[iMore Question]

Weird problem. I have iCloud off on my Mac (have heard too many horror stories of libraries getting ruined, and I am extremely meticulous with its organization), but I have iCloud library enabled on my phone to be able to use Apple music. I know I have to turn off iCloud library on the phone to be able to upload new music from my computer. But when I do that, I lose all downloaded songs or lists from Apple music.

Except for one stubborn song which does not disappear, when I re-enable Apple music on my phone after the sync. I have taken to doing a screenshot of my apple music playlists to re-create the, but is there a better way to do this? I have no idea why this works with that one song I downloaded from Apple music and not the others. Thanks for the help

[FelixLotta]

Make sure you have logged into the store in iTunes on the new machine with the Apple ID you use with your devices.

Connect up each iDevice in turn but *do not* sync them yet.

Instead cancel any auto sync that it tries to do and then right click on the device in the iTunes sidebar (if you're on the latest iTunes, turn the sidebar back on for this (View > Show Sidebar), or command+option+s.

Then select "transfer purchases" and it will move all of your purchased apps and music from each device onto your iMac.

When it has done that, do the same right click action and select "back up".

Now each device has everything you bought from iTunes on the iMac. You just need to move across any manually ripped music from whatever machine you have it on (your old eMac?). Transfer this by hand over ethernet or via a USB stick or something.

Job done!

You don't have to pull all your store content back from the cloud, although it is convenient - USB is much more effective if you have a data cap to worry about!

Edit: you also don't have to use iCloud really - if you back up to the cloud it will store your phone settings and contacts, calendars etc, but not your music or apps, since those are already in the cloud. If you back up to the iMac then it can restore everything back just the way it was without having to pull data from the cloud.