Did iCloud Music Library break your collection? Here’s a fix

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Maybe wait until you try this on your own Mac.
Maybe wait until you try this on your own Mac.
Photo: Apple

Several iTunes users have taken to the Apple Discussion forums to complain about iCloud Music Library — part of the iTunes 12.2 update — has destroyed their music libraries.

Discussions user Tuff Ghost explains that everything was fine with his 13,000 song iTunes library, until he installed iTunes 12.2 on his Mac and allowed it to enable iCloud Music Library.

“All of the (sic) sudden it starts overwriting my album art with completely wrong art (example: Weezer showed art for a Radiohead album) on both my iMac AND my iPhone, screwing up metadata by putting random songs in albums where they didn’t belong (there was a Cursive album where the first track was listed as a Foo Fighters song).”

When he clicked to listen to a song, it would play a completely different one, like the metadata for the files was completely incorrect.

If this is happening to you, another Discussions user may have found a solution.

iCloud Music Library is like iTunes Match – it lets you stream songs that you’ve ripped and purchased in your iTunes library to your devices so you don’t have to carry them around wasting space. Seems like it’s also flawed like iTunes Match.

Zackadelic says that all you really need to do to fix this all is to replace the .itl file in your iTunes Library folder to the previous one, and all will work as before. Just don’t enable iCloud Music Library again.

Here’s what he suggests:

Close iTunes
Navigate to you iTunes folder
Choose a former .itl file from Previous iTunes Libraries (preferably the most recent one before the Apple Music disaster) and drag it into the iTunes folder
Rename the messed up .itl to iTunes Library (Corrupt).itl
Rename the previous iTunes library that you just dragged in to iTunes Library.itl
Open iTunes

Your music library should be restored to perfection!

If it doesn’t work, though, you can reverse the process above and be no worse for wear.

Chris Welch over at The Verge thinks the real issue might be the application of DRM to your matched files, so you can watch out for that, too.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes. Here’s hoping Apple has a fix in the coming days.

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