A day after the launch of Apple Music, users are reporting an iTunes bug that is wrecking music libraries by scrambling artists, albums and tracks.
Apple‘s tagline, “All your music in one place,” implied there was finally a solution to having your music spread out across different services and devices. But one of the key features aimed at making that a reality, iCloud Music Library, may have been the culprit behind the scrambling of iTunes libraries on Macs.
Apple has not yet publicly acknowledged the problem or responded to our request for comment. But I fell victim to the bug and documented the degree to which it jumbled my library.
After I updated to the new iTunes 12.2, I was asked to enable iCloud Music Library, which is supposed to sync your tracks across your devices. Once it was enabled, iTunes randomized the majority of my roughly 25GB library. Tracks moved across albums, album art didn’t match music and artists were listed up to seven or eight times.
Apple has not yet publicly acknowledged the problem or responded to our request for comment. But I fell victim to the bug and documented the degree to which it jumbled my library.
After I updated to the new iTunes 12.2, I was asked to enable iCloud Music Library, which is supposed to sync your tracks across your devices. Once it was enabled, iTunes randomized the majority of my roughly 25GB library. Tracks moved across albums, album art didn’t match music and artists were listed up to seven or eight times.
Above, you can see album art from the artist Crystal Castles, but the album is titled Reflektor, which is an Arcade Fire album. There are also tracks from The Beatles, Outkast and other artists. However, when I clicked on “Hey Ya” by Outkast, a Crystal Castles song started to play instead.
In the example above, Arctic Monkeys’ album art is displayed while Elliot Smith is listed as the artist. Meanwhile, when I clicked on The Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” an Arctic Monkeys song played.
I’m not the only one experiencing iTunes library issues; people are complaining about the errors on Twitter and forums, including an Apple Support Community thread. The bug seems to be affecting those who have either signed up for iTunes Match or used iTunes Match in the past. In my experience, music not purchased through iTunes was especially scrambled.
@lippo and again iTunes Match or iCliud Music library messed up my music on my iMac and iPhone. Very bad words right now.
— JT Ray (@TheRealJTRay) July 1, 2015
But it gets worse. If you’ve set up Apple Music on an iOS device, and iCloud Music Library is enabled, all of the erroneous changes are reflected in the new Music app, too.
Apple Music messed up my organized iTunes library. I’m cringing.
— music + bling (@boyofparadise) June 30, 2015
iTunes makes a copy of the library right before jumping to using iCloud Music Library, so you can pull up the old library if you hold the alt key while launching iTunes. But the bug also jumbled the iTunes media folder where music is stored locally, so an old library might not know where to look for saved music.
One long, painstaking fix for the problem could be to delete your entire library and add everything back via Apple Music. But that has an obvious drawback: If you ever stop using Apple Music, you lose all your music.
In my case, music was backed up to a hard drive, so there is the option to add it back that way. But if I want to use Apple Music and sync it across devices, it’s not clear if using the backup method will reactivate the bug. Another option is to go back to the computer’s previous state using a Time Machine backup.
In the meantime, one thing is clear: if you haven’t updated iTunes yet, it might be best to avoid doing so until Apple issues a fix.
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Reference: Mashable
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