Apple Music unexpectedly quits, reverts view options and deletes duplicate items

Question

Apple Music unexpectedly quits, reverts view options and deletes duplicate items

Playlist by playlist I changed view options and eliminated duplicate items. In the middle of working Apple Music quit suddenly. When it came back up, hours of work disappeared; everything went back to the way it was and all of the duplicate items came back. VERY frustrating and an extremely inconvenient waste of time!!! Apple Music is terrible compared to iTunes!

[Re-Titled by Moderator]

Original Title: Apple Music quit in the middle of changing view options and deleting duplicate items. When it came back up hours of work was gone. View options and duplicate deletions reverted to the way they were. GRRRRR!!!!

iMac 24″, macOS 15.6

Posted on Sep 2, 2025 10:12 PM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

277,711 points

Sep 3, 2025 01:18 PM in response to DJ Park Mouse

Do you have a subscription to the Apple Music or iTune Match services? There appears to be an obscure bug where Apple Music gets connected to a temporary copy of the library that then doesn't get updated correctly. Hold down option as you launch Music and explicitly choose your library, normally at ~/Music/Music/Music Library.musiclibrary. Test behaviour with a few changes, closing Music and reopening after allowing time to close to check that changes are holding.

tt2

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Answer 2

Sep 3, 2025 02:43 PM in response to turingtest2

No I do not subscribe to Apple Music and don't know what iTune Match services is. I love iTunes, but not so happy with Apple Music, which is harder to use. It looks almost the same and has similar features, but Apple Music does not behave the same way as iTunes does; it grabs duplicates and does other peculiar things. It often does not hold changes I make. I have a very large library that was meticulously built in iTunes over several years, and importing it into Apple Music has been a frustrating and time consuming process. If I could suggest any changes that would be the most helpful to me it would be the ability to set a preference for view options that would be consistent throughout the my library, including all playlists, and the ability to import an entire library, playlists and all.

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Answer 3

turingtest2

Level 10

277,711 points

Sep 3, 2025 03:48 PM in response to DJ Park Mouse

Apple Music and iTunes Match are two cloud music subscription packages. I ask because they both have a potential impact on the advice I might give, but now we know that can be ignored.

I'm a fellow user. I cannot get Apple to change the way the app works, only attempt to help navigate its occasional shortcomings.

See Duplicate songs in iTunes/Music - Apple Community for some advice on that front.

Try https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2023/02/updated-assimilate-view-options-v6-2/ for something that might be able to give all of your playlists the same general layout.

See Managing your Mac media libraries - Apple Community for general post iTunes>Music transition advice.

Music can import an existing iTunes .itl file, although the Monterey version tends to choke on that, and Music won't convert a library that pre-dates Mojave. I've helped over a hundred users with such issues by converting their .itl files on an older Mac running Catalina. Contact info in my profile here should you need it.

tt2

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