Hi there,
I went through a bunch of work with Apple today that I thought I should record. Just in case.
My wife and I really like Apple Music and want to get the Family plan. I learned that I need to do Family Share first. When I went to do that I noticed that the account that it was going to do it with was my iCloud account. Not my store account that all my purchases is on. So no way to share music in that case since all of my purchases are on the storage account. This is not that uncommon it turns out. But I had no luck using Google and actually had to talk to Apple. I did notice that Apple will not merge accounts which I thought might have been my solution.
Background
I have had an iCloud account for a very long time. In fact it was a Me.com one first. In those days you did end up with a store account and a Me.com account. No big deal until now. This means I have two Apple IDs and that complicates things. The one that will be used for Family Sharing will not have any of my purchases on it so hard to share.
Solution
So what I did was copy all of my files out of my Mac iCloud drive to a local desktop folder. Then I logged out of iCloud using my Cloud account and logged in using the store account. This took a bit of time. I did say yes, keep my contacts but nothing else. Once it was done I copied my iCloud drive files back. 1Password had an error and I had to enable it to use iCloud for sync. Nothing lost and that was easy. Things like Tweetbot didn’t even blink.
I had to do this on every device. Took a while. I did not save anything on those as the Mac was the primary copy of things.
Once I was done on all of the devices, I enabled Family Sharing on my Mac. Worked fine. After my wife accepted the Invite, and it was reflected on my Mac, I did the Family Share for Apple Music - which I had to do on a iPhone.
So now I have Family Share working good - meaning either of us can download the others music, books, and apps. Plus we have the family price on Apple Music so that is good. Plus with my wife’s Apple account having a credit card it will be used for purchases rather then mine.
Links
General Info for setup - https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201088
General Info - https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201060
Setup help for Family Sharing Apple Music - http://www.imore.com/cant-get-family-sharing-apple-music-work-heres-fix
Update:
- 9/17/15 - another hidden cost to doing this. I use the excellent RDP app called Jump Desktop. It used iCloud to sync among devices the configuration of the different desktops I did. Unlike some of the other apps it was not smart enough to deal with this change so I lost everything.
- 9/1315 - talked with Apple Support and they recognize the difficultly. But the next time someone asks about this they will make sure the full impact is understood. Very nice to work with them on this.
- 9/9/15 - just learned that all of my Photo’s shared albums are gone. Mine that I shared, and mine that I accepted from others. My pictures are not gone but this is quite frustrating.
- 9/7/15 - just learned the my Mail rules, and signatures are all gone. That is painful - the signature not so much but all the rules gone is. Unexpected cost to this solution.
Michael
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