Just after iTunes 12.2 launched, I wrote about how it messes up album artwork, replacing my carefully selected artwork with graphics pulled from the iTunes Store. This happens on tracks I’ve ripped from CDs.
iCloud Music Library is a disaster. It changes artwork, alters tags, and many tracks are unavailable, having the “Waiting” iCloud status. Here’s an example of how much of a mess it is.
I have a number of live recordings of Bill Evans in 1980. They come from three box sets, and each set is labeled with its date, and the artwork from the box set.
On my test Mac, running iTunes 12.2 with iCloud Music Library turned on, here’s a playlist of that music.
You can see that the artwork is different for every single track, and that several of the tracks are dimmed; they are “Waiting” for iCloud Music Library to do something. They’ve been waiting for several days now, and this doesn’t correct when I sign out of my iTunes Store account and sign back in again, or when I turn off iCloud Music Library and turn it back on.
This means that I cannot access much of my music that is stored in iCloud Music Library (which I added to iTunes Match, before the release of iTunes 12.2). Out of 9,733 tracks in my iTunes library, 972 are dimmed and show the iCloud status as Waiting.
Add to that 1,627 tracks that are marked as Apple Music, but are tracks that I ripped and matched using iTunes Match, and about one quarter of my iCloud Music Library library is borked.
Thanks, Apple.