when ripping CD’s? Is it Apple’s fault if bad metadata is coming from Gracenote?
For Apple Music tracks, which is what this article is about, it’s Apple who provides the metadata. They may use Gracenote in some way, but most if not all of the metadata should have been supplied by record labels.
I use iTunes for music, but not Music Match or iCloud. I’m pleased. I keep telling people and keep posting that if you accept someone else taking care of your stuff, they’ll take care of it in a way you wouldn’t. So don’t take “free” and then complain about what happens. This is a teachable moment.
People in various places keep begging for a file system in iOS, including me. Then I think that they may just give us what we ask for, then I shudder.
I never understood the griping about Apple Music. It’s met all my expectations and I use it all the time. Maybe it’s because I’m not a “power” user that I don’t see its deficiencies but I’m guessing that would be the majority leader users.
Come on Linux foundations. Can you do better? Go beyond these pety cooperations
Sent from my iPhone
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I suffer the same crap as most above on this post. I want to play a specific album. It’s on my iPhone. I’m in town and look at it and half the tracks are greyed out meaning I can’t play them. Why the f-ck not. They came from my CD. They were there and now they are not. The most frustrating thing is when the cover art changes to some shit photo I don’t recognise. I’m a long term apple user who has always sung the Apple song. But now they’ve screwed my music and that is unacceptable
I agree with one of the posts above. Instead of Tim Cook wasting time spreading the word of his personal beliefs he should be inside Apple screaming at the employees like Jobs once did to sort this fecking mess out
It really is unacceptable
Tim – don’t screw our music -FIX IT