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icloud music library will not update/display on Mac


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Maybe start from scratch? :-O

 

Yeah, I guess I know what you're saying, but (1) I have a thousand hours invested in meticulously tagging and editing, and (2) this is the first moment in *almost* a year in which I can make my library actually, mechanically function, at least vaguely as it is supposed to function. On the one hand, it is disconcerting to see that iTunes can inexplicably only read my files from the cloud, rather than from my external drive, where they have happily and peacefully resided lo these many years. On the other hand, this is the only moment I've had since last *April*, that my library has functioned like it is supposed to function. And I have to take some relief in knowing that my external drive, with its ~75,000 tracks, is also backed up (weekly) to a second drive, and to Time Machine, and to Backblaze offsite. Surely my actual music files are redundantly safe. So that's the dilemma I face, just shut up and use it "as is" (even though it's incomprehensively bizarre), or keep trying to f*** around with it, and risk the current usability, broken though it may be. Apple Senior Support & "Customer Experience Team" ----> still AWOL, eleven months later.

 

If and when we reach the one-year mark (weeks away), I think I'll follow through with my original angry threats, last spring, to send physical FedEx letters to the brass, now soon to be on the upper floors of the shiny new spaceship. May well fall on deaf ears, but at this point, couldn’t hurt. Maybe just be cathartic for me, like the below, and there's something to be said for catharsis.

 

Grrrrrr.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys,

 

I have been following your problem for the past two months. I also have a large iTunes library with around 40.000 songs with lots of cover- and ID3-tag-editing done. Some of then songs were also broken files. I have finally solved the issue and would like to share with you how I did it.

 

I started using apple music a while ago. It worked fine on my phone. I didn't really want all my music to even be available in the iCloud library, but I wanted apple music to sync between my devices, so that I wouldn't just have it on my phone. Unfortunately of course, that doesn't work.

 

The issue was that because of the large number of songs, iCloud Library didn't sync and I got the same error as you did. After seeing that nobody could help you, and getting very disgruntled over the state of things (i.e. apple music files piling up on my phone, but none of them being on my iMac), I decided for a radical approach: Copy the iTunes folder to an external harddrive (therefore not "losing" my precious songs) and delete all my owned files. All the titles I didn't find on apple music or that I had edited to my liking, I could just import again via the hard drive, and then let them get uploaded into the cloud. One by one.

 

After I deleted all the songs and activated the iCloud library, something curious happened. Apparently, while I was trying to get the iCloud to work, earlier, iTunes had already uploaded a lot of my songs into the cloud. Some were in grey writing (with the cloud symbol drawn in dotted lines), and some were actually uploaded properly. This goes to show that the iCloud library just can't cope with this much music all at once, also porbably because it's edited to such a degree. Anyway, I deleted them again, and they kept reappering. Also, I couldn't download songs that I had previously had in my library from apple music. Annoyed, I made a new iTunes library, and then when songs reappeared, I deleted them in batches of about 5,000 songs. Only once since I did this successfully two days ago did some of the "ghost songs" reappear. Also, maybe because the meta-files from the old iTunes library got deleted, I was now able to successfully download previously owned songs from apple music.

 

I then took on the painful task of manually recreating all my playlists, which took a couple of hours, but it works now. If you plan on taking this route, export your playlists in .m3u and open them in VLC media player. If you open them in iTunes, they will be empty, because the directory they point to no longer exists. If you open them in VLC, it gives you an error, but you can see the songs that are in the playlist and re-add them manually. I also added some of the albums I thought to be essential.

 

So, buddy, it looks like this is your only way out. Everything works fine for me now. It looks like iCloud music library just can't handle this much all at once. That's probably also why nobody at Apple is getting back to you, because there just isn't a way for it to work, and Apple doesn't want to own up to it.

 

If you really do want to keep your music in your library, it might be a good idea to do what I did, and then reimport part of the music to your iTunes, uploading it to the cloud piece by piece. That way, iTunes doesn't need to deal with too much at once. This is also what the Apple Care people told me. You could try to reimport them from your hard drive with, lets say, 1000 titles at a time, and then go from there. Maybe that will work. But with the size of your library (which, if I remember correctly larger than mine), this might be too painful a thing to undertake. Also, I don't know if your apple music will be reimported to iTunes properly, having been deleted from the cloud. That usually removes your downloads from your computer. So be careful with that.

 

Anyway, I hope I was able to help you with your problem, although it might be an inconvenient truth. I'm pretty happy with the way things are now - my computer is running much better since the HDD has been decluttered, and whenever I need to get hold of my "old" files, I can just import them. Which is really all I ever wanted. It helps to let go of the idea of having everything in that one library.

 

Greetings from Germany!

 

 

Best

Johannes

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