How to Turn Off iCloud Music Library on iPhone, Mac, and PC

Part 1. Everything You Need to Know about iCloud Music Library

Before we start to teach you how to disable iCloud Music Library, you are recommended to think about whether you need to close it. And we also have a significant suggestion for you before you start to turn iCloud Music Library off.

What Is iCloud Music Library?

iCloud Music Library is a feature provided by Apple's iCloud service that allows you to store your music library in the cloud and access it across multiple devices, such as your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC. It's a part of Apple Music.

How does iCloud Music Library work?

By enabling iCloud Music Library, you can access your entire music library from any authorized device with your Apple ID. This means you can listen to your favorite songs, playlists, and albums on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, or even on the web via iCloud.com. If you add a song to your library, it will appear automatically in your library on your other devices as well. Meanwhile, if it's matched with the one in the iTunes Store, iCloud will give it at iTunes Plus quality (256 kbps DRM-free AAC). If it's not matched, iCloud will keep its original quality.

If you prefer offline listening, you can download songs, albums, or playlists from your iCloud Music Library.

How can I enable iCloud Music Library?

Apple's iTunes Match and music (Apple Music) services are integrated with iCloud Music Library. By subscribing to iTunes Match for $25/year or Apple Music for $11/month or $120/year, you can store up to 100,000 songs to up to 10 authorized devices (no more than 5 computers), not including songs purchased from the iTunes Store. But the files can be no larger than 200 MB or longer than 2 hours.

When will I want to turn off iCloud Music Library?

But there are times when you want to turn off iCloud Music Library. If your music library is large, enabling iCloud Music Library can quickly consume your available storage. And in some cases iCloud users do prefer to manually manage their music library and don't want any changes made to their library, such as metadata updates or matching with the iTunes Store. Then disabling it ensures that your music library remains unchanged and unaffected by any modifications or matching attempt.

What happens if I turn off iCloud Music Library?

When you turn off iCloud Music Library on one of your devices where you use with Apple Music, it will stops syncing your Apple Music library and playlists across your devices. Any music that was synced to your devices through iCloud Music Library will be removed, including downloads from Apple Music. The synced music will no longer be accessible on your devices unless you have local copies or backup. At the same time, your music library will no longer be stored in the cloud, and you won't access it across devices to stream or download.

Before turning off iCloud Music Library or discontinuing your subscription to Apple Music or iTunes Match, it's always a great idea to find alternative method that can help back up your music library. That is to use a powerful Apple Music downloader called ViWizard Audio Converter to download your entire music library into transferrable music files. Then you gain the ability to transfer your music library to all your devices and desired platforms. Not just your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or PC.

Part 2. Turn off iCloud Music Library on iPhone/iPad

Step 1. On your iPhone, iPad, open the Settings app from the home screen.

Step 2. Scroll to Music.

Step 3. Under LIBRARY, you will see the "Sync Library" setting.

Step 4. To turn off iCloud Music Library on your iPhone or iPad, ensure to switch off "Sync Library."

Part 3. Turn off iCloud Music Library on Mac

Step 1. On your Mac running macOS Catalina or later, open the Music app.

Step 2. Click Music > Preferences.

Step 3. Go to the General tab, and ensure not to select the box of "Sync Library."

Step 4. Click the "OK" button to save this change.

Part 4. Turn off iCloud Music Library on Mac/Windows

Step 1. On your PC or Mac running macOS Mojave or earlier, open the iTunes app.

Step 2. Click Edit > Preferences.

Step 3. Go to the General tab, and ensure not to select the box of "iCloud Music Library."

Step 4. Click OK to save this change.

Part 5. How to Backup Apple Music Library Forever without iCloud

Due to the restrictions of Apple Music, Once you turn off the iCloud Music Library, you will lose all your Apple Music downloaded songs and you won't be able to play Apple Music offline anymore. So, if you still want to listen to Apple Music songs offline on your devices, you can do some tricks as below to back up Apple Music without the iCloud Music Library by downloading and converting Apple Music songs.

Here's a tool called ViWizard Audio Converter which can help you easily back up your Apple Music and iTunes playlists. ViWizard Audio Converter is a tool that aims in converting Apple Music to MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, and other open formats. This tool supports converting Apple Music at 30X faster speed and keeps the lossless quality. You can also open the format window to adjust the parameters of the output audio, such as sample rate, bit rate, channel, and volume.

Key Features of ViWizard Audio Converter

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• Convert songs, albums, and playlists from Apple Music to MP3
• Remove DRM protection from Apple Music, iTunes, and Audible
• Save the converted audios with the original quality and ID3 tags
• Support the conversion of up to 100 audio formats to others

Step 1 Open ViWizard and Import Apple Music Files

Firstly launch ViWizard Audio Converter. Then click the Music Note button to load the Apple Music songs you've downloaded on your Apple Music library. In the popup window, select the music you want to convert and click OK to confirm. Or you can head to the folder where the downloaded Apple Music are stored and directly drag the files to the interface of ViWizard.

Step 2 Select Output Audio Format

Move to the Format section at the bottom left and click the MP3 button. There you can set the output format, codec, channel, sample rate, bit rate, etc. according to your needs. Remember to tap the OK button to save all your settings.

Step 3 Click to Start the Back up

Click the Convert button at the bottom right to begin converting the Apple Music songs to MP3. After the conversion is done, just click the Converted icon to locate those well-converted Apple Music songs. Now the Apple Music songs are saved on your computer.

Conclusion

If you want to turn off iCloud Music Library, you'd better know what it brings to you and what will you lose after the disabling. To summarize, you can only manually sync the Apple Music songs to other devices and cannot listen to Apple Music offline. So, you need a tool like ViWizard Audio Converter to convert Apple Music so that you can easily listen to Apple Music offline and sync to other devices you like.