iCloud music lib and local music file question

[AppleHater]

I was so looking forward to try Apple music until I started to read all those horror stories. Before I start my trial, I have a few questions.

I have my collection of music that built from more than 10 years ago. I spent thousands of hours to rate and tag them all the way I want. The last thing I want is to lose my collection.

First, if I don't enable iCloud music lib, what am I giving up? Can I still add music to my local lib like before?

Secondly if I enable iCloud music lib, would it removed my local files to replace it with iCloud versions? Is there a way to prevent it?

 

[lagwagon]

Enabling iCloud Music Library with almost certainly destroy some or a good chunk of all your album art/meta data you've put so much time into perfecting. (It's completely messes up a decent chunk of my library of only 7700-ish songs.) It will give a lot of albums incorrect art be it either from a different album or even sometimes from a completely different artist (yes it's that bad.) It's a mess right now. I've even noticed I have one Face to Face album always disappears (after a fresh re-sync to fix the mess) once I turn on iCloud Music Library. (Tried 4 times now and same result no matter choosing "merge" or "replace".)

Keeping it off you lose out on being able to add Apple Music to "My Music" and making music "Available for Offline".

So for the moment it's either forcing you to wreck your library but be able to fully use Apple Music or keep your nice library neatly organized and looking pretty with correct album art and not have full functions of Apple Music.