With Apple Music subscription, how does it handle my own tracks I upload? Can I delete them after uploading?

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Level 1

92 points

With Apple Music subscription, how does it handle my own tracks I upload? Can I delete them after uploading?

I have had a subscription to Apple Music for a long time. Recently, maybe after the latest OS update, the way it handled tracks I had uploaded has changed.

Apple Music did not have all of the albums I owned by some artists, so I uploaded those long ago. I then deleted the local copies and relied on the uploaded ones. That has worked fine for a long time until just recently. Now it says it can't find any of those local copies and won't play on my desktop, but some play on my iPhone and others do not. Strange.

If I "locate" and go back and point it to the locations, one by one, this seems to solve it.

So just clarifying, do I have to maintain my local copy after uploading? If Apple Music on my iPhone is playing it from the cloud, why does it need my local copy to work correctly now?

Thank you.

Mac mini (2018)

Posted on Oct 16, 2024 4:07 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

274,610 points

Oct 16, 2024 5:35 PM in response to Ramblinmanva

The ideal approach with Apple Music is to have one computer with all of the original content on it that is also backed up for security. If space is really at a premium you can select a group of tracks and use the Remove Download command to free up local storage. Don't manually from Finder as Music still expects to have access to the local file if you do. A drawback with relying entirely on the cloud is that you could lose access to content if your subscription lapses, or items are removed from the Apple Music catalog by the rights holders. I recently ran into an issue where one track on an album was updated with a different sample and another track (same artist, different album) was replaced with a completely different track due to copyright issues. I was subsequently able to restore my original versions to my library and have them uploaded rather than matched as I had backups to fall back on.

tt2

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Answer 2

Ramblinmanva Author

Level 1

92 points

Oct 17, 2024 4:37 PM in response to turingtest2

Thanks much for the feedback. Appreciate it!

To clarify, I had all of these tracks on an external hard drive. I have relied on my Apple Music streaming subscription to handle all of the tracks it has but I've manually uploaded any missing files I wanted in my library. I wonder if where I'm going wrong is this.....I have the Apple Music library residing on my Mac's local hard drive, not pointed to my external hard drive where my many gigs of files that I used in the past before I had a subscription. So I would drop those in the local library so they'd be uploaded to Apple Music. It sounds like I should leave those local copies in place to be safe? I'm not sure if I should somehow point it back to the external hard drive. I no longer use those files and have just saved them for the future. Hope that makes sense.

Not sure what caused all the mess recently with all the exclamation points. Seemed to happy after the OS update. Thanks again.

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