Then, last year, my phone decided to delete its entire local music library. I stored my music library on a Mac Mini here at home and synchronized it to my phone with iTunes.
At that point, I completely stopped trusting anything Apple does related to music in the cloud. Apple Support was unable to help (“have you tried clicking the cloud icon in iTunes?” 🙄). A while later, I found that I couldn’t download a few specific tracks from my iCloud Music Library, no matter what I tried. I canceled Apple Music and was able to restore my music library from a backup. It doesn’t matter sometime around the time Apple Music was introduced, I decided to try the new streaming service, which promptly screwed up my cloud music library in nonsensical, opaque ways. Truth be told, I still don’t understand the relationship between iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library. This post documents how and why I did that.Ī long, long time ago, I used iTunes to play music on my computers, the native Music app on my iPhone, and iTunes Match and/or iCloud Music Library to synchronize music to my phone. More follow-up from my recent “Now” post: I’ve finally (mostly) extricated my music library from the entirety of Apple’s music ecosystem. Replacing iTunes, Music.app, iTunes Match, and iCloud Music Library February 11, 2021
