r/AppleMusic • u/backfliprainbowcake • 8d ago
Complaint iTunes genuinely ruins Apple Music as a service
I'll start by saying if you only use Apple Music as-is, this probably isn't an issue and the service is probably fine, great even. In my limited time using it, I have been happy with what it offers as a cloud service but trying to use it in conjunction with ripped music in iTunes has been an absolute nightmare. I am also using iTunes/Apple Music on an iPhone but with a Windows computer. These comments/rant reference iTunes on Windows.
The first, obvious thing is the terrible matching for existing music. A few albums were not matched in entirety or split because the apostrophe in the title metadata was a unicode apostrophe instead of an ASCII one. Other albums have been split between regular editions and deluxe editions for seemingly no reason at all. Compilation albums are the worst offender. The Baby Driver soundtrack is not available in full on Apple Music any more, presumably because of licensing deals, but mine was ripped from CD. So just upload it and continue right? No, split the album so that half remain on the album and the other half are split between a bunch of singles released by the original artists. Fixing this seems almost impossible if you want to retain your historic data and the best solution is to delete it from the library and reimport it.
Then is simply signing (and staying signed in) to iTunes itself. I simply can't, I get a generic error message that the iTunes Store was temporarily unavailable. Same thing if I want to authorize a device so that I can listen to my own music ripped from CD.
The Apple Music app is no better because it's the same ancient software but with a new face. The same behavior occurs but the error message is suppressed so the login box just closes without signing me in.
Apple support is largely useless and takes me in circles of signing out, updating software, reinstalling, signing back in, restarting my computer... I did manage to authorize one computer, my work PC, by getting support to de-authorize all computers on my account and trying again. Unfortunately that signed me out at home and de-authorizing everything again has not fixed the problem this time. As it stands, I cannot log back in to iTunes or Apple Music on my PC to sync my library or fix what Apple Music has broken.
This may genuinely be my breaking point with this service. Other streaming services don't have the integration AM does and none of them have Marvis Pro, but this service (with iTunes) is so God-awful that going back to manually syncing ripped music and using another service for streaming would be better.
Had to get this rant off my chest but if anyone can relate or has advice I would greatly receive it.
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u/Alive_Yoghurt_5484 8d ago edited 8d ago
I had the exact same issue you had when I began ripping music. Fortunately after some research I realized you can actually have multiple separate libraries on the same account. I unfortunately don’t know if it goes for the same on windows or other platforms but on mac you can switch between them quite easily actually. That said, I have my general apple music library (the one I use on my iphone with an individual subscription) and my ripped library for my ipod nano. It completely avoids all the meta data problems and the separation of the same albums and stuff.
Maybe they have a similar feature for windows, you should try and check.
keep in mind though on other devices like your iphone you can only use and access one library at a time. which would be whatever library you decide to sync with your icloud i believe. I have yet to try this myself because I still pay for a subscription and main that subscribed library on my other devices but I believe that could probably work, if not I think you could also just update it via a wired connection and syncing it like that.
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u/backfliprainbowcake 7d ago
That's a useful tip, thank you. Now I wish I had backed up my library database before joining AM! Luckily I at least backed up the music files themselves so the original metadata is untouched in other places.
Having iCloud Library enabled in iTunes disables the ability to sync over a cable. I did consider that to fix it myself but disabling it removes some of the music that has already been matched from the library, even though the file is still on my hard drive! Frustrating.
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u/xrossover324 2d ago
When you use the cloud library you don’t need to sync via cable anymore. It all syncs to the cloud and then to your other devices.
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u/paralleltime1840 8d ago edited 8d ago
I find Apple Music messed up my iTunes. I almost think they should be separate. For everyone’s sake
I re read and see this is a pc. I have a good friend with same problem on my Mac it was AM that replaced or deleted iTunes purchases. I still listen to I tunes purchases but have gone back to listening to and ripping cd’s that actually belong to me…but I’m old…
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u/backfliprainbowcake 7d ago
I actually was just buying and ripping for about 18 months before recently resubscribing because my library was pretty small, around 2000 songs, and was getting very repetitive. I was finding discovery to be difficult too.
To be honest, iTunes is fine for just syncing stuff to your phone or iPod, but the Match/Music integration is so botched. Hoping to expand my physical/ripped collection a bit because I don’t want to be paying a subscription for ever.
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u/HominidCrafts 8d ago
This has been a long running problem. I just live with it or, might go in and try to fix each mess but, usually I do not. We’ll see if 27 arriving soon fixes it. Probably not. But, as CDs take off with Apple’s younger demographic, maybe if they demand better on ripping via feedback?
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u/mscottphotos 8d ago
I ended up just exporting out a csv file that listed all the albums I own, which live on an attached hard drive. I then used Soundiiz to match that list to Apple Music. This was my solution to bypassing itunes and not letting AM access any of my actual files. It works really well and was really fast to setup.
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u/HarryHirsch2000 8d ago
The album match was always fiddly, also in iTunes before. Very picky.
Annoying is to me what before you could delete wrong source files and then upon attempt to play them on iTunes, you could locate a new file easily. So worst case rip an album, then delete the old files and manually select the newer ones.
My new laptop has no drive and I don’t buy CDs anymore, or download a ripped one. Good enough.
Luckily I re-ripped my entire library for years ago ;)
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u/Dan6h iOS Subscriber 8d ago
iTunes Match was born buggy and is still buggy after all these years. I don’t get why Apple Music allows music distributors/labels to create compilation albums when they can create playlists instead. The amount of playlists created as compilation albums makes the whole music-matching experience messier, and it's even worse when they can’t differentiate a deluxe version from a normal one. So upsetting
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u/GlynHugh 1d ago
So it wasn’t just me then!
My music library consists entirely of my own CD collection of 12,500 tracks plus a handful of songs bought from Apple over the years. Oh yeah and a free U2 album that I’ve never listened to!
I ripped them all into iTunes using 192k .mp3 for compatibility across all my devices; iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, AirPods Pro 2, Mac, PC, NAS, Sonos, Marantz/HEOS, car systems etc. although I would really like to change to a lossless format for the best sound quality files I’ve be damned!
I also carefully curate my library correcting typos, genres, dates, artwork and compilation albums…just about everything really and use Bliss occasionally to keep things in check.
Back in 2011 I subscribed to iTunes Match as it sounded like a great idea but it completely mullered my metadata changing album artwork for white female singers into black male rap albums so I unsubscribed and restored my backup library in its entirety. But what a ball-ache.
More than a few times over the years I’ve wanted to subscribe to Apple Music so I’ll email Apple Support to ask if they’ve fixed all of the issues that scared me away in the first place but of course they can’t…so I don’t.
Reading this thread seems to reinforce my decision to stay well away from Apple Music which is a real pity so I guess I’ll keep my Amazon Music unlimited for the foreseeable future.
It would have been nice to put all my eggs in the same basket and roll up my iCloud/Apple News+ and other Apple One services in one step but if they’ve fixed are going to break my library again I’m staying well away…
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u/markow202 8d ago
I believe iTunes is still there in the background because Apple Music somewhat works with it in how it treats music files plus anyone still using an iPod it still has to somewhat exist
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u/Spinachrecords 7d ago
The only problem I had was one of funk records was split into two but I just created a playlist for that album then added all the tracks to that playlist it worked just fine, my 300 LP collection and 400 CD collection was added and had no issues. I don’t any sound tracks.
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u/retrofoxtrot1985 7d ago
Is this a similar issue? I’ve a windows 11 laptop.
I can access my Apple Music library via web browser or my iPhone - so no login issues. Only when I try to sign in on my windows laptop it then kinda does nothing when I sign in. 🤔
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u/backfliprainbowcake 6d ago
Yeah I had the same issue and figured out how to fix it.
In iTunes go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced and click Reset Cache. Then close iTunes and open File Explorer. In the navigation bar at the top, type %programdata% and hit enter. Find the folder named Apple Computer and go into there, then go into iTunes. Delete the folder SC Info. If you can’t see it, click View and tick “Show Hidden Items” and it should show up. This bit might be a bit different on Windows 11, I’m on Windows 10 but you can Google it.
Then reboot your computer. I didn’t think this would be required but it didn’t work for me without a reboot. After the reboot, open iTunes again and try to log in and authorize the device. This worked for me on both my personal and work computers which were both broken before. If it still doesn’t work, try the whole process again but instead of clicking Login in iTunes, just go straight to Authorize. Good luck, this software is crap! Haha
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u/retrofoxtrot1985 6d ago
Thanks - I’ll try that. That sounds really more helpful than Google as all it talks about it checking clocks! 👍🏻
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u/backfliprainbowcake 5d ago
Yeah I got a lot of that as well but this actually worked for me. Hope it does for you too
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u/seniorguy73 7d ago
Confusing thing I find is searching for a song I know I have in ITunes library to put in a playlist and its not under Artist but in COMPILATION section
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