iCloud Music Library’s Metadata Isn’t Getting Better ⇥ mcelhearn.com

Even though I could now go whole-hog on iCloud Music Library, I’m not touching it yet. It’s still failing to provide correct metadata for songs from Apple Music, not just ripped or third-party tracks. It’s too bad, because a lot of Apple Music’s features — like offline playback and playlist creation — require an iCloud Music Library subscription.

My metadata system isn’t complex, but I worry that any cloud service will attempt to “correct” it. Worse, I’m scared that it’s going to treat different versions of a song as the same. I’m not prepared to roll back its changes because I don’t know how much effort it will take to recover my library even if I have a local backup.

That hesitance, I think, indicates that iCloud Music Library is a significant blemish on Apple’s record. Their web services are rarely class-leading, but they should not be this far behind.