I turned Icloud Music Library Back on

Apple General
#1

Way back when Apple Music started, I tried Icloud Music Library but then there were all the horror stories about it deleting entire libraries, and all that stuff, so I turned it off.

But recently I thought I would give it another go, but I prepared myself.

Firstly I used Jaikoz Jaikoz Audio Tagger to clean up my metadata. My library was a bit of a mess. It’s also got a lot of shit in it that I don’t actually listen to, so I really need to delete a whole heap of stuff.

I have about 10000 tracks totalling around 72GB. So after running Jaikoz through it, it mostly cleaned up the metadata and also the album art. Then I made a back up of my entire library on a spare hard drive (in addition to my Time Machine Backup), just in case.

Then, I ran some scripts from Dougs iTunes scripts (look it up) to embed al the artwork in the actual music files, cause iTunes likes to keep them separate in some cases (apparently).

Then I deleted all music from my iPhone and iPad, and resynced my libraries to me with the new album art and meta data. My entire library fits on my 128gb iPhone, but I only have a few playlists on my 64gb iPad.

Then, I deleted pretty much all my playlists, wanting to start fresh with icloud music library.

Then I went in and reset my icloud music library… so whatever had uploaded/synced to the cloud the first time round was deleted from the cloud. You do this in the My Account screen in itunes.

Then I turned it on (in itunes) and left it to it.

It took me about 2 days to resync my library back up to icloud.

Then, I turned it on, on my ipad. I did the “merge” function rather than the “Delete and replace” function, so whatever music was already on my iPad stayed on my iPad.

So now I can listen to all my music, even if it’s not on my iPad (it just downloads the song if it’s not already there).

Finally I turned it on, on my iPhone. This didn’t make much difference because my iPhone already has all my music on it.

Now, any playlists I create on any device are automatically synced to all the other devices (the best feature, I reckon).

Plus if I delete any of the shitty tracks I don’t want, it’s deleted permanently on all devices… and in the cloud as well. Unless it’s something you purchased in iTunes. Then you’re stuck with it.

I still think the idea behind Apple Music is just horrible (lets face it, how many people are going to go throw all of that?). But it does seem to work mostly okay now, if you can be bothered stuffing around with it, and you do things in the correct order.

A note: I am using the Apple Music app on my Android Nexus 5X. All the music is downloadable and playable there as well, and I’ve also got all my music in google play music as well.

#2

Interested in how you found Jaikoz??

I found it ruined some of my tracks.
Eg, live songs on a compilation album made them go back to the original album, thereby creating 20 different albums/genres.
I know there is tons of options, I have just never been able to nail this app.

#3

I didn’t use Jaikoz on my entire library, only the tracks without album art (there were about 1800). I did it in chunks and watched it do it to make sure that it didn’t stuff anything up too badly. There may well be problems, but if I come across a badly tagged/album artted track, I’ll mark the track with two stars and fix it later on manually.

It’s certainly not perfect, but at least, on the surface, my library “looks” a lot better than it did previously.

There’s probably other options instead of Jaikoz, which may do a better/faster job. It’s certainly tedious, but definitely easier than doing it by hand.

#4

Doug’s iTunes Scripts still exists and is still updated??

Wow. I remember using that back in 2006. I had no idea iTunes even still supported that stuff.

#5

Yeah I was surprised as well. I used the “find tracks with unembedded album art” script, and then the “embed album art” script. I had to do them in chunks of 100 as for some reason it would fail if you tried more than that, but it worked well. I was kind of surprised that they were still there and still worked, as I figured is the kind of thing Apple might put the kybosh on. Touch wood, they still could.