F**ing Apple iCloud Music. Advice on a damaged MP3 library required.

[Colonel_Mad]

I'm just unbelievably picky in this regard to the extent I'll actually photograph artwork myself if need be, e.g. if the copy I have ripped is a MoFi, Japanese first press or whatever that is the artwork I want!

Glad it's not just me. Apple just don't cater for or have any interest in music for any other reason that they can make money out of it.

All my ID3 and Artwork data has been meticulously curated over nearly 20 years since I first discovered Napster and the fact I could set my work computer to the task of downloading music rather than the data crunching it was meant to be doing.

It perhaps shouldn't be, but it is something that is really important to me and as it turned out to my health too. It was a genuinely stressful experience to see that work destroyed in the course of an hour or so after clicking the icloud switch to 'on'. I was really worried it would start to transfer back to the music on my hard drive.

I assume somewhere in the small print of those long documents Apple get you to agree to from time to time that we've all agreed to let apple destroy our chosen ID3 information in the interests of conforming with their world view.

There are stories online of rare tracks being replaced by the standard release versions of Greatest Hits albums (the artwork perfectionist's bete noir) and explicit songs being replaced by censored versions when people have made my mistake in the past. Hopefully I've avoided that.

 

[robs]

Just don't do it

(the mouldy apple thing).

 

[Tony L]

I never have less than the music library on the MacBook and two complete backups on two external drives that I alternate, so I have current and two different roll-backs. I use CarbonCopyCloner as I don't really trust Time Machine, i.e. my worst case scenario is rolling back to a bootable backup. I always do a backup before allowing iTunes to update itself with a new version, an OS upgrade or whatever. This way I'm pretty safe. Had someone screwed my phone up the way it happened here I'd likely have reset it to empty as-new and rebuilt it from scratch. Anything to protect the main library!