Apple Music Download or Stream my purchased music?

[kagharaht]

Silly me. I recently did an Erase All Contents and settings on my iMac M3 and never restored from Time Machine. I was wondering why my Music folder is only 2GB but all music plays fine. I had at least 60GB of purchased music. Mixed Purchased from the Store and Imported from my CD's. I'm still subscribed to iTunes Match despite having Apple Music Subscription. So all my music has been streaming on my new iMac all this time. I can redownload them all back to the iMac I suppose or should I keep them in the cloud?

 

[CharlesShaw]

I remember the early days when we had to make our own backups of iTunes purchases or potentially lose them forever (there were stories of a lucky few getting Apple to let them re-download their purchases), so now that those days are gone, I never worry about having my purchases downloaded, unless I want the music synced to my Apple Watch.

 

[CMoore515]

I stream from my MacBook Pro. Ditched Match a long time ago as I felt it was redundant.

 

[CharlesShaw]

I stream from my MacBook Pro. Ditched Match a long time ago as I felt it was redundant.

I used to pay for Match so I could create and maintain playlists of iTunes purchases on any of my devices, but dropped it last year and don't miss it.

 

[kagharaht]

I do have a previous older TM backup on another portable drive stored away. I see the Music folder there with all the Music I burned, purchased and custom ones from independent artist and so on. I keep iTunes Match so that custom music or independent ones not in Apple Library are uploaded on the cloud and can be played on other devices. I could be wrong, I didn't think Apple Music subscription does that also.

 

[WebHead]

Stream to listen, download to back up (even though I've been relying solely on my iCloud Library for years, against Apple's advice)

 

[kagharaht]

Stream to listen, download to back up (even though I've been relying solely on my iCloud Library for years, against Apple's advice)

Thats true, what if internet access is down. It can happen. When I had COX POS, some idiot hit a POLE that the fiber cable connected several cities. Thing was down for almost a day. Then it was temporarily patched up because the repair would take days. Our service was so bad for days, you can only stream 480 p on the TV one at a time!.. I think I'll download all my stuff directly to the iMac.

 

[kagharaht]

Weird. One of them is failing getting error -1002? Searched online for solution. some say delete the folder in the music library and try again. Same error. Several now. If you guys haven't downloaded you purchased music and are all on the cloud, you may want to do so and make a backup. Luckily I have an old external drive where I copied the old library and was able to retrieve and manually add them back.

 

[WebHead]

what if internet access is down

Pretty much all my listening is done on the phone and I've never had an outage (so far).

If you guys haven't downloaded you purchased music and are all on the cloud, you may want to do so and make a backup.

Yes I'll soon be downloading at the highest available bitrate, whatever that is these days. Not sure if it's the same error as yours but I've found some tracks didn't sync from my original source, so I'll have to go back to an old HD to get them.

 

[kagharaht]

So just heads up. There were a lot of Music and PDF booklets from purchases back when it was iTunes that refused to download. These are actual purchases from the iTunes Store. I had to delete them from Apple Music and find the backup to reimport them. Lesson for me is to make sure purchases are really downloaded and backed up, not just sitting on the Cloud only.

 

[WebHead]

So just heads up. There were a lot of Music and PDF booklets from purchases back when it was iTunes that refused to download. These are actual purchases from the iTunes Store. I had to delete them from Apple Music and find the backup to reimport them. Lesson for me is to make sure purchases are really downloaded and backed up, not just sitting on the Cloud only.

Good tip! Doubt I still have all of mine backed up but luckily they're not huge priority for me.

 

[kagharaht]

I have been out of the tech loop for awhile it seems. I had no idea my Purchased songs will convert to HLS format. I had Lossless Download enabled and my purchases downloaded again in HLS....hmmmm I like the format of lossless, my purchases are now protected format. I'll have to turn off Lossless and re-download them.