Help with Apple Music

Factual Questions
1

I have a Mac WorkBook, and an iPhone. Up until yesterday, I had a music library on both, with lots of songs, lots of playlists.

I decided to give AppleMusic a try. And now, I still have all the songs and playlists on the Mac, but the only music on my phone are under “Purchased”. All the playlists are gone.

What’s really odd: when I plug the phone into the Mac, under Devices I see my phone and all the missing playlists. But if try to copy a Mac playlist to the phone Device, I get a message saying that I can’t because (reasons).

I realize that the idea of AppleMusic is that the music lives in the cloud and not necessarily on the phone, which is nice…but I really don’t want to manually re-create dozens of playlists containing thousands of songs. What do I do?

2

Sounds like some sort of error.

I would try:

Sign out of iCloud, sign back in, then turn on iCloud Music Library in the Settings for “Music”; it’s my understanding this option only appears if you have Apple Music.

3

I assume that I do this sign out/sign in on the Mac WorkBook, right? (and unfortunately I’m now at work, and the Mac is home)

I also want to make sure that none of the physical copies of music on the WorkBook disappears without a trace. I’m not fully committed to AppleMusic forever, and wouldn’t want to lose anything should I change my mind down the road.

4

No, on the phone. The playlists still exist on the Mac, correct?

Nothing on your Mac will get deleted unless you delete it.

5

Has your library uploaded to iCloud?

6

I don’t think so. How can I tell?

7

I think I may have found the problem … “Use AppleMusic” was checked on the iPhone but not on the Workbook. Updates in progress… will report back.

8

Is this step necessary ?

9

Probably not strictly necessary. AIUI, AppleMusic merges your personal library with theirs. You can optionally keep a copy of all your songs on your device, or just stream theirs to free up storage on yours.

I seem to be OK now, once I set the check boxes on both the Mac and the phone. It took a while for everything to appear on the phone, but it’s all there now.