Right now I can listen to anything on my iPhone that I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store without downloading it or syncing it.
It would be nice to have my entire 10,000 track iTunes database available in this way.
BUT my prime concern is that I don’t want anyone to touch the metadata in my iTunes library. I have everything very carefully categorized, sorted, arranged. I use some unconventional spelling and sorting configurations. I’ve spent hundreds of hours over the years getting all of it just so.
Is there any Apple service that will leave my metadata alone? It’s fine if the cloud-based stuff has different metadata. I just want to be able to keep what’s on my hard drive untouched.
But, in my experience, all it does is match music in your library to songs in Apple’s library, and push songs to the cloud that Apple doesn’t have. It doesn’t touch the library it is scanning.
No, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your private library/meta data at this point. Over the last few years I have a developed a hate for Apple Music as they’ve chipped away at this sort of file management for their users. I’ve started checking into other services for this reason. Amazon Music looks promising, but I haven’t actually moved a test list yet to make sure that it works as advertised.
My advice would be to spend some time googling your exact requirements. Either someone on the Apple Boards has a workaround, or you’ll find a new service. I lean towards Amazon Music because my collection had a large chunk their already.
But the files in the cloud are either going to be matched with what Apple has or potentially converted in the process. So the cloud based stuff will very likely have different meta data.
That all sounds fine in theory, but given your attachment to your personally curated data I think you’re playing with fire. For better or worse, Apple likes to do things their way and in my experience can be aggravating if you’re already attached to a non-conforming work flow.
If you’re gonna use this service I’d recommend letting it touch a “contaminated” copy of your library, and keep the original files somewhere unseen and untouched by Apple. And you have backed them up, right?