Two questions about iCloud Music Library

Tech Support
1

Hi guys,

I have two questions that I’m hoping you can help me with.

Question 1:

I just turned on iCloud Music Library in iTunes on my Mac, and when I look at the “iCloud Status” column, I see 5 songs showing up as “uploaded” and 6 songs showing up as “matched” - and all my other songs (a few thousand) are showing up as “removed”.

I know what the categories “matched” and “uploaded” mean, but still: what’s the logic behind what just happened there? Is “removed” the default category for all songs, until I decide to manually add them to the iCloud Music Library, at which point they turn into either “matched” or “uploaded”? But if so, why did it pick a handful of songs automatically and make them “matched” and “uploaded”, respectively? Why those 11 songs and not others? Not clear to me.

Question 2:

I have a playlist in iTunes on my Mac that I sync to my iPhone. That’s the only music that’s on my phone (maybe about a thousand songs). Now, when I turn on iCloud Music Library on my iPhone, it asks me whether I want to merge the music on my phone with my iCloud Music Library or replace the music on my phone with what’s in my iCloud Music Library. Not sure which option I want, because I don’t know what the implications are. If I say “merge”, will I end up with duplicates? If I say “replace”, will it automatically turn off syncing of my iTunes playlist? Or will iTunes on my Mac continue to show that I’m syncing the playlist, but it won’t actually do it? And then if I want the playlist to sync again, how do I go about doing that? Turn off iCloud Music Library? Or simply uncheck the playlist from syncing in iTunes and then re-check it again? None of this is clear to me.

I’m sure many of you have tried this out already and know how this works. Thanks for any insights you might be able to share! :slightly_smiling_face:

2

I can’t answer your specific questions but my memory is that it took a couple of weeks for the system to sync up and settle down. I didn’t lose any playlists or have songs downloaded to my phone without my asking. Some of your old songs will now be available in higher bitrate versions, depending on when you bought them or ripped them from CD.

I also signed on to Apple Music. It took nearly a year for me to get used to not buying songs. Now I mostly ignore all the music I had before and just go with the flow. No regrets.

3

Thanks, Mike. Yeah, since I have backups of my music library, maybe I’ll just go ahead and play around with these options and see what happens. If something gets messed up, I can always revert to the original state…

4

According to this Apple Support article, “removed” means:

This icon appears when you remove a song from iCloud Music Library on a different computer. Songs that you delete from iCloud Music Library are immediately deleted from associated iOS devices, but stay on other associated computers until you manually delete them.

I’m not sure why they showed up that way on your library though.

I have been using iTunes Match for some time now so can’t help with your sync question beyond a belief that the “merge” option should not create duplicates.