Apple Music blues

[mjzee]

What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted.

Full article here: https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/

[jeffcrom]

This is worth reading. It's just unbelievable.

Makes me feel better about my house full of records and CDs.

[jazztrain]

That's really scary.  I also take some comfort in my physical collection of shellac, vinyl, and aluminum.  I only use iTunes to rip music I already own to my iPod.

[ejp626]

There are plenty of days that I find Windows Media Player too intrusive (renaming albums sometimes after I've ripped the files) and I pretty much only use it for pop CDs and use FreeRip for everything else.  I'm quite glad I haven't ever granted any of these services access to my hard drive. 

I had no intention of signing up for Apple Music anyway, but if this report above turns out to be true, then clearly no one should!!!

[psu_13]

http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it

[mjzee]

46 minutes ago, psu_13 said:

http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your-hard-drive-unless-you-tell-it

Great!  Thanks for clarifying.

[ejp626]

I have to say, I believe the original report far more than the "clarification." 

The number of fanboys in the comments in the second piece that flat out deny there could be any problems associated with using Apple is a bit worrying.

[David Ayers]

Who is Amber? I'm a mac/ipad/iphone user so I feel a bit ashamed not to know...

[sonnymax]

This claim has been discussed here before prior to the launch of Apple Music. There is no way Apple can delete files off your hard drive. It could conceivably ask if you want to delete the files (presumably after you have uploaded everything to the iCloud), but you have to click the button that says "yes". I don't doubt that once your files are in the iCloud (or in a any other online cloud-based storage system) something could happen to them. It's unfortunate that some people don't fully understand what they might be giving up in exchange for the convenience of cloud-based streaming. It's a similar situation for people like me who use a home NAS to stream music and fail to back up their files on separate drives ( the more, the merrier).   

Edited May 6, 2016 by sonnymax

[David Ayers]

People who at least half knew what they were doing used to tell me that simple updates to iplayer used to delete a lotmof their files. Delete, not lose. I could never quite believe it but this sense of apple being a bit rogue xkeeps coming back in one form or another.

[psu_13]

So, I don't know what exactly happened to this poor user, but I'm pretty sure that Apple Music is not *designed* to end up in a place where it is actually deleting files off of your computer without telling you. The problem is that Apple Music/iTunes is a very complicated system, and it's hard to tell exactly what happened to the poor guy to put him into his final state.

The current iTunes/Apple Music application is really at least four different applications that manages music in four different ways (I'm leaving out the movies, books and apps part of the system for now).

1. It's a thing that lets you rip CDs and manages the local storage of the results.

2. It's a thing that lets you buy and download music files from the iTunes store, and then manage the local storage of same.

3. It is iTunes Match, which came before Apple Music, which allows you to stream any of the some version of the above files from other computers using your iTunes account. 

4. It is Apple Music, which is a spotify-like service that lets you stream music that you have not bought from any computer using your Apple Music account.

The main confusion over how the system works is in how your local catalog interacts with Match and how they both interact with Apple Music. Apple also made the unfortunate decision to make the Match and Apple Music services different even though they are in the same app and even though on the surface they do very similar things with files that are already local to your computer. I think this is where the original user got into trouble, but I'm not sure.

So what does Match do? It does two things:

1. It makes the various bits of music that you ripped or bought from the store available for streaming from any computer that you have your iTunes account on.

2. As part of (1) it maintains a catalog of the music you can stream in Apple's servers.

The way this works is:

1. Any music you bought from the store is automatically in the shared catalog.

2. Any music you ripped is added to the catalog in one of two ways: iTunes examines all of your local files and sees if they "match" existing songs in the store based on some fuzzy criteria mostly related to file fingerprints or meta-data. If it finds a store file that matches it assumes your local file is the same track and lets you stream that track from the store if you don't have a local copy of it. If it can't find a match it will upload the file to some storage associated with your account, but the number of files you can upload is limited. The matching is done this way to limit the amount of user data the Apple servers need to store. The fuzzy matching does cause some weird issues though, because you might not actually get *exactly* the track you expect, esp. in classical and jazz recordings where the same track has been reissued or remastered multiple times.

Confusingly, Apple Music also uses a system much like Match to integrate files you might already own into Apple Music's shared catalog, but the two systems *are not the same*. I don't know how AM works if you don't keep Match running, because I have not tried that case. Still, it is subject to all the above confusions.

If you have been a long time user of iTunes Match and read the Apple Music docs carefully you would have realized that you wanted to keep *both* subscriptions going in order to be happy. This is what I did with my relatively large catalog and while I have had other problems with Apple Music (and Match, and the iCloud music library) I have never had it delete any local files without telling me.

Early on in Apple Music's launch there were some Internet pieces written by angry users who got into trouble by doing this:

1. Start with a large local music library.

2. Sign up for AM or iTunes Match

3. Think "hmm, all my files are now in this cloud catalog, I will save space by deleting them from my computer".

4. Be sad later, because the cloud library is not really storing your files, most of the time, just a meta-data fingerprint of your files.

I don't think this is what happened to this user. But I do think that he was using Apple Music without iTunes Match and something ended up going wrong with his shared catalog

In some ways I think Apple could have avoided some of this confusion if they had kept Apple Music and the iTunes store in separate applications. Merging that catalogs together makes for a confusing user experience and it's hard to know what to do when something goes wrong. Some people may recall other early reports of Apple Music duplicating tracks or otherwise running into trouble because the iTunes catalog and the Apple Music catalog had some kind of disagreement.

Anyway, you can avoid all of this by not signing up for any of it. Or just playing CDs. But I like playing music from my phone in my car. ?

Hope this "helps."

Edited May 6, 2016 by psu_13

[David Ayers]

3 hours ago, psu_13 said:

 

Anyway, you can avoid all of this by not signing up for any of it.

 

I've done that and it works *really* well...

 

And I'm a mac user - go figure.

[mjzee]

Here's a scary thought, inspired by this recent thread: http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/78502-another-thread-gone-missing/

What if your hard drive started dropping files?  Either through a malfunctioning EHD or through something like Apple Music.  If you have a large digital collection, how would you catch that?  I know it's possible if you do a compare of your current collection to your most recent backup, but most people wouldn't do that on a regular basis.  How would you become aware of missing files?  Similarly, what if your EHD began corrupting files?  If you perform regular backups, your good backup would be overwritten by the corrupted files.  I'm just throwing these out as food for thought.  As some of us migrate more toward primarily using digital files, I think these issues will be of some concern.

[JSngry]

Reading the comments...doesn't the author say that his story is "just a warning" or something like that? Does that mean that his chat with Amber was apocryphal?

No matter, just as I don't bet more than I can afford to lose, I don't let go of hard copies of things that I don't want to lose. This cloud stuff is great, but, still, if you want to really be sure to have it...

[psu_13]

I've probably lost more music on CD than I ever lost off of my computers. (Knock wood). I also had a few CDs rot, but luckily had ripped them already, so they live on, for now, as long as my backups are not destroyed.  

[JSngry]

Can we confirm whether or not this actually happened to this author, or is it something he wrote as a warning?

I mean, I'm with him either way, it's just that his own comment in his article disclarifies the veracitic nature of the incident's reportage?

[ejp626]

It is the internet, so it's pretty hard to know who or what to trust.  My reading of his comment was that it did happen to him and he was warning others.  I thought that his "just warning" others was modifying the fact he was not taking legal action, like some may have been urging him to do (not modifying the fact that files were deleted).

I fully believe that Apple and Microsoft have the ability to delete things off the hard drive.  (And didn't they delete 1984 off a bunch of Kindles?)  I am quite convinced that there will be a flavor of Microsoft Windows (one day, not today) that will go through one's hard drive and delete files that have been downloaded from torrents.  

This case (if it actually did happen) may well be user error as well as a lot of bad system design, but it is quite clear that these programs are not at all clear about how they are operating and are a lot more invasive than most people realize.

Edited May 6, 2016 by ejp626

[sonnymax]

On May 6, 2016 at 4:11 PM, ejp626 said:

I fully believe that Apple and Microsoft have the ability to delete things off the hard drive.

And just how do you think they do this?

[sonnymax]

From CNET:

When you sign into Apple Music and enable iCloud Music Library on a Mac, iTunes begins matching the songs in your personal library with songs in Apple's catalog. If a song matches, Apple adds its own version of the song to your library. When there isn't a match, Apple Music uploads a copy of your song after temporarily converting it to a AAC 256 Kbps file.

 

The original files stored on your Mac are not converted -- only the uploaded and synced file is changed.

 

Matched and uploaded music is then made available on any device linked to the same Apple ID you used to sign up for Apple Music.

 

But this is where it can get confusing (as if it wasn't already). Any songs or albums you download from Apple Music on a secondary device, meaning Android, iPad, iPod, iPhone, or Mac is just a copy of the original song. And because that copy is now linked to Apple Music, you will lose access to it 30 days after canceling an Apple Music account.

 

However, you will not lose access to the original files stored on your computer. The only way you would lose access to the original file is if you delete it from the Mac it was uploaded from.

 

No, Apple Music doesn't delete your files

[David Ayers]

The notion of "primary device" seems archaic. These days people have lots of devices both personal and work, and you might not even remember which device you used to sign up for e.g. Apple Music. Equally you are very likely to have different sets of downloads on different machines. Apple's working model does not correspond to how people actually use devices.

You might not even any longer use the device Apple once-upon-a-time designated as primary.

Edited May 8, 2016 by David Ayers

[ejp626]

If you go through the comments on the CNET article, you will find quite a number of people who have had files deleted and quite a few that have had their files over-written with Apple's versions of files (which then they lose when they stop subscribing to the service).  Or maybe they just lost access to their original Mac, which happened in some cases.  You can choose to not believe any of them or believe that they are all idiots that clicked delete on thousands of files, if it makes you happier or more secure.  I think it is fully possible that in some settings of the software, Apple and certainly MS Windows in general, can delete files. 

I certainly saw Windows Media Player change file names and associations on files I had ripped with the software (undoing my special edits when the master information on-line was wrong, thus effectively putting the wrong information back onto the files).  I had trouble believing that even after I moved ripped files to other hard drives, the file associations would keep updating to the wrong information.  It certainly looked pretty "magical" in what it was doing.

System software does delete files frequently (temporary files mostly), as well as virus checking software (which can both delete and quarantine files depending upon the settings).  In some cases, it can literally change the path name to put it into the recycle bin.  Windows Explorer could be set to not display file names of offending files (I do think this is something Microsoft will unroll some day). 

So much happens under the hood of system software and software with broad reach (like many Apple software solutions) that I find blanket statements like "it never deletes files" to be generally untrue. 

[sonnymax]

In fact, I did read all the comments, very carefully. I don't doubt that these people did lose, or lose access to, music files. What I don't believe is their claims as to how these files were lost. I think the article did a very good job of explaining how it can happen. The fact that these people choose not to believe the explanation is not surprising. iHaters are abundant and quite vocal on CNET. The fact remains that if you agree to upload your music library and use iMatch, files that you own will very likely be exchanged for ones that "match" those already in the iCloud. I say "match" because this exchange isn't exact, and in some cases is unforgivably wrong. You trade access to your original files for the sake of convenience - in the iCloud, not on your hard drive. It's your choice, so choose wisely. I will never use iMatch, ever. Most of my files are lossless, and many could be mistaken for something contained in the iCloud. If by some accident or misstep iMatch gets activated, I will delete my iTunes library and restore it with a backup, or a backup to the backup, or a backup to the backup to the backup. Yes, I actually have three copies of my library. With over 2TB (and counting) of music, I'm limiting my chances of a total meltdown.

And just so you know, a few years ago I did make the mistake of clicking "yes" to the iMatch option during a routine iTunes update. It caused me a lot of grief, but I recovered everything by way of backups. The important point is that I made the mistake based on my own ignorance. That's a fact that some people find it difficult to acknowledge. Better to blame the person who offers a choice, rather than the one who makes a poor one.

Edited May 8, 2016 by sonnymax

[mjzee]

To be fair, it's hard to know all that will ensue from clicking an innocent "yes" (one of many) after an upgrade.  It's not like at that point Apple will pause the process and explain all that will occur after you click "yes."  One has a reasonable expectation that Apple will do right by its customer and not cause harm.  So, yes, this can be a shock, it can be detrimental, and the customer should not be blamed.

[psu_13]

My understanding of iTunes match and Apple Music is that the matching system should only affect what appears in the cloud music catalog and should never actually change the local files that are stored on your hard drive (unless you tell it to, on purpose or by accident). Obviously the system is confusing and I could see how naive use might result in a state where you might think that the files are gone. But I remain very surprised at the claim that the files were just deleted by the system. No system is designed to do that on purpose, only by mistake.

But as I said before, I have never combined a local catalog *with* Apple Music but *without* iTunes Match, so there could be some extra confusion there, since the matching system in Apple Music is *not* the same.

Overall Apple could be doing this better, but as I tried to make clear in my original post, they are fighting a lot of history and complexity.

FWIW, I personally use iTunes Match (and Apple Music) so I can play my music off my laptop either when I'm not at home or if I don't fee like turning on my "main" computer. Except for some occasional foibles as described above, it has worked well for me and never touched any of my original files, whether I ripped them myself or downloaded them.

[JSngry]

Wait, are we saying that some people don't know the difference between a hard drive and a cloud drive, like people who don't know where their car battery is?