Shut off Cloud Music Library

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Level 1

23 points

Shut off Cloud Music Library

iOS 18.3; OS 10.15.7 Catalina; subscribed recently to Apple Music

I want to download an album from my late 2012 iMac to my iPhone 16. I store my music on my iMac using an external SSD, not in my iCloud account. Before subscribing to Apple Music a few months ago, I had always manually synced only selected music to my iPhone.

When I open a finder window on my iMac showing the iPhone and click the Music tab, I no longer see all the music on iMac to manually sync with my iPhone. I instead see "iPhone is using Cloud Music Library. You can play and download songs on all your devices. To sync music from this computer, turn off Cloud Music Library." Other advice here says "Turn it off on your iPhone: Settings > Music > Sync Library."

When I try to do that, I see a warning "This will remove all Apple Music content and downloads from your library on this device."

I now have about 30 albums on my iPhone. Before subscribing to Apple Music, I downloaded them from my iMac. None of the music is from Apple Music. I do not store music in my iCloud account. I do not want to lose any of those downloads, either on my iPhone or my iMac. I want to only add one or two to my phone from my iMac.

Does the warning apply only to music from Apple Music, and not to music on my iMac?

iPhone 16 Plus, iOS 18

Posted on Jan 30, 2025 4:39 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,799 points

Jan 30, 2025 6:05 PM in response to Garak

When you have an Apple Music subscription you would normally enable Sync Library in both your computer and your device so that changes made in one location would sync to the other. See Use Sync Library with your Apple Music subscription - Apple Support. If you turn off Sync Library on the phone then any content from the Apple Music subscription service will be removed. Any cloud content that isn't your iTunes purchase history will also disappear. You can then sync music from your computer again as you did before.

Turning off Sync Library on your computer would again remove content from the Apple Music subscription service, and any of your uploaded or matched content that isn't stored locally on your computer. Still best to backup before making changes. If you don't use the Apple Music subscription to sync your library or listen to additional content then consider terminating the subscription.

tt2

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Answer 2

Feb 19, 2025 9:41 AM in response to turingtest2

hello sir.

I have a list of songs in Apple Music on my windows11 pc. I have Music Subscription.

I try to Sync the music from the computer to the iphone 16 ios 18 and i got error message " to sync music from windows to iphone need to turn of Cloud Music Library" and do not allow me to sync the music and have all my songs list from old iTunes into iPhone. What to do to fix it..?!

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Shut off Cloud Music Library

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