#Music metadata database for mac update#
#Music metadata database for mac mac#

#Music metadata database for mac mac#

After adding it, the album is now in iCloud Music Library and should appear on your Mac as well as on all your iOS devices. You can skip this step if you want to modify tags on a pre-existing iTunes track(s) from your library that was previously uploaded to iCloud. You can do this either in iTunes on the Mac or in Music on an iOS device, it doesn’t matter. Add the album or track(s) from Apple Music to “My Music” by clicking on the + button. It may seem a little convoluted “on paper”, but it’s really pretty simple after you’ve done it once or twice. However, this is the best way to modify tags as you go along when adding albums from Apple Music. If your entire music library of several thousand tracks got screwed up by iCloud, there are probably faster ways to re-start from scratch than this method. You can use this method to repair tags that may have been modified on a few albums when you first activated iCloud Music Library. I think it should, as it follows the same logic explained by Kirk in his article, but I can’t test it as there is no way that I can see to temporarily turn off iTunes Match without turning off iCloud Music Library altogether. Also, I’m a subscriber to iTunes Match and have no idea if this trick will work for non-subscribers. Please note that this method won’t fix problems with mis-matched tracks (when the music playing is actually different from what you expect) it only fixes problems when you have incorrect tags on the correct music. In particular, I’ve been able to make iCloud use my own metadata (and stick with it), even on tracks added from Apple Music. I haven’t been able to figure everything out yet, but I do understand one or two things better than I did before, in great part thanks to Kirk’s article. I’ve fiddled around a lot, ran a lot of tests, and even wiped out and restored my iOS devices a few times in an effort to understand how this whole thing works. I’ve been (more than) a little obsessed trying to see if there would be a way to force iCloud to use my own metadata. Once the tracks are in iCloud Music Library (which happens as soon as you add an album from Apple Music to “My Music”), there’s a good chance that iCloud will enforce its own metadata. I haven’t been able to find any logic as to why it sometimes works and other times doesn’t. I’ve had it work on some albums and not on others, and even had some tracks of an album that got updated with my metadata, while other tracks of that same album reverted to Apple’s idea of what the metadata should be.

#Music metadata database for mac update#

You can always try modifying the tags after adding an album from Apple Music, and then go to “File -> Library -> Update iCloud Music Library” to refresh iCloud and hope that your tags will “stick”, but that’s very hit or miss. There’s all sorts of other reasons why you might want to change or add your own metadata to Apple Music or iCloud matched files, if only to correct possible mistakes in Apple’s provided metadata. For example, artists are by default sorted by first-name/last-name by Apple, while I’ve long used the “sort as” field to sort them by last-name/first-name. I want to use my metadata, certainly on my pre-existing tracks, but also on albums that I add from Apple Music. One of the main issues is that iCloud generally insists on enforcing its own metadata on tracks.

Kirk covered a lot of what can go wrong when migrating an iTunes library to iCloud in his informative article earlier this week and as he also mentions, there are seemingly random problems that can creep up, and which seem to defy all logic as to why they are happening. For now however, iCloud Music Library is a mess. That’s actually how Apple has set things up to work, and which is the promise of iCloud Music Library, if only it did in fact work.

Something I’ve wanted to do and have had problems with since Apple Music’s launch is to have all my Apple Music tracks blend seamlessly with the rest of my carefully curated iTunes library (iTunes Store-bought and CD-ripped music), and have this “blended library” available for streaming on all my devices. Warning: this is a long post aimed at people who, like me, are obsessed with the organization of their iTunes music library.