If you’ve been having problems with Apple Music and iCloud Music Library incorrectly matching songs in your library, you’re far from the only one. It turns out the reason is that Apple Music doesn’t use the same method for matching songs you own as iTunes Match does. This results in significantly more errors and frustrated users.
Though iTunes Match used acoustic fingerprinting to identify songs you own and match them for all of your devices, Apple Music uses the metadata of those songs. That means if you change something as simple as the title and artist, it could match to an entirely different song despite the unchanged audio.
It’s not clear why Apple chose to ditch the more effective method for song matching in favor of the surface-level metadata.
The change was discovered by Kirk McElhearn, who wrote about the Apple Music metadata problem on his blog. A dissatisfied Apple Music subscriber himself, he experimented with renaming a Bach song in his library to “Can’t Feel My Face” by The Weeknd. Then he deleted the song locally and redownloaded it from iCloud.
Sure enough, the audio for the Bach song was gone and in its place was the hot new R&B jam. Apple Music even ignored the fact that the lengths of the audio files were completely different.
If you subscribe to Apple Music and are still a paying customer for iTunes Match, Apple Music’s less-accurate matching overrides the acoustic fingerprinting that iTunes Match utilizes. So you’re stuck with a mess.
Some Apple Music subscribers were already annoyed with iCloud Music Library after discovering it slaps DRM on music you own. It’s not that simple, but it does prevent some people from redownloading music they ripped from CDs.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
George Tinari has covered Apple and technology for over six years. On the rare occasion that he’s not sitting in front of his laptop, you can find him eating, awkwardly socializing, listening to music or singing along loudly to said music. You can also follow George on Twitter if you need more complaints and sarcasm in your timeline.
One response to “Apple Music metadata is messing up your music”
Hmm this is a lingering problem. However, i haven’t experienced this as of yet. I turned on iCloud Music Library on my iPhone/iPad/Win7 work PC. On my iMac that has my entire library and using iTunes match i have iCloud Music Library turned off. While I can’t see any of the Apple Music files i added to “my music” on my iCloud ML enabled devices, it means that Apple Music isn’t screwing around with my files. If i want to listen to any of the files that were added to “my music” from a device, i just connect to my surround sound through BT from my iPhone. Kind of a work around. I’m one of the few that are really please with Apple Music so far and plan on keeping it after the 3 mo trial ends.