Mike's Blog

I’ve used Apple devices for years, decades even. And I’ve been a MacBook user for more than a decade, but when I switched from using iTunes on a PC to iTunes, and then Apple Music, on a Mac, and I acquired an Apple Music subscription, I couldn’t work out what was going on.

I think I’ve now worked it out. But it’s taken a while. So I thought I’d write down what I’ve learned, although you may all already know this!

In the old days

In the days of iTunes on both Mac and Windows, you could rip your music CDs onto your PC, and then you selected which of your albums, songs or playlists you wanted to sync with your iPhone. You plugged your phone into a USB port, hit “Sync” and off it went. Depending on the amount of music you had in your library, and the speed of your computer, it could take minutes, or it could take hours. And it was all physically copied to your phone.

What happened?

More than 10 years ago I switched my main computer from a Windows laptop to a MacBook. For a while it continued to work the same way, so I synchronised a selection of music from my MacBook to my iPhone by plugging it in. But then I subscribed to Apple Music and suddenly I had the ability to sync my music to the music Cloud.

Foolishly I clicked “sync library” on both my Mac and my iPhone. That’s when the trouble started. I ended up with duplicate copies of some albums on my iPhone. And some duplicates on my MacBook too. I couldn’t work out what was going on, so I just disabled sync and lived with it. For some time. For several years actually. I kept saying to myself, “I really have to sit down and work out how this works.” But I never did.

And now?

Well I recently replaced my aging Intel MacBook Pro with an M2 MacBook Air. Brilliant little machine. I’ve done a lot of travelling in the last year. And I was becoming increasingly annoyed that whatever music I wanted to listen to on the plane wasn’t on my phone. Or only a couple of tracks of one album was. Or I had two copies of it. So I resolved to sort it out.

The setup

I now have a MacBook Air, an iPhone (SE3) and an old iPad Air 2 I recently inherited from my wife. My iPhone has 256GB storage and could hold my entire (about 100GB) music collection, but what I listen to when I’m travelling and offline is limited, so I don’t need all of it. The iPad has only 32GB of storage, and I really only use that to play music when I’m at home and online, where it’s paired with an Alexa Echo Dot that plays through my hifi. And it has nowhere near enough storage to download my entire music collection.

What I hadn’t realised

Assuming you have an Apple Music subscription, the ideal setup is for your entire music library to be stored on your Mac (or your Windows PC). Then it expects you to sync this with the Library in the Cloud.

You could split your physical library across multiple devices and sync them in both directions. But I’m a bear of very little brain, so that’s too confusing. I’d rather it was all physically stored in one place. I also strongly recommend backing this up – I’ve done this to both Apple Time Machine and Microsoft OneDrive – it’s very easy to hit the wrong button and delete a track, an album or an entire Library. It’s good to have somewhere you can get it back from without having to re-import from your CD collection.

Cloud music is separate from your iCloud data storage, and can hold up to 100,000 tracks. Then you can (should) clear all the music you’ve transferred to your phone using a USB cable, and sync Apple Music to your phone with your Cloud Music account.

Then you can see your entire Music Library and you can choose what to download and store on your device for offline playing. Well sometimes you can choose, but sometimes it just downloads stuff for you without you asking for it. But only on the iPhone, the iPad appears to be different.

What I did

First, I had to sort the mess that was my Apple Music on my Mac. That’s because I’d actually got two physical music collections, one on each device. And because I’d hit “sync library” on both devices, I’d got copies going both ways, and therefore duplicates on both devices. The iPad, being a recent acquisition, had no music on it at all. A good place to start.

I turned Library sync off on my phone. No point making the situation worse. I decided to have all the music physically stored on my Mac, and to sync it from there to my other devices.

So I held down the Option key while opening Apple Music on my Mac. That allowed me to either switch libraries or to create a new one.

I created a new library, and then synced it with the Cloud. A whole lot of stuff came down, which I selected and deleted from the library. I did this a couple of times until the Library was empty. Then I copied my entire music collection (from backup) into the Music folder and used Apple Music to import it all. (File|Import – select the Music folder – Open). It took a while. I left it overnight.

When it had finished, I opened Music on my iPad and had a look at the Library. Most of the music was showing, but (thankfully) none had actually downloaded. You can see the status of each track in the Library – if it’s in bold type it’s available in the music library, and provided you’re online at the time you can hit play and it’ll play that track. If it’s grey then it’s not available in the music library and you can’t play it. If you play the album it’ll skip those tracks.

And if it’s in bold with a little down arrow in a grey circle next to it, it’s been downloaded and is available to play on your device even when you’re offline.

For reasons that still escape me, about 15% of the tracks I’d imported into Apple Music on my Mac hadn’t synced with the iCloud library, and therefore weren’t available on the iPad.

When you look at the music on your Mac, there’s no obvious way to fix this. There’s no option to force a track, or an album, to resync with the cloud. Furthermore there’s no way to see, on the Mac, which tracks have synced with the cloud and which haven’t, as they all show as being physically on the machine – because they are. This is the physical location of the music tracks.

So you have to look at your iPad (or Phone, but the phone behaves differently, as I’ll discuss later) to see which tracks haven’t synced.

So I set up my iPad next to my Mac, Apple Music open on both, and when I open the same album on each device you can see, on the iPad, which tracks haven’t been synced with the cloud. What you then have to do is delete each of these tracks from the Mac Library, and remove the files.

Fortunately they are not completely deleted, they are moved to the bin. So I opened two side-by-side Finder windows, one with the Music folder and one with the Bin. Starting with an empty Bin (very important) I could then see the deleted tracks, and drag them back into the folder from which they’ve just been deleted. Then back in Music select File | Import and either Command + click each of the tracks I’ve just replaced, or select the album, and click “Open”. This imports the tracks into the Library again, and forces a re-sync with the cloud. You can monitor progress on the iPad because when you delete the tracks from the Library on the Mac, after a few moments they disappear from the Library list on the iPad. Then when you re-import them they first show in pale grey, with a cloud and arrow icon alongside. And then a few minutes later they show up in bold, so they’re now synced with the library.

But not every time. Occasionally one or more fail to sync even this time, and I had to repeat the entire procedure.

Now sometimes an entire album failed to sync with the cloud. Don’t just delete the album from the library, because if you do, although the tracks will all be moved to the Bin, the containing folders (the Album and the Artist folders) aren’t moved to the Bin and disappear. You can recreate them, but that’s a lot of mucking about and typing, and they have to be exactly the same as the ones that were deleted or Apple Music complains. I found the easier way was to go into the Finder window, copy the album folder (which copies its contents), if there were other albums by the same artist, or copy the artist folder if there was only one album, and paste it to another folder on the computer – I used my Downloads folder.

Then you can delete the entire album from Music. Then I went back to Finder and dragged and dropped the copied folder back to its original location. Then I could re-import it into Music.

It was taking an inordinately long time to do this with each of nearly 1,000 albums. Every time I found one that didn’t need to be re-synced it felt like a victory.

However, there is an easier way. There’s an option, in Music, to re-sync the entire library. File | Library | Update Cloud Library. This does the entire library again. But it also takes hours. And it also occasionally fails. So I still had to go through every album on the iPad to ensure all the tracks were there.

There were other glitches. Most irritating of all was the failure to use the same artwork on the iPad as on the Mac for each album. It turned out that generally Music on the iPad uses the artwork associated with the first track in each album. So if that track is missing and the artwork for the next track is different (which can often happen if you’ve used “Download Album Artwork” in Music in the first place) then it’ll get the wrong artwork. I found I had to open the artwork on the Mac, copy the image to the desktop (Cmd+Shift+4) then open the album, select all the tracks at the same time, right-click and select “Get Info” and use “Add Artwork” to paste the copied artwork back to every track in the album. That usually worked. I still have a couple of albums on my iPad with the wrong artwork, and I can’t work out how to fix them. Life’s too short.

What about the iPhone?

Well, that was even more complicated.

I’d disabled Library Sync on my iPhone, and then deleted all the contents, so the iPhone Library was empty. My mistake was to turn Sync back on before I’d sorted the Cloud library using my iPad.

It turned out that every track that I’d deleted, replaced and re-imported manually got automatically downloaded onto my iPhone. But only those. So when I’d finished sorting out and syncing the Library from my Mac onto my iPad I now had an apparently random selection of some tracks that were downloaded to my iPhone, but very few whole albums. This didn’t happen with the iPad. Bizarre. My advice if you’re grappling with this is to disable syncing on any devices other than the one you’re using to identify missing tracks, and then only when you’ve completely restored the library, re-enable syncing on that device. After, of course, deleting and removing any music that’s stored on that device.

When I gave up and used the nuclear “Update Cloud Library” menu option on the Mac, those tracks that were re-synced with the Cloud didn’t download to the iPhone.

So my final task was to go through each album on my iPhone to decide which I wanted stored locally, and to either remove the downloads or download the rest of the album.

Downloading the rest of the album is easy. From the Library/Albums view, open an album. If it shows a tick in a circle at the top it’s already fully downloaded. If it shows instead a down-arrow in a circle then it isn’t, but clicking it downloads the rest of the album, and you’re sorted.

Getting rid of the downloaded tracks you don’t want is harder. To see which these are, instead of Library / Albums, you go to Downloaded/Albums and then click each album to see if it’s all there or not. If it’s not all there you can only remove the downloaded tracks individually. You click the … at the right-hand side of each track and select the “Remove” option, helpfully highlighted in red. Then you’ll be given the option to either remove the download (yes) or remove from Library (No! Don’t do that. It’ll delete this track from every copy of the Library, including the master version on your Mac or PC, and you’ll either have to re-rip it, or restore it from that very handy backup you made right at the beginning…)

But if you click the … at the top of the album you will only get the “Remove” option if the entire album is already downloaded. From here you can’t download it, and the only delete option is to remove the entire album from the Library (as I’ve already said, that could be catastrophic).

I discovered it’s easier to leave “Downloads”, go back to “Library” and then to remove the local copy of albums you don’t want downloaded, you have to download the entire album, and then you can use the Remove option to Remove the Download. Perverse isn’t it.

Is it sorted now?

Yes. Finally, after several hours of work, and even more hours of letting it do its own thing, I have all 966 albums stored on my Mac, synchronised with the Cloud library, available to play from my iPad and some of them selectively downloaded to my iPhone.

In theory I could now remove the downloads from my Mac and simply rely on the copies I’ve synced with the Cloud Music. But I used to work in the storage industry, where there is a saying that, “If you don’t have at least three copies of something, it doesn’t exist.” And also I couldn’t play it offlline if the only place everything existed was in the Cloud. I’m a strong proponent of cloud storage. But I also want a physical copy locally both for backup and because internet access isn’t ubiquitous. Yet.

What happens if I cancel my subscription to Apple Music? I have no idea, but at least I have a hard copy and two backup copies of my original music library, so if necessary I can start again!