Apple released iTunes 12.5.5 yesterday, fixing some bugs (such as the network access problem), but creating others.
I discovered this morning that if I try to delete a song from a playlist in Playlist view, iTunes thinks I want to delete it from my entire library. Here’s what happens.
Display a playlist in Playlist view. To do this, choose View > View Options, then choose View As > Playlist. Your playlist displays like this:
Select one or more tracks and press Delete. This should delete the selected items from the playlist, but it doesn’t. iTunes displays the following dialog:
However, if you perform the same operation in any other view – Songs, Artists, Albums, Composers, or Genres – iTunes correctly removes the song from the playlist, and does not offer to delete it from your library.
This is serious for several reasons. First, it is not the expected behavior, and never has been. Second, there’s a Do not ask me again checkbox on that dialog. If you check that box, and don’t read the dialog, any time you delete a song from a playlist in Playlist view, it will be deleted from your library, with no warning.
My guess is that iTunes somehow thinks that all playlists in this view are part of iCloud Music Library; it’s not the case, because I don’t have iCloud Music Library turned on in this library.
I’ve reported this bug to Apple, but, in the meantime, do be careful.
(Geez, Apple, you really need to do more testing…)
Update: A Twitter follower informed me that he is not seeing this. But he confirmed that he uses iCloud Music Library. The dialog is actually what you’d see when deleting a track from an iCloud Music Library, and that is the bug; that iTunes sees a playlist in Playlist view as being an iCloud playlist. The library where I discovered this does not use iCloud Music Library, and never has. So if you use iCloud Music Library, you won’t see this bug.