Hello,
I recently noticed something somewhat strange with my AppleMusic Library. I have a decent size library that I've had since the beginning of iTunes - it's been through multiple iMacs, iPods, iPhones, and an Apple Music subscription - and most recently I bought a MacBook Air to get a hold of really having a good organized library. Most of my library consists of music I've uploaded from my large CD collection - which I've spend a lot of time upgrading to higher quality (cd quality) versions when I got my MacBook Air - Back in the day you could only rip CD's in lower quality with iTunes. I did have some albums that I purchased (and some songs). I had a little trouble when my library was rebuilding itself after signing into iCloud on my new laptop - some of the albums that I bought no longer existed in the version that I had - I have two albums in particular that gave me some trouble. You see, I sometimes when there's a CD release and a "special edition" digital version, there may be a few special tracks on one or the other and sometimes I have to combine them to make my own version of the album. A few times I had a go into iTunes and see if my original purchase was still there - some songs weren't but I still had them in my Time Machine backup and was able to burn them to a CD and re-upload them and rebuilt the album. I finally got everything looking good (as good as it could be).
As it stands, I have two libraries. One library is my entire CD collection and includes my digital purchases on an external hard drive - I need to plug in the drive in order to access it. No problem. I don't want my hard drive full on my laptop. I also have my library that is connected to my iPhone/iPad and is my "Main" account/library. All songs seem to play just fine, nothing is "Locked" or grayed out. Playing on my laptop, iPhone, iPad, all fine.
Here's where my strange problem comes into play. I have a Volvo XC40 (2025) and about 3 months ago we were given the Apple Music app - before this, I used to exclusively use Bluetooth to listen to music in the car. The app was somewhat of a game changer - my whole library, playlist, everything - right there plus the entire Apple Music library as well.
All was going well until I decided to play my Britney Spears playlist - this playlist includes tracks from "Blackout" and "Circus" amongst others but no song from either album would play. The play button would just spin and say "Loading" but would never play. I then went into my library and went to one of the albums and just randomly picked a song and the same thing happened. I then went into the Apple Music library and found the album and sure enough, I could play every track, just not from my library. I deleted "Blackout", redownloaded the Apple Music version, which pretty much matched mine as far as tracks go (labels were somewhat different - for example, this version was "Explicit") - I was under the impression that my albums/tracks were "Matched" so I'm not sure what happened here. I re-added the tracks to my playlist and now the album is back in my library but unfortunately I lost major play counts. I did not buy this album from iTunes, apparently because it wasn't in my purchase history - I then went to the album in iTunes and it says "Purchased" next to "Gimme More" - I guess I purchased that when it first came out before the album but it's not listed in my history to re-download.
I have a similar problem with "Circus" now - This one I did purchase through iTunes back in 2008, and even though I can re-download the album from my history, I haven't done anything yet because I also have about 3 other tracks that no longer exist that either did when it was released or they are on my special edition CD - I'd have to look but either way, there are tracks that are not listed anymore. I tried to find those songs in my library in the car and they weren't there - I added one to my play list and it didn't even show. Why wouldn't it just get "matched"? I wonder if this has to do with this being a car version of the app?
I may end up with just having two versions of the album in my library so I can add songs to my playlist and listen to them in the car without searching the Apple Music library every time I want to hear a song from that album.
For the record, I have nothing downloaded on my laptop either - everything I play is from the cloud. The only hard copies I have saved are on my external hard drive (and my old iMac). Is this enough to ensure I won't lose anything? This is another topic, but I thought I'd throw it in.
Thoughts? Thank you!