Dr. Laurin Ostermann

The iCloud Media Library Disaster

While I have been enjoying having the world’s music readily available through Apple Music at any time for the last four months, I have not quite come to grips with the iCloud Media Library.

At first, I thought it might be a good idea to use this feature, which should allow you to sync all your music up to Apple’s servers ensuring that all your devices would have the exact same music in their iTunes libraries. But then, I realised a couple of things: to begin with, when using the iCloud Library you will not be able to sync your music between OS X and iOS devices via a USB cable any more . The only way to transfer files from iTunes to your iPhone or iPad is by redownloading the songs in the iOS Music app, which can not be done for the entire library in a straight-forward manner. Thus, it became almost annoying to keep my iPhone in sync with my Mac, especially because I didn’t want to stream my music to the iPhone all the time, which would, of corse, compromise my mobile data plan. Secondly, making Apple Music tracks available offline only works when you enable iCloud Media Library, which again contradicts my philosophy of how I want my music organised. And lastly, when I discovered that my Mac at the office suddenly had different tracks than my Mac at home because iTUnes mismatched quite a few songs, I decided to turn off iCloud Media Library.

Now, I enjoy Apple Music as a pure streaming service, which I think is totally woth its money, and I am looking forward to Apple fixing all the iCloud Media Library issues sometime in the future.