Syncing music and iCloud Music Library

[Cloudsurfer]

So I've got the whole circus enabled right.  Music, iCloud Music Library. Supposed to keep my whole library in sync across all my devices, right?

Well, not so much.

Yesterday I deleted some playlists on my Mac in iTunes 12.2 and added a cd that I bought on eBay. Normally, what I do after, is sync whatever I did on my Mac to my iPhone through USB. When I tried that, iTunes said I have iCloud Music Library enabled so it wouldn't let me physically sync between my Mac and iPhone: the Cloud was supposed to take care of that.

What?

So I thought, okay maybe iCloud will sync whatever I did to my iPhone overnight. But no, it didn't. All the playlists remained on my iPhone, the ones I deleted, and the new CD I ripped was nowhere to be found.

So I was forced to disable iCML on my iPhone, deleting all my  Music songs in the process, sync the new album and playlist situation from my Mac and then enable iCML again after all that to get my  Music songs back.

How insane is this? There has to be an easier way??? How about just letting me sync manually with iCML turned on!

 

[bushido]

do u have show only offline music enabled on your iphone? otherwose u should see them as part of the cloud ready to be downloaded

 

[lagwagon]

So I've got the whole circus enabled right.  Music, iCloud Music Library. Supposed to keep my whole library in sync across all my devices, right?

Well, not so much.

Yesterday I deleted some playlists on my Mac in iTunes 12.2 and added a cd that I bought on eBay. Normally, what I do after, is sync whatever I did on my Mac to my iPhone through USB. When I tried that, iTunes said I have iCloud Music Library enabled so it wouldn't let me physically sync between my Mac and iPhone: the Cloud was supposed to take care of that.

What?

So I thought, okay maybe iCloud will sync whatever I did to my iPhone overnight. But no, it didn't. All the playlists remained on my iPhone, the ones I deleted, and the new CD I ripped was nowhere to be found.

So I was forced to disable iCML on my iPhone, deleting all my  Music songs in the process, sync the new album and playlist situation from my Mac and then enable iCML again after all that to get my  Music songs back.

How insane is this? There has to be an easier way??? How about just letting me sync manually with iCML turned on!

I agree that it's quite the pain not being able to sync the old way once IML is enabled.

As for your ripped CD not showing up. Anything added locally to your iTunes after IML is enabled you need to right click the album (you should see a dotted cloud icon on each song for that new CD) and select "add to ICloud Music Library" to send it to the cloud so your other devices will see it.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

I agree that it's quite the pain not being able to sync the old way once IML is enabled.

As for your ripped CD not showing up. Anything added locally to your iTunes after IML is enabled you need to right click the album (you should see a dotted cloud icon on each song for that new CD) and select "add to ICloud Music Library" to send it to the cloud so your other devices will see it.

I understand. But what if I alter an album, say I change the album art. Does that sync automatically or do I have to do that manually as well? And what about other changes like playlists?

I feel this whole thing is just too unnecessarily complicated. If I change something in Pages on my Mac, it's changed on Pages on my iPhone with no hassle whatsoever. Why can't they do that with Music as well?

 

[lagwagon]

I understand. But what if I alter an album, say I change the album art. Does that sync automatically or do I have to do that manually as well? And what about other changes like playlists?

I feel this whole thing is just too unnecessarily complicated. If I change something in Pages on my Mac, it's changed on Pages on my iPhone with no hassle whatsoever. Why can't they do that with Music as well?

If both your Mac and phone are on IML and you change art from the Mac, yes it will also change on the phone.

But the reason stuff gets wrong art in the first place is because the matching system can match a song to an album (say some random compilation or same artist but different album that also includes the same song.) The system from then on thinks it's what it's it matched to regardless of correcting the art after the fact.

An example. I have an album by NOFX, it's a single album with only two songs. Both being same songs as a full length released same year. Track 1 is identical to the full length but track 2 is a demo version of a song on the full length. The system matches track 1 as it being the full length album (track 2 uploads since the track name has (demo) in it so it doesn't match incorrectly to the full length.) Just two tracks, but since it thinks it's the full length I get the option at the bottom to "see the rest of the albums tracks" tapping this takes me to the full length track list and even changes the background colour from white to black (the 2 track single album has white art while the full length has black.) More proof the system changes what it thinks the album is based off the mismatch, bringing up the option to "show album in iTunes Store" takes me to the full length, even though the single album is ALSO in iTunes.

To get around all this I have to add say (demo) or anything really to track 1's name so that it doesn't match to the full length. Fixing the bad art match plus the bogus links to the full length.

It's because the matching completely ignores the album tag 100%. My library is small compared to a lot of people (7700+) it's going to take hours/days to edit track names (to not mismatch), upload, re-edit back all those track names. I'd say a good 20-30 of my albums get mismatched because of a song or two on an album.

 

[Rigby]

To get around all this I have to add say (demo) or anything really to track 1's name so that it doesn't match to the full length. Fixing the bad art match plus the bogus links to the full length.

Hm, this is interesting. It seems to prove that Apple Music uses a different matching algorithm than iTunes Match. Match completely ignores the meta data provided by the user, i.e. you cannot force it to upload a song by e.g. changing the track title. This would also explain why Apple Music causes so many issues while Match mostly works fine. If you subscribe to both, they are apparently trying to mix the two different matching algorithms in some way.

 

[lagwagon]

Hm, this is interesting. It seems to prove that Apple Music uses a different matching algorithm than iTunes Match. Match completely ignores the meta data provided by the user, i.e. you cannot force it to upload a song by e.g. changing the track title. This would also explain why Apple Music causes so many issues while Match mostly works fine. If you subscribe to both, they are apparently trying to mix the two different matching algorithms in some way.

Yeah, with ICloud Music Library you can force what gets uploaded by giving track names that for sure won't match. Just so that what is in the cloud is identical to what your local library is. Huge pain in the butt for people who have large libraries, gathered over many years and many sources.

 

[danny_w]

Sorry for your problems and I don't have a fix. But the more I read about issues like this the more I realize that multiple whole generations have been duped by the Apple cloud debacle. Nothing new here, Apple has STILL not learned how to make a cloud service that works. I've been with them since the original Mac Mini and multiple generations of half-baked cloud services that would "almost" work but not quite, then Apple throws in the towel and starts all over again, abandoning what they had and wreaking havoc on their customers. Sorry but I learned my lesson long ago and will never trust any cloud service from Apple ever again.

 

[Razeus]

Sorry for your problems and I don't have a fix. But the more I read about issues like this the more I realize that multiple whole generations have been duped by the Apple cloud debacle. Nothing new here, Apple has STILL not learned how to make a cloud service that works. I've been with them since the original Mac Mini and multiple generations of half-baked cloud services that would "almost" work but not quite, then Apple throws in the towel and starts all over again, abandoning what they had and wreaking havoc on their customers. Sorry but I learned my lesson long ago and will never trust any cloud service from Apple ever again.

This. I really want Apple Music to work and work well. They greatly improved iCloud for documents in iOS 8. They made great improvements in the speed of iCloud Photo Library, but in the end it wasn't for me - especially when I saw what Google Photos dropped on them. That's when I realized that Apple is making me do all the work and charging me a premium. Google does the work for me and just wants me to see an ad.

I'm not sure. It's becoming clear, I'm going to have to go all Apple or all Google. And with what Google is doing with Photos and their virtual assistant, I'm leaning towards Google. iOS 9 will be the make or break moment for me.

 

[Cloudsurfer]

Sorry for your problems and I don't have a fix. But the more I read about issues like this the more I realize that multiple whole generations have been duped by the Apple cloud debacle. Nothing new here, Apple has STILL not learned how to make a cloud service that works. I've been with them since the original Mac Mini and multiple generations of half-baked cloud services that would "almost" work but not quite, then Apple throws in the towel and starts all over again, abandoning what they had and wreaking havoc on their customers. Sorry but I learned my lesson long ago and will never trust any cloud service from Apple ever again.

I know exactly what you mean. I've been with Apple since 2005. Believe me I've lived through Mobile Me and it wasn't pretty.

Still I feel they can do things right. iCloud for the most part works for me. It syncs calendars, iWork documents, even my photos are perfectly synced. It's not the perfect service but by far not the worst either. I just wish IML was as easy to use as their other services, or at least have the option to manually sync.

 

[lagwagon]

I know exactly what you mean. I've been with Apple since 2005. Believe me I've lived through Mobile Me and it wasn't pretty.

Still I feel they can do things right. iCloud for the most part works for me. It syncs calendars, iWork documents, even my photos are perfectly synced. It's not the perfect service but by far not the worst either. I just wish IML was as easy to use as their other services, or at least have the option to manually sync.

I don't have many issues at all or any with iCloud. It's how it handles the matching that throws it all off. It looks at artist and track but ignores album completely.

 

[Rigby]

Yeah, with ICloud Music Library you can force what gets uploaded by giving track names that for sure won't match. Just so that what is in the cloud is identical to what your local library is. Huge pain in the butt for people who have large libraries, gathered over many years and many sources.

To make things even more confusing, iTunes Match also uses the iCloud Music Library.

There are basically two different aspects: iCloud Music Library is a database in the cloud were the equivalent of the iTunes .itl file is stored (e.g. basically your meta data along with a link to the actual audio file). One of the fields in the meta data (visible as iCloud Status in iTunes) determines the source of the song, i.e. purchased, uploaded, matched, or Apple Music. Among other things, this determines whether you get a file with DRM when downloading from the cloud.

The tricky part is how the user's existing songs are added to the library. If you only have iTunes Match it is simple: Match simply stores the user's meta data in the cloud library and tries to find a matching audio file using only acoustic fingerprinting (in part to avoid fraud by the user). In the case of Apple Music, they are apparently also looking at the user-provided track and album meta data to identify a match (which is safe because Apple Music has DRM and the user can download all songs anyway). Now what happens if a user has both Apple Music and iTunes Match and tries to match an existing audio file? I bet this is also the reason why some people who subscribe to both suddently get DRM versions of their own songs.

 

[lagwagon]

To make things even more confusing, iTunes Match also uses the iCloud Music Library.

There are basically two different aspects: iCloud Music Library is a database in the cloud were the equivalent of the iTunes .itl file is stored (e.g. basically your meta data along with a link to the actual audio file). One of the fields in the meta data (visible as iCloud Status in iTunes) determines the source of the song, i.e. purchased, uploaded, matched, or Apple Music.

The tricky part is how the user's existing songs are added to the library. If you only have iTunes Match it is simple: Match uses the users meta data and tries to find a matching audio file using only acoustic fingerprinting (in part to avoid fraud by the user). In the case of Apple Music, they are apparently also looking at track and album meta data to identify a match (which is safe because Apple Music has DRM and the user can download all songs anyway). Now what happens if a user has both Apple Music and iTunes Match and tries to match an existing audio file? I bet this is also the reason why some people who subscribe to both suddently get DRM versions of their own songs.

Apple Music's matching doesn't look at album. Thats why there is such a huge mess. It matches the track name but assumes it's from x album (if it's on two or more albums) and doesn't take into consideration it's off album y instead of x.

I would REALLY hate to see what it would do to a full Rush discography. With so many songs appearing on multiple albums studio, remastered, new version, live(multiple times on it's own)...and so on. I only have 8 of their 100 albums. (Yeah 100 is an exaggeration, but they do have a TON of albums)

 

[Razeus]

I always hear of this Rush band. Never bothered with it. Time to "discover" new music.