iCloud Music Library
Make your existing music collection available on all devices
Having on-demand access to millions of songs is just part of what an Apple Music subscription offers, and you may be wondering what happens with all the music that’s in your iTunes library. You may have acquired tracks from the iTunes Store and its rivals, and imported tracks from CDs or other physical formats. From the latter type, you may have music that isn’t available through Apple Music or any other download or streaming service. Thankfully, the music in your iTunes library isn’t confined to your Mac.
Apple Music provides a feature called iCloud Music Library that makes your personal music collection stored in iTunes available on all of your devices, including Windows PCs running iTunes and Android devices using the Apple Music app. This is achieved without you having to mess around with the old-fashioned method of syncing other devices with your Mac. Instead, your library there is inspected and any music that’s also available in Apple Music’s massive collection is immediately available to you on all your devices. This includes any music you have bought from other download store or a physical format.
Songs you’ve purchased from the iTunes Store are automatically part of your iCloud Music Library as long as you use the same Apple ID to subscribe to Apple Music as you did to sign in and buy them from the iTunes Store.
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Any of your tracks that aren’t featured in Apple Music are then uploaded to iCloud, though they have to meet some criteria. The time it will take for all such tracks to be added to your iCloud Music Library and playable on all your devices depends on a combination of how many of those tracks you have and your internet connection’s upload speed (often a lot slower than for downloads). Taking these into account, it may take several days for your entire library to become available to play on all your devices.
Despite the iCloud in its name, tracks that are uploaded to iCloud Music Library aren’t counted against your iCloud account’s storage quota. The only cost Apple charges is your Apple Music subscription.
If this kind of syncing is all you want from Apple Music, read the box “What about
iTunes Match” because this will save you a lot of money.
Tracks that have to be uploaded are only processed if they conform to a few rules. They must be under 200MB in size or less than two hours long. Up to 100,000 songs can be uploaded to your iCloud Music Library (songs from the iTunes Store don’t count towards this limit) and so if you have more than that in your iTunes library, you’ll need to consider pruning your main iTunes library. Items that are in a highquality format – such as Apple Lossless, WAV, or AIFF – are uploaded in AAC format at 256kbps (the same quality as tracks from the iTunes Store), and the original remains on your Mac.
There are some minimum quality requirements, too. If a track is already in MP3 or AAC format, its bit rate can’t be 96kbps (kilobits per second) or less; such low-quality tracks are ineligible to be added to iCloud Music Library – see the guide to the right for icons that indicate this and other statuses. Bear in mind that you can use a Smart Playlist (File > New > Smart Playlist) like the one shown in the screen above to check which, if any, of your music can’t be uploaded to iCloud Music Library.
Sadly, there’s a downside to Apple’s track matching technology: the track that plays on your other devices may not be the version you expect. It may be a censored version, for example, even if the lyrics are only mildly offensive, as we found with the phrase “his broke ass” in TLC’s No Scrubs.
One thing Apple notes, though not prominently enough, is that you shouldn’t treat iCloud Music Library as a backup. Software glitches or accidental deletion of a track from your library aren’t necessarily trivial to recover from. Back up your entire iTunes library to an external drive, update the backup periodically, and ideally store it at another location than your Mac. SuperDuper is a good tool for this ($27.95,
shirt-pocket.com).