One day earlier this year, I looked up a song in my Mac's music library that's been there since 2001. I received an error message, "This song is not currently available in your country or region." I thought this might be just a glitch on my iPhone, so I tried the desktop app. No go. I opened up my media drive, and there was the music file. To check if it played, I hit the spacebar, and it began to play immediately. Hrmph. I have the file, I thought. Why won't the Music app play it?
(DJ Billings, CC BY-SA 40)
After some digging, I found other users with similar issues. To sum up, it seems that Apple decided that it owned some of my songs, even though I ripped this particular song to an MP3 from my own CD in the late 1990s.
To be clear, I'm not an Apple Music subscriber. I'm referring to the free "music" app that used to be called iTunes. I gave Apple Music a go when it first launched but quickly abandoned it. They decided to replace my previously owned songs with their DRM versions. In fact, I believe that's where my messed-up music troubles began. Since then, I've been bombarded with pushy Apple notifications trying to steer me back into becoming an Apple Music subscriber.
The sales notifications were annoying, but this suddenly unplayable song was unacceptable. I knew there had to be a better way to manage