Can you trick Apple Music/iCloud Music Library by labeling music files as audiobooks?

Question

I have about 40,000 tracks in my iTunes library.

As I understand it, in order to add Apple Music tracks to custom playlists, I have to enable the iCloud Music Library, which I can't do with more than 25,000 tracks in my library.

I know that I can work around the problem by splitting my library up into two. But I wonder if there's a simpler solution?

I don't listen to audiobooks very often, and so I'm not using the "Audiobooks" media type in iTunes. If I relabel a music file as an audiobook in iTunes, it no longer shows up in the Music track count, but I can play it just like normal from iTunes on my desktop.

Before I go culling my whole library for tracks to label as books, though, I wondered if anyone had already tried this, and whether it works? It seems a lot easier than breaking everything into two separate libraries, but I haven't seen it suggested in any of the many threads on this issue.

Answer 1

Finally got around to trying it, and it works. Once I'd marked enough files as "Audiobook" to get the remaining music files under 25k, Apple synced the remaining files with no problem.

This seems like a much easier solution than the "two libraries" solution that other people are recommending...although it would make actual audiobooks more of a pain to deal with for people who use audiobooks.