Apple Music deleted 50 of my iPhone playlists

[kimhill]

Apple Music deleted 50 of my iPhone playlists.

 

I went to "My Music," and saw that all but four playlists of my (pre-Apple Music) tracks were gone. The songs themselves seemed to still be on the iPhone, although since I noticed a few gigs more free space than I remembered having, I'm wondering if Apple Music had started uploading tracks to the cloud & deleting them from the phone.

 

As an attempt to fix this on the phone, I turned off "iCloud Music Library," and started a sync. For some reason, iTunes needed to sync 2000+ songs to the phone- perhaps these were songs that had been matched & deleted.

 

In any case, turning off iCloud Music Library on the phone brought playlists back to normal, and has fixed my extensive album art errors too - all the art is back to normal.

 

Without iCloud Music Library, I can't add any Apple Music tracks to my library. It sort of knee-caps a lot of Apple Music functionality (surprise). But the good news is that I can still listen to Apple Music stations and features, and Apple Music no longer has its grimy paws on my personal music files!

 

For me at least, it looks like if you turn off iCloud Music Library everywhere, your existing personal music data will remain unharmed, and you'll still get a decent piece (but not all) of Apple Music functionality. At this point, it seems clear that no one with a large/carefully curated music library should risk turning on iCloud Music Library on any device — desktop computer or iOS.

 

Prediction- we'll be waiting a long time before these anomalies are fixed. Judging from recent history in iTunes bugs ("Waiting for changes to be applied"?), they may never be fixed. I was completely sold on Apple Music, but it may be time to look at Spotify again, in order to have access to a full set of streaming features, while protecting my existing library from harm.

[kirkmc]

I hate to say, but I agree with you. I don't think any but the most egregious bugs will be fixed. I was told by Apple that some specific sync bugs were fixed in 8.4, and I see they're still there. As for the DRM bug - some people, including me, find their iTunes Match files mostly become Apple Music files with DRM - I'm told that's a bug, but no idea when it'll be fixed.

[kimhill]

I hate to say, but I agree with you. I don't think any but the most egregious bugs will be fixed.

 

It may well be that music fans who prioritize their large, carefully-curated libraries will simply not be using iCloud Music Library — which shuts off a lot of Apple Music functionality. This will include a lot of DJs who use iTunes to manage their music library — alongside pro DJ software like Traktor or Serato.

 

But abandoning iCloud Music Library is the only way, if you don't want to throw away years of curation. The race to the bottom continues.