Apple did worse than delete my iTunes library. It just got corrupted in such a way that most of my music was unavailable, and the metadata got scrambled in biza

Apple did worse than delete my iTunes library. It just got corrupted in such a way that most of my music was unavailable, and the metadata got scrambled in bizarre ways. I would have e.g. Daydream Nation but only 5 tracks, and the artist was Bob Dylan, and the cover art was a Freddy Gibbs album. Playlists had tracks removed - sometimes completely emptied out. It was just like that one day, and all I'd done around that time was play music. The same kind of problems existed on my Mac, iPhone, and the web UI, but each one had its own set of fucked up metadata. I had the same music library since iTunes 1.0, moved from one Mac to the next for almost 20 years. I wanted my play counts and the last time I played things and all of the nice metadata that iTunes used to have. Worst of all, I couldn't restore from a backup because the cloud library becomes the canonical library as soon as you enable it. I tried restoring my library from a backup, but as soon as the cloud library synced, it would screw everything up again. As long as I was offline, my restored backup was in perfect condition. Apple support was useless of course. They just told me to delete and add my music again. That's thousands of songs, and doing that deletes the metadata I wanted to keep. All I wanted was for them to reset my cloud library as if I'd never synced anything, so my working library could sync up. The only way to do that would be to stop my subscription and then subscribe again. I spent probably 30 hours trying to fix it but ended up just accepting that my personal metadata was gone, other than existing on the last working backup. Doing what Apple support suggested was not reliable either. Deleting music in one UI had unpredictable effects in another. Adding the music I own, ripped from CDs, failed often when Apple tried to match it and then get the various libraries in sync. I had to remove and import some albums 3 or 4 times before it was consistent across devices and the web UI. My library is still fucked in a lot of ways, but the music I want to hear most often is mostly there. The thing that prevents me from just going back to syncing to my phone is that some music is only available from their music subscription, and that can't be synced over a wire. They're also the only streaming service that will actually upload music it can't match. I'd move to Tidal or Spotify or somewhere else if any of them offered that. I want to be able to hear my obscure music in the same app as I use for big label music. Rant over, back to work.