Apple Stole My Music
blog.vellumatlanta.com
blog.vellumatlanta.com
There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, but rather are willing to go huge lengths to please music industry.
Only because you eating in the restaurant it doesn't mean waiter can run to your house and smash all of your food in the fridge reasoning "from now on you are covered".
http://9to5mac.com/2015/07/02/apple-music-vs-itunes-match-dr...
> If you haven’t deleted your own copies of your music, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you download onto other devices from Apple Music, those devices will get the DRM versions, but you’ll still have your DRM-free originals.
> Either way, if you’ve used iTunes Match as a convenient way to free up space on your Mac by deleting your own copy of any of your music, don’t cancel your subscription in favor of Apple Music if you want to keep that music DRM free.
Given the reference to freeing up space, it seems like he is talking about the original music files within iTunes and not a backup.
What happened next was an epic fail exactly like the article describes - iTunes trashed my collection, "organised" the files in it in ways that were buggy and just plain wrong, and turned two weeks of part time effort into completely wasted time.
This was before iCloud, and fortunately I keep my own music on a separate disk, so it didn't try to trash that too.
In a sense I was lucky. Two wasted weeks is a learning experience. Two years would have been heartbreaking.
Two decades? I. Can't. Even.
Since then I haven't allowed iTunes anywhere near my FLAC collection. I've also warned anyone with a music collection to never, ever to allow iTunes anywhere near it.
From the library folder:
Music/Artist/Album/Track# Title.ext
A common example: "Artist" and "Album Artist" are two different ID3 fields - if you have an album with an Album Artist but a blank Artist, iTunes will catalog it as "Unknown Artist" when the consolidation happens.
This is slightly annoying to fix, but the mass tag editor in iTunes works well.
In which case you can just turn off the folder organization, but there's not an easy way to undo it once iTunes has gone and dicked it up.
More importantly, and more generally: what if my music organization format predates OSX/iOS/iTunes and I am not interested in altering it for todays fad ?
This is not apple-specific, either - many devices and services (audi MMI, Sonos, etc.) assume certain naming and organizational practices - and work very awkwardly with any other layout.
Granted, my Sonos system has never deleted anything or reorganized directories ... but my music is mounted read-only just in case.
Also, take your pick. If the files aren't organized to a consistent standard, that means a database has to be stored somewhere with that info so the app can do its job. In iTunes' case, that's an XML file.
Actually, that's not true - one alternative to an organizational structure or a database is to actually name the files verbosely, which is what I decided on in 1996 when I ripped my first CD:
Artist Name - Album Name - ## - Track Name - time.wav
For instance:
Ferry, Bryan - Taxi - 03 - Answer Me - 2m46s.wav
This file can now be dropped into place anywhere without losing information, requires no DB and gives you full "metadata" for wav files that don't actually contain metadata.
Pray tell, how should my WAV/PCM files be "tagged" ? What's the format for that ? Exactly.
Again, I disagree - see my response further up the thread for how to get around this problem with verbose naming:
Ferry, Bryan - Taxi - 03 - Answer Me - 2m46s.wav
For one, even in your specific limited case of Bryan Ferry's album _Taxi_ there are 5 different versions of the album from 5 different countries[0].
Furthermore, your verbose naming proposal is not only unequipped to handle something as basic as alternate versions and international releases, it has no affordances for providing basic information such as year of release, publisher, and composer, let alone information about bitrates and compression schemes.
Even were we to restrict our attention to just the metadata your scheme does encode, your proposal would fail when cataloging an entry where the band/album/track name contains a hyphen surrounding by whitespace. There are also some albums which have more than 99 tracks (archival records, for example, which are distributed in multi-CD collections).
My response may seem a bit like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer but, having worked in a library and taken classes in information science, it's crucial to illustrate why hastily-conceived proposals to replace metadata with file naming conventions should never be taken seriously. In fact, I believe they should only be taken jokingly!
Metadata schemes are so important to information and library science that, in my opinion, any proposal to replace metadata schemes with "verbose naming" should be shown to be untenable unless the goal is to index fewer than 100 files in a restricted-access repository (and maybe even then).
From the standpoint of a librarian or digital archivist, you may as well have proposed storing the binary data in the file name, too, essentially eliminating the file name which itself is a piece of metadata.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/Bryan-Ferry-Taxi/release/1120442
EDIT: readability
But that's how anyone who is serious about collecting digital music has been ordering it since ages. Sure, I never considered putting track length in the filename as :) (but I can see why), and if I can help it I have them tagged correctly too. But the file/folder structure is how I keep it organised.
There may be better ways to go about this, but it at least needs to be an actual improvement. iTunes is not.
Currently I'm experimenting with a command line tool called 'beets', which from reading its docs, definitely has a philosophy that aligns with mine. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out how to tell it where to get the metadata from, it defaults to MusicBrainz which seems to have quite a few inaccuracies in their data (spelling of "Kung-Fu", hyphenated or with spaces I don't care really but if you use both spellings on the same album, one of them is wrong). It's got plugins for discogs and figure-out-from-pathname so that's good, but then it still uses MusicBrainz too. All in all it's a bit fiddly, but I can't really imagine a way to do it better, if you want have accuracy, keep control, some assistance with automatic tagging, but without messing up weird edge-cases like the classical albums and bootleg recordings mentioned above (for which 'beets' tries real hard to do the right thing, that being what you decide it to be).
What you meant is a standard that was used. That's changing, a little.
For a live music fan, that's a disaster. Many thousands of live performances pulled out of their identifying folders because they had similar metadata. A significant number of labelled, sorted tracks pushed to "unknown artist". Random, inaccurate assignments of album covers.
Suffice to say, it was easier to uninstall iTunes and restore from a hard backup. One of the perks of smartphones is that I can get music onto my device without even considering iTunes, and I can't imagine giving it another shot.
Careful there, the iPhone is also a smartphone, and I do not know of a way of getting music onto it without iTunes.
It's been a few years and I'm not sure if its still in development. I believe it was called iFunbox? On mobile now and don't have the opportunity to search for more info - I will edit this later.
Thankfully, it's one I can recover from a CD, when I find it again.
It shouldn't be hard to imagine that metadata will have collisions, and include something like a hash of the actual data.
Apparently Amazon uses this tagging service to keep its online music library organized.
Intentionally or not, history (what songs actually were on an album) gets edited unless you manage music files yourself.
(The Apple behavior described in the article is way worse than what Spotify does, of course.)
For the record, I've never lost any music, and I'm not entirely sure how that's possible short of a catastrophic iTunes bug[1] -- I'm not disputing anyone's stories, but even "post-Cloud" I've never seen iTunes delete files without me actually clicking on delete somewhere. Despite what the blogger was told by the rep, I'm pretty sure that's not how Apple Music is supposed to work. You enable it on a "primary" Mac, it matches tracks to the iTunes Store library, and then it uploads tracks that aren't in that library to iCloud. The files in your original library will be left alone unless you delete the original files.
[1]: Not that "catastrophic iTunes bug" sounds unlikely. I've heard friend-of-a-friend stories about deletion bugs in the recent past.
The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.
And you get Youtube without ads for the same price.
Plus, Google Play Music's UI blows the others out of the water. My favorite part is the "Play Next" and "Add to Queue" choices for unobtrusively adding songs to what's currently playing. Something that iTunes actually used to have, but then they removed it for no reason.
I think it is $15 for five people.
When I want the fad-of-the-day music I will pay to stream it. Which isn't very often. We all have our guilty pleasures :)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204962
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
What's the difference?
Maybe the answer is never, but I sure am not confident about that.
It's like being mad at Linux for letting you 'rm -rf ~/Music' it simply did exactly what you told it to.
I use iTunes Match across a myriad of devices and it is a wonderful service. It's sad to see a frustrated end user spreading such FUD.
Signing up for Apple Music is what prompts iTunes to replace your local music library.
The advantage for users is that your data is available everywhere you have an apple device and Internet. The disadvantage is a corporation manages and controls increasing amounts if your life, private and public, and leaving them for another becomes unthinkable, and of course the corporation chooses what information it is appropriate for you to rent access to.
Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.
I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.
Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.
(Edit: This is not a compliment)
It's how I've felt for decades as a Mac user: boy they suck, but they suck less than any of the (desktop) alternatives.
(edit: I see you updated your post to clarify -- now this is redundant.)
Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.
Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).
Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)
At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.
Is this claim based on anecdotal evidence or some other source?
http://mashable.com/2015/12/31/iphone-4s-ios-9-lawsuit/#l.Zf...
Edit: I'm not sure if this has been fixed with the later iOS 9 versions.
It affects iPad, too.
But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.
Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.
If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”
Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?
It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.
I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.
Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?
I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.
I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.
Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.
Other systems get backed up to the NAS, and the NAS drives are periodically backed up onto a second ZFS pool that is normally kept physically offline.
A user manual is expected on a new device, having media on your device added and deleted by a corporation on their whim is not so pleasant, mostly because it makes their view of your true relation to them apparent.
EDIT: (incomplete submission)
Oh, of course, great idea! I thought 4 was enough!
[0]http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your...
* Get it synced properly
* Determine what is stored in iCloud/on-device
* Ensure that device contents are actually backed-up, unless done manually
* Set up simple things like email accounts
Just a month or two ago, I was helping someone whose iTunes music wouldn't sync to their iPhone. It turned out that, when they signed up to Apple Music, iTunes had silently flipped on a setting that prevents this. Working out what on earth was happening took me almost an hour.
Yet everyone tells me that their Apple devices 'just work'. I don't have the same experience - I find their behaviour to be utterly opaque and non-deterministic. Am I alone?
I don't know whether this is deliberate on the part of Apple to discourage the use of iTunes, or whether they really think that it works well and is intuitive. For anybody from Apple reading this -- iTunes is not intuitive. It is horrible.
It can, without asking, delete the music from your device or your folders, reorganize your folders, rename your songs and reset their id3 tags.
The mentality of "our users are stupid, just do everything for them" seems pervasive throughout apple's products.
Oh, it's worse than that: "we know better than you regardless of your intelligence. trust us: this new UI is better for you; this new media file manager is better for you; this new gesture is better for you" - forget all the work you've done, forget all that time acclimatizing to the last set of UI and gesture changes ...
The whole "user is stupid" attitude was basically stated to me by a big name Gnome developer a year or so ago.
And his like seem to have their fingers in more and more of what lives above the Linux kernel (and are likely chomping at the bit to do the same to the kernel itself once Linus is out of the way).
I had the joy of buying a product that Apple swears doesn't exist ("Our records say we never made a machine with that serial number, so I'm not allowed to put you into the support system.") Three dead logic boards later, I'm done with the company altogether.
I'd like to think that with market penetration nearly complete, Apple will start to face consequences for this. They're depending on beating competitors and pushing upgrades now (instead of selling to new buyers), so lost customers are a bigger threat. I'm not holding my breath, though, it's just too rare.
If your user is stupid, they won't be able to manage a general purpose computer but will instead require a well-controlled computing appliance that will dutifully collect all the rents its creators can get away with.
This! One is something like "delete all the music from my iPod" and the other is "delete all the music from my hard drive". How on earth has this situation been allowed to develop?
Similarly, the default setting where Apply tries to copy all of your content to a new iPod when you plug it in, in alphabetical order. I have 300Gb of music, you should know that won't succeed.
It's just a UX nightmare, hard to grasp how to do things, almost impossible to grasp what the consequences of doing things are.
I'm currently using the 3 month free trial and every time I use it i have to tell myself "it's free money, just 1 more month until I switch back to spotify".
For example, the playlists I create on my laptop don't sync whatsoever with my phone. I spent a little time trying to research how to sync them and just said screw it.
On what planet does a user not want their playlists automatically synced between devices, let alone making that the default option?
Win7 is essentially what WinXP was a few years ago; it's not perfect, but it's familiar and it gets the job done and it stays out of the way (most of the time). As a user, Microsoft has to offer me something significant if they want me to spend time learning something new, and I've not yet seen it.
Windows 10 is to Win 7 what Win ME was to XP.
Re: Privacy: Maybe not directly a privacy concern, but one of my biggest issues with Windows 10 (and 8) is how many things are now out of your control. For instance, you can't disable automatic updates or the built-in antivirus for more than a short while. Given that, it's easy to imagine Microsoft pushing out a privacy-invading setting that you have to manually opt out of, which you won't do until you know about it.
I wouldn't say I barely tried it; I've had it installed since December and used it full-time for about a month before dual-booting Linux (and I still use it for gaming). Maybe I wouldn't be so frustrated with it if it didn't regularly freeze for several seconds at a time, because that's really the biggest issue I have with it (and I know I'm not the only one), but I'd say I gave it a pretty fair shot. Aside from losing access to a couple programs (which is why I dual-boot), I'm happy with Linux Mint.
That's probably from the built-in spyware and forced upgrade processes that run in the background.
I haven't had any significant problems with freezing and boot times.
I am a little biased as I'm doing C# MVC so I'm using Visual Studio, I think it's all pretty great.
You do have to get used to the new control panel, but all of the old panels are still there for you to use (I am nearly 100% sure), but it's not really _that_ bad. You get used to it.
I run Android on my phone so I'm pretty sure that overall I have no real privacy from any agency that really want to get in to my business... oh well.
Apple devices haven't "just worked" in over a decade. It's a testament to apples marketing that people still think this.
I wouldn't say my Mac 'just works' anymore, nor my iPhone for that matter. And this is commented on a lot by a lot of prominent Apple bloggers, to the point that it does get responded to by Apple SVPs (see Marco Arment and Phil Schiller)
EDIT: that said, my mum gave up the PC when she got an iPad 2, and was even happier when she got a hand-me-down iPhone 4S. She finds both slow now, but still won't go near the PC anymore. For her, the Apples still 'just work'.
It's the syncing services, specifically, that Apple is screwing up. They never figured this stuff out, even under Steve Jobs.
> Fortune magazine reported that during the summer of 2008, after MobileMe had launched to mostly negative reviews, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to a meeting in the Town Hall auditorium at 4 Infinite Loop. After asking them "what MobileMe is supposed to do", when someone answered, Jobs reportedly shot back, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
Confirmed that it wasn't user error, and was common, never made got another inch of headway. My eventual diagnosis was "at least you're getting the message!"
Next, companies "figured out" that usability is soo important and that it needs to get fixed because customers were having trouble. This was generally a wrong conclusion. Getting rid of complex menus doesn't necessarily increase usability. It irritates power users to no end and doesn't help casual users when they run into special cases. Heck, even the power users can't help the casual user anymore!
Every not completely trivial app(lication) should offer at least additionally a "complex" mode that offers a good old menu bar where deterministic, to some degree "atomic" functions (if you pardon the faulty analogy) are offered, grouped in a logically consistent way.
And they find that very natural. Normal.
Like they found normal 20 years ago we had to help them with their MS product they paid, but for free.
I plug my Android phone into my Linux laptop. The phone's filesystem is mounted. I move, copy, delete whatever music and photos I want. Dead simple and rational.
I put Flickr on the phone. Photos I take with the phone are automatically backed up to Flickr, and I can see them from anywhere.
For the longest time MTP & Linux was terribly painful, verging on unusable, while mass storage worked perfectly. It bit when I upgraded my Nexus phone and discovered I couldn't get to the files stored on it.
Fortunately, all seems to work well now.
But oh my goodness! MTP support on Linux was terrible for a while, and even on Windows it wasn't fast and reliable. It was easier at the time to just use a service like Dropbox to transfer files to/from the phone, than to use USB.
First off, file access is mediated via software on the Android side. What you are seeing is a database representation of the device FS. And this database can be incorrect (people have in the past deleted folders they thought were empty only to lose files) or used to implement DRM.
Second, it is bloody slow.
The one benefit of MTP is that Android do not have to unmount the FS you are trying to access.
But only because people want me to and pay for it... I wouldn't inflict the trauma that is using these on anyone.
I had problems with every single Android I owned, here is the current one:
1. Super slow, even after reformatting everything and reinstalling, it is not even a cheap phone.
2. Terrible interfaces overall, specially as they keep removing physical buttons, and apps started to shove important buttons (like "menu") in random places.
3. The interface thread seemly is prone to freezing, for example yesterday I wanted to use youtube, and the interface froze, and then suddenly opened a video I didn't wanted, and started playing full blast volume and waking people up, and I couldn't figure how to close the damn video, and then suddenly it crashed.
4. This all applies to the actual phone parts... more than once I had to quickly dial someone for some emergency reason (not life or death, but still emergency), and the phone app decide to be slow, or crash, or reboot, and so on.
5. Had the phone app crash on me while I was actually talking to someone.
And this is just my personal phone, in other phones I had one that I had to reinstall and the phone antenna stopped working after the reinstall (it needed a custom antenna driver, that I had to track down on internet and install...), random reboots, slow, extremely fast draining of the battery, specially if you made some mistake like leave a GPS-enabled app running, nevermind the fact that the OS itself is so crap, that every manufacturer ship the phone with several third party apps to fix OS problems (memory managers and defragmenters, app killers, temporary file cleaners, and so on...)
iPhone has another set of problems, but still is problematic. I personally would never buy one (my current client I am testing his iOS code on a device he provided to me...)
I have been very happy with Nexus phones (going back to Nexus S), and have never experienced any of those issues.
We also have 3 Motorola G phones - which for the money (<200) are really hard to beat. Motorola seems to have not attempted to mess with the stock O/S all that much..
I happen to do this since i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months and it's just easier to pick up a new one, sign in and let it set itself up exactly as the old one.
But anything that deviates from this workflow, you tend to run into problems.
umm... what?
But honestly the iPhone 6 is the most breakable thing i've ever owned.
it could be argued i don't care for it that well.
iTunes has always been the worst user experience, both for myself and setting it up for the less technically inclined. I've been a firm "no-Apple" camper because Apple products doesn't give you the control if you need it. For an obsessive music fan, fine-tune control over how the product interacts with your library is critical.
I am not surprised at all by the disaster mentioned in the article- it validates the paranoia I've always harboured against Apple products.
> The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
They might be slightly more reliable in their most standard use case, but you're doomed at the smallest hiccup.
For various reasons, I have multiple Apple IDs with iTunes content linked to them (old account, new account, various region changes over the years etc.). At some point, Apple decided that you could only download past purchases with _one_ Apple ID per computer per ninety days, effectively locking me out of the content unless I had a local copy[1] and was using a pre-authorised PC (for context, this was after Apple had done the "It's all in the cloud; just stream it" push for movies etc.).
I ended up getting around it by firing up a bunch of virtual machines (one per Apple ID), downloading everything I end, striping off the DRM, and then never using iTunes again for anything other than music (and even then I favour CDs first and other download sources second).
I'd certainly been a long time coming (2010ish iTunes handled my large-ish media library fine, and the UI was fine. By 2014ish, every release was feeling slower and slower, and the UI felt more and more like the iOS interfaced backported to PC), but that was the final straw. Currently moving over to foobar2000 for music (technically I could just point it at my music folders and be done, but I'm taking the opportunity to make sure everything is tagged properly).
[1] Which of course I keep on my NAS, but a) I'm not always on my local network and b) I'm not always 100% diligence about making sure a copy ends up there.
This is ingenious and also hilarious if it weren't so damn tragic.
>When giving the above warning, however, even in my most Orwellian paranoia I never could have dreamed that the content holders, like Apple, would also reach into your computer and take away what you already owned.
It just feels dirty, and, as my Software Developer Uncle probably would've called it, "Playing outside the sandbox." I mean, sure, as the article notes, the TOS gives Apple a lot of consent, but "Loss or Damage" via incidental use vs. outright deletion via intentional coding feels...different. Maybe legally they're not...
I do remember ranting at the top of my lungs after an online jam software installed an update and crashed my Win7 PC laptop so hard it had to rebuild via a command prompt screen. By then, I already had CD backups, a USB HD 500GB full of projects, and it was a cold reminder. The laptop restored fine, but whoa, not fun. Not what I signed up for in the agreement, risk-wise, I felt, so I've essentially stopped using that software.
...and I'll close by reminding myself I'm perfectly reasonable with my Win laptop setup, not running iTunes (Winamp), and backing up to a local cloud or other media (another USB HD coming soon). Life happens, accidents happen...but there's some funky software out there.
Heck of a story, and one I will point to gladly when discussing paths for audio DAW hardware/software platforms.
My solution to this (and to issues like this outside of software) is extreme but it will fix the problem. When one side creates a contract of any sort (ToS, EULA, phone contract, home buying contract) which primary purpose is to be signed by numerous other individuals who have little to no ability to alter the contract, the other parties are allowed to use lack of understanding to break the entire contract unless the creator can show beyond reasonable doubt (I would use clear and convincing, but that would be abused) that the signer did understand the entirety of the contract.
It would break contract law as we know it, but it would force simple, easy to understand contracts and it would penalize any robo signing practices. (Personal story: last time I went to a phone company, they gave the contract to read on a small device where I could only read 2 lines at a time and where part of the display was broken. I wasn't allowed a print out of the contract until after I signed. I walked away and have to this day not gotten a smartphone because of the downright evil practices of cell phone companies).
I've honestly kicked around a legal-ese type write-up of 'Personal Terms of Service' type disclaimers - subject to change at any time - essentially stating that by taking payment for a service there is a negotiating platform to reconcile conflicting claims. As in, I claim that I should never be subject to an early termination fee if I'm personally unstatisfied with the service, and the service provider says they alone are allowed to waive the fee. Well then, that's a conflict of terms, and by taking my money for a service, they implied they would allow my ToS to usurp theirs (e.g. it's written in my ToS that accepting money creates a binding agreement for such a thing), etc, etc.
I thought it was an exercise in basically being selfish, but the more times examples like this surface, the more it actually starts to sound reasonable. That's...pretty wild to me. I mean, I have a lot of respect for contracts and see them as the ties that hold a lot of commerce together, so they've got real, practical use that should be encouraged. But when it comes to "wiggle room" that sounds a bit like gamesmanship to tilt the power, then I also think fighting back is a natural result, childish as it might seem at first.
Also have enabled iCloud Music Library. Note these are three different services, and iCloud Music Library has been the most likely culprit for monkeying with your music, not Apple Music.
The combo of all three has deleted or auto-replaced exactly zero of my custom rips. I can use a series of steps (smart playlist to find matched songs, then manually delete that set) to shift to using Apple's high quality unprotected version, or not.
I wonder if the key to everything working as you imagine is the Match subscriptions:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/itunes-match/
If using Match, then after matching, manually deleting local, then re-downloading, you end up with a very high quality file without DRM that will continue to work fine and be portable, even after you cancel.
I'm not sure what happens if using only Apple Music without Match.
The linked article sounds a lot like the iCloud Music Library beta problems in July 2015:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/07/01/apple-music-users-...
And similar support experiences:
http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/24/i-got-my-music-back-at...
One of the strange things is I have 2 mp3 rips from CD with skips. When I play over the internet with iTunes match the files still skip. These are common songs, so whatever they are doing to determine if that song is in their library is working (I guess).
My only complaint is sometimes it breaks up my albums if it decides that songs are by different artists. (Bob Marley, vs Bob Marley and the Wailers)
There are two default options that should be changed for safety when configuring iTunes:
- enable error correction when importing from CDs (importing options in Preferences)
- disable "keep music collection organized" (or something to that effect, located somewhere in the prefs)
I restored a backup, turned off Match and Apple Music and obtained a refund. Suffice to say it was the first week of Apple Music but still, it was pretty appalling that my carefully tagged library and artwork were overwritten with zero warning.
Apple do tend to release things a little half baked sometimes - especially when it pertains to cloud services - sadly the customer's data is the casualty which is a shame since it reflects a very cavalier attitude to user data.
Well, to save precious local storage space of course. Apple's just being helpful here.
But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong - "I know! Let's save the user some space by serving all their music from the cloud!" The moment that file deletion came up in the design, the option to opt-in should have been added. Unless someone at Apple did indeed intend lock-in ...
Yeah, storage that was made precious by apple by not supporting an SD card slot. Very "helpful".
I can totally see how this might have seemed like a good idea. Shame it's just... not.
I just checked the apple website and it seems you're right. 3 out of the 5 available Macbook pro variants have <= 256GB storage.
This is very much about a laptop rather than a phone. And yep, I'm also suffering from this. I've got a 2010 MacBook Air with 256GB storage. I'm down to 10GB free space and struggling to decide how to cope with the now 160GB Photos library.
This is an article about music in iTunes on a laptop. Apple sells laptops with SD card slots.
Which automatic update features, by the way? While I definitely don't like or defend such features, all the ones that I know about can be turned off—which gives a more useable result than having to turn off the whole computer! Maybe my Mac is silently doing some behind-the-scenes updating that I haven't noticed hitting my data, though.
(Windows 10 is the real pig here, though. Bye-bye, option to download only on request! Bye-bye, this month's data allowance before I realised that it was downloading what turned out to be a huge update! I did eventually discover how to designate a connection as 'metred', a nice feature that I wish Mac OS had.)
If that's really the rationale, I think they're either optimizing for a use case that I find personally very atypical, or they didn't do their research.
Don't contribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice, especially when dealing with a massive company who hires quite intelligent individuals.
Lock-in was intended, and then some smart people found not just a way to sell it, but make it look more acceptable even if they were called out on it.
I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”
“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile . . .
Apple have a similar philosophy with Photos, where the photos on your device are just low resolution versions, with the original hi-resolution versions kept on iCloud, if you choose the Optimize Device Storage setting. [1]
Not a philosophy I agree with. I like to keep my data local so I can use it offline. It's one reason I bought a 2012 MBP - I could get 1TB of storage cheaply, and I can upgrade it to a 1TB SSD myself for half the price of what Apple charges (Apple charges $800 for a 1TB SSD in Australia).
If there anyway to turn off that syncing and keep files locally only? Your comments have made me rethink my upcoming purchase!
This is exactly how it should be, and how apparently it is not for Apple Music. At least this is true for today, who knows whether what is optional today might become the only option tomorrow...
i once accidentally enabled it on my phone and now, even though i have a reported 2300 songs on my phone.. as soon as i lose signal i have no music.. itunes wont even open up to a playlist in airplane mode.. made even better that it "syncs" my music when i plug in and reports the storage usage in GB.. its just not accessible...
apple's pushing of everyone into the cloud has me switching to Android in a couple of months when I move. I'm done with their shit.
http://www.macworld.com/article/2955637/software-photography...
SSDs are getting cheap http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E1T0B-A...
That's $320 for 1TB. Still 4x than a HDD but the difference in absolute price is getting down.
They should have just left it on the local drive as well. Terrible.
Thus there certainly is a reason to do this. Its how photos work on iphones and androids as well. You take pictures, they are put on the cloud, space can be freed up. Its not a malicious workflow
You must have the Google photos sync option (or something like that) enabled.
I thankfully have a local backup of the photos I took, but when a phrase like "backup" is used, it is implicit and understood that there is a "restore" mechanism.
Google Photos lacks a "restore" mechanism, and it sounds like the same is true of Apple Music.
Google Play Music also does the matching/mismatching thing.
An uploaded Ladytron - Gravity the Seducer was replaced by a remix album but remains tagged as if it's the original. This is probably due to them not having the original, and this was a 90% match based on tags... but 90% is not good enough. I worked in the music industry and have so many demo tapes, master cuts that were not subject to post-production, etc. I want the version I have, and not some approximate guess at something similar-ish.
This isn't just an Apple issue.
For reference, I have 125GB of photos since 1994 in there... it would take a very long time to select them all.
There is no client.
It isn't possible to restore the backup.
That's hardly comparable to Apple deleting things automatically, silently, with neither warning nor confirmation.
[0] http://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/themes/ap2/ap_resize...
Just enabled it on my domain, will try tomorrow.
iCloud Photos is the worst: Last time I tried to download all my iCloud Photos/Videos (~1000) from the website it turned out to be impossible: You can download a few, but after 200 or so you just get server errors. And it always chokes on videos, stopping before having finished downloading the full file. There is no bulk export option like with Google Takeout.
Now I hear that this is not a problem if you have the Photos app on you Mac (it syncs), but I don't have a Mac.
Can you clarify this a bit? I.e what does the Dropbox app do if you take a picture in portrait mode, and what does iOS do? Is the rotation info lost completely?
It's a lossless rotation - you can actually use something like jpegtran to rotate it back and the pixel checksum in ImageMagick's identify will match – but it completely breaks any system which uses checksums to detect duplicates, of course. I noticed when I started testing Google Photos and had a ton of duplicate images.
I know. I used to use it. It worked perfectly. I switched to Onedrive primarily because my free 48GB Dropbox expired and I got 100GB Onedrive with my new phone.
This is why I prefer Dropbox. They keep 30-days worth of history so you can revert any file changes during that period. And I prefer to pay extra for the Extended History add-on, giving me 1 year worth of history. They aren't alone in doing this. SpiderOak also keeps the history of all changes from what I understand and they also do encryption. And Google Drive keeps history for 30 days, but they don't have an add-on. Note though that Google Photos can be downloaded by means of Google Drive ;-)
I did try OneDrive with a trial Office365 subscription, but I think at this point OneDrive is the worst option out of the mainstream ones. Besides the lack of version history, it also lacks a Linux client. One thing I do is to have a home machine that I keep turned on for having an extra backup, being synchronized with Dropbox. It also serves as a media box, but it's a Linux box, because Linux is the best option for servers, including home ones.
And it's not as cost effective as you'd think. If you look at Office alternatives and considering the OneDrive features you get, it's quite overpriced.
I hadn't considered that. Though a dropbox bug lost my documents and also deleted all version history. That was one reason I stopped using it.
Edit: I checked and it seems Onedrive does have version history.
> This is why I prefer Dropbox.
Dropbox is too expensive and I don't really need 1 TB :/
> Google Drive
I will not pay for any Google service. I'll use the free stuff and expect them to disappear/stop any time.
On Dropbox losing files, never had problems, but I believe you. All software is terrible.
I store my photographs in external Hard Disk as well as Google Photos - because of the amazing search and categorization features built into it.
Also, I cannot see my photos in Google drive at all. I have to go to google.com/photos to see or download the backed up pics. This is what my drive looks like if I click on the Google photos button on the left sidebar: https://imgur.com/wh9ONt5
It does return the original files.
Here are two files, one that got backed up off my phone by google photos, which I then downloaded from google drive, and one that I copied directly off my phone via USB:
$ md5sum IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR*
4bcb38a2e3869b4c769301c1664f5846 IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR (1).jpg
4bcb38a2e3869b4c769301c1664f5846 IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR.jpg
When I set up Google Photos I was asked: Do you want to use Google's high quality or do you want to preserve the original photos and have them count against your storage quota?
After that, you should know what you're getting into. I certainly did.
.
Select all (click first, hold shift, click last)
Click download icon on top
Enjoy zip archive of all photos
My sister borrows my iPod, plugs on her Windoes machine that had iTunes, and it offers to sync, and she clicks "ok" on autopilot.
ITunes couldn't recognize the iPod, since it was mine, not hers, and decide thr best course of action is wipe it clean...
We finally bought her a new computer.
She plugged it in to charge it. The iPod wiped itself clean. She had not even installed Itunes on the new PC yet. It took us a solid day and a half to get through her traumatic reaction and get the music back on with the new Itunes install through a thumb drive, using Windows Explorer and a new 'import library' pass to bypass Itunes' asinine UX decisions.
See the Justice Department's CFAA guide [2], under "Intentionally Damaging by Knowing Transmission". Also read the section on "Exceeds authorized access", starting at page 11.
This guy was told that the software was operating as intended. That shows criminal intent. It eliminates the defense in the CFAA under "No action may be brought under this subsection for the negligent design or manufacture of computer hardware, computer software, or firmware." The CFAA has a civil suit provision: "Any person who suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of this section may maintain a civil action against the violator to obtain compensatory damages and injunctive relief or other equitable relief." That may override the EULA, but this needs legal advice.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/criminal-ccips/l... [2] http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/appstore...
First of all using iTunes for Windows has a way of making its users feel like something of an afterthought.
Secondly I was always scared to sync my devices. Is this the day it tries to undo my jailbreak? Is this the day that deleting a playlist actually removes all the songs from my device? Is this the day that it removes an app I depend on because Apple decided to kick it out of the app store?
Somewhat relatedly I never felt comfortable plugging my iPhone into my secondary computer. The whole process of authorization and syncing is just horribly opaque.
It's some of the most opaque software I've ever had the displeasure of using. How they managed to fuck up a file copy[1] so badly is beyond me.
Android isn't without it's own faults, but at least it feels like it's own independent device, with its own copy of my library. I don't want a complicated sync mechanism: I want to put this new album onto my phone.
The Apple Music three month trial had a positive affect on my listening habits. I tried it, hoping to discover new music. But the UX was a slog. No easy pivot points on artists and songs. A DJ workflow vs listener workflow, which added complexity. No collaborative filtering.
So, I switched to Spotify. The "Discover Weekly" section that uses Echonest (I think) has surfaced new artists and songs to explore. Pivot points on songs, artists, and playlists are straightforward.
Have spent 100s of hours hours ripping and curating high 100s of CDs over the last 25 years. Barely touch em. At this point, if you'd ask me to choose between my old catalog and Spotify, I would choose the later. Heh, thanks to the Apple Music 3 month trial.
Pretty awful. I wonder why Spotify doesn't correct? Have been listening mostly to electronica on Premium account. So, this is the first I've heard.
UMG. Had suggested a mobile collaboration on iOS to UMG, a few years back. But, they were focused on Blackberry, back then.
[EDIT] Just tried the example song from the above link. And, yes, the watermark is still there. Wow!
> This watermark is embedded in UMG tracks on Rdio, Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, and others.
I would subscribe to a service that allowed me block watermarked files.
[edit] removed patent tangent
"FUCK THE CLOUD" by Jason Scott: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717
Proud user of Linux and SELinux (mandatory access control system, which protects your data from your apps).
Of course this ignores user created media, or freebies, or gifts... but even for the purchased access, I always wonder about that forced (dare I say clickwrap?) licensing aspect. Why should I pay again for different format of same info (amazon format vs. epub)? Why should NYT force me to pay extra for tablet AND phone access to same content? Why should I pay extra for a digital copy of a movie that I already have on Bluray? And of course, why should I be forced to allow the publisher to control media on my drive?
We see this with books (printed books say that you have a license to read them, but not to redistribute in any way electronically without permission, even snippets or out of press books (the long running Google books issues) or Amazon revising kindle books on your device) and as the post mentions, we see it with music and movies/shows as well.
It's not as easy to distribute content these days as we may think; many book publishers tried direct to consumer ebook sales over the last few years and are pulling out of that game (the fact that o'reilly and tor worked so far is because they give flex and target techies). Libraries are shifting to emedia services like BiblioBoard and Hoopla which don't even let you download the content except in very restricted apps; instead, you read images online in a browser or stream only. The goal again is to enforce the licensing and get consumers out of the "own" mandate.
At the end of the day, content creators should have a say in how their content is consumed and sold, publishers have demanded a say, and resellers want to own the customer and their data. The current model is too adversarial; I hope we can come up with a way to reward content creators while still allowing a reasonable flexibility of consumption and appreciation.
PS: We seem ok when Netflix drops a movie because we understand we are renting access to their basket. I guess publishers want that too, only they want a higher per unit price with even more control. Sigh.
Or even worse, the malicious firmware code shipped with some Windows-based machines.
The entire industry is fraudulent to consumers - turning consumers into products themselves.
With this industry, you pick your poison.
Do you want your hand held every step of the way in owning a computer? Get Apple.....or alternatively use the UNIX environment it comes with instead.
Do you want all of your data tracked, shipped off and sold to a company like Commscore or Nielsen that builds a dossier on you that puts Lexis Nexis to shame? Get Windows or Chromebook.....or alternatively install a Linux distro like Debian or Mint. I wouldn't even touch Ubuntu.
There are plenty of good alternatives out there. The price you pay for getting to use computer systems which don't betray you is the cost of learning to use Linux or BSD (these days, nothing like as painful as it used to be) and going without some "conveniences" like magical available-everywhere cloud-synced everything. In my book that's a tiny cost for the ability to keep proper control and ownership of my own shit.
More importantly for me, no matter what happens to my devices I will have some form of backup. This is miles better than the default for people even 5 years ago. You have to try really hard to lose data now! Well, so long as you're not picky about the file size....
Granted Google has the keys to my kingdom. I have things like Backblaze but...
We have her do a manual backup periodically, but now I am going to automate that and make it robust. I am honestly afraid for the future of that data. This is just another part of why I am glad all of my own important data is on Linux machines that I have relatively strong control over, and backup automatically.
What a time to be alive! I can't wait until they can edit your memories out of your brain and store them on the cloud, you know for more capacity and safer recall.
Could I copyright a piece of unpublished music, then use the converted copy to show a case against Apple for copyright infringement ?
Do they need to modify your copyright works to provide their service - is that in the user agreement explicitly?
If a service smells of lock-in, you can be sure things won't become better, they will become worse like the issues people get with Apple Music and iCloud. You care about your files? Then you manage them, don't trust some service you have no control over.
What seems to have happened is, Apple incorrectly matched the original song to another non-English song. Later, it deleted the original song on my iPhone and gave me the incorrectly-matched version.
I realize the blog post says an Apple rep told them otherwise, but if true, they were wrong.
Also, who says "the software is functioning as intended"? That's not the style of casual speech that Apple support reps are trained to use with real customers.
That's not the style of casual speech that Apple support reps are trained to use with real customers.
That seemed kind of off to me, too. The whole "Oh, yeah, it just deletes your stuff, stop bitching" attitude is...not my experience with Apple. But it sure does fit the the "let me confirm your worst fears about how terrible Apple is" narrative better.
And, yes, I'm sure I'll be accused of being an Apple apologist, but really it's just a certain level of weariness at this point. I hate iTunes, too. I have problems with iCloud. I think Apple Music may be built around an irreparably flawed paradigm (trying to maintain one unified library between music you've added to iTunes on your own, bought from the iTunes Store and added with Apple Music, rather than just maintaining "Local Library" and "Cloud Library" as separate entities). But I'm just not seeing the Grand Evil that's being ascribed throughout a lot of the comments here. In practice, my Apple products still actually work pretty well. I'm not interested in proselytizing to others, but I'm also not interested in constantly being told, in so many words, that Apple products only appeal to the stupid or the incompetent.
edit: I'll be content with the subreddit for now:
Store your music, listen via http://swinsian.com (for example), back it up, be happy.
I've been handcuffed to iTunes for years because of the iPod syncing mechanism but I'd love to switch.
After I've switched to Apple and used Apple music for a couple of months I just bougth Fiio X3 II. Great thing for a good price.
Two outputs - headphones and Line out\COAX. Can be used as an external DAC with windows PC (maybe other devices too, never dug too into it).
The UI theme is customizable: http://fiio.me/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=40141&extra=page...
Firmware is updated pretty often even for older models.
PS: Oh, and it has Apple in-line headphone control. (Android in-line control works too, but only for Play\Pause\Next|Prev. No sound control.)
I recall an idea from the past where they wanted users to disclose to them all the user's non-itunes music in return for some perceived benefit. At the time I thought of this as a way for someone at some company to assess out how much CD-ripped, Napster-shared, or other indepedently-sourced music was still out there. Needless to day it didn't fly.
I have never in my life used itunes. I can tolerate most of today's "walled-gardens" but not one that seeks to place a surcharge on friends sharing music, which has always been the essence of how my music collection was built (pre-digital). I would give up music before I would sign on to letting Apple control my music collection.
If there were a robust, tiny command-line version of "itunes" that would run on any computer, I might reconsider. But that's not happening either. That's the true reason I have never used itunes. Strong distaste for the proprietary Apple-only graphical software.
I remember how excited I used to be when friends and I would drive to an out-of-town show and stay with other friends who had big record collections. You always brought a box of fresh blank tapes; and that's the same thing they'd do when they came over your house.
Compare that to the relative simplicity of having your music, books, etc. as a plain file, and you can see where the problem is: paying gets you less, rarely more.
Like? I feel that we've reached the stage where it's pretty easy to pay for digital music/streaming at this point. As far as saying that it's almost entirely easier than pirating music.
1. Spotify - doesn't allow you to buy premium (which is availble worldwide) if you have a non-US credit card.
2. Apple Music - is available, but I use a linux laptop.
3. Rdio - shutdown.
The vast majority of preference of the the people how they enjoy their music makes put "friendliest DRM" in the leagues of Unicorns.
Huh? I assuredly have spotify premium on an Australian credit card, and I know people with it in other countries too. Spotify isn't even a US company.
But they do allow you use spotify anywhere from the world if you have premium.
if you live in a country where spotify is officially available[1], you can buy premium with your local card (i pay about ~7 usd/23 brl for a two people family plan).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify#Geographic_availabilit...
When you pirate music it's the same as searching spotify, except you click download instead of play and you get files that work forever on any device. Storage smaller than your fingernail fits a straight month worth of music for $20 and works just as well if you're in the mountains as when you're on the train to work.
It's a faaaaar nicer user experience.
I think you are generalizing "paying" to "subscribing to a streaming service" here, which I don't think is entirely fair.
You can still pay for your music the old-fashioned way, by buying songs on Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc., which will yield you DRM-free, plain MP3 / AAC files that you can use where and how you want to (unless, apparently, you entrust them to iTunes and enable iTunes Music...).
And while the book industry unfortunately hasn't quite followed the same path, there are still many great sources for books around that also provide you with DRM-free, high quality files (e.g. OReilly, Packt, lots of smaller publishers).
This is true now, but it wasn't always; it's a hard-fought right that should be appreciated rather than taken for granted. (Not to say that you are so taking it, but a superficial reading of your post might sound that way.)
If I'm given the choice between a free proprietary, inflexible system like Apple Music, and paid DRM-free content that I own and can keep as long as I want (basically, paid pirated content), I'll choose the latter.
Even that, by itself, is not one reason. Look at https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/free. Meanings [1-4,6] are very common reasons to pirate stuff. [5] is kinda minor, depending on how much money you have.
GP's point is perfectly valid. Look at XKCD 488
But let's be real, it's far easier to grab flacs from the usual places than futz around with ripping your own vinyl.
Not only do I have countless files gone, if you let the subscription lapse... You don't get your music back and it wasn't there when I renewed.
Also, the cellular providers have to love how much of my own music I'm downloading over their costly data services.
"through the Apple Music subscription [...] Apple now deletes files from its users [...] 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."
Also: I know of a few people who would love for this to happen because it would open up a lot of space in their hard drive which is almost completely full. "I subscribed to Apple Music and freed up 100 GB! Sweet!"
That being said there should definitely be a way to avoid this and I would personally prefer it to be opt-in than opt-out.
That wording does not suggest to me "all of the music in iTunes will become part of your iCloud music library." You can't sue for damages, but you can sue them for lying or concealing information in the EULA
e: Although one very rich thing is when I wanted to cancel it was impossible to do without installing iTunes on my new computer until I contacted support to complain.
But I have not turned on Apple Music, or iCloud Photos, for this very reason. Cloud syncing services are a DISASTER for Apple.
I recently bought my wife an iPhone SE, and upgraded some older computers to El Cap--fresh install + migrate files so I could get a clean start. But turning on the cloud services, and configuring them to do what I expect, was so complicated and scary that I just gave up. I'm syncing Safari bookmarks and Notes, and that's it.
And even the Notes are a mess. I'm stuck with separate local and iCloud folders of notes, because I simply don't trust Apple to not screw up or delete my local notes in the course of trying to sync them.
Rule #1, #2, #3 of cloud syncing should be "do no harm." DropBox has largely figured this out. Apple has not.
It's funny to think back to when Steve Jobs said that DropBox is a feature, not a business. Well, it's a feature I use and happily pay for, and it's a feature that Apple has yet to figure out.
Since my mac is basically a unix machine it's trivial for me to make sure this rule is followed, but it's not trivial for most people.
Personally, I've been slowly moving to having my main music collection on a home server, and then distributing it out to clients via Plex. I'm not 100% pleased with the web interface compared to iTunes' thick-client interface, but as iTunes' UI has gotten worse over time and Plex's has gotten better, they're starting to approach each other in terms of usability.
The main complaint I have with Plex right now is that there's not an option to specify the quality of the streamed music. It will do realtime transcoding (so you can store lossless CD rips on the server), but the destination format is hardcoded based on the client (I think web clients get 256 kb/s MP3, Android gets something else, etc.). There's an open feature request to let the user select it as a preference, and allow different codec/bitrate combinations based on whether the client is on the LAN, on WAN, or on mobile.
Plex is, IMO, the best game in town for approximating the functionality of a proprietary ecosystem (play all your stuff on all your devices anywhere) but without the lock-in. You do need to be a reasonably intelligent person to set it up, though.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that MediaMonkey no longer works on recent versions of Mac OS X, but that Swinsian (http://swinsian.com/) is the new hotness anyway. Can't vouch for it, but it looks good.
I have steered clear of this service from the beginning, partly because I'm old and want my own old library and partly because I am very aware that Apple can NOT do services of any kind, at all. They have botched everything they have ever tried to do online. .me, .mac, accounts (I have 3 and they cannot merge them).
I feel for this guy but, given their history, it's pretty much a slam-dunk that Apple would drop the ball if it's a service.
This was the reason Apple had to extend warranties on their hardware here - it was pretty funny watching Apple try to argue to the government that they made non-premium stuff just like everyone else, and therefore didn't have to have the extended warranty. To which the government said, paraphrased, "cool story, bro".
If this were a much smaller smaller company you might actually get to talk to someone who can do something i.e "let me see what files we uploaded from you... oh we'll send you a link...". With larger companies you usually talk to "explainers", or people whose job is to explain to you that you are screwed rather than explore solutions to your problem.
What should be a relatively simple task, plugging in a drive-like device to my computer and moving files from one place to another is made needlessly complicated and restrictive by forcing it to slog through the tar pit that is iTunes. Never again.
Sadly I haven't found a decent replacement for it.
Does seem to be working times for apple, product wise they are making of decisions.
Seriously, just use free software.
Free software would never have deleted your files without asking you. Or maybe once before it would be fixed as a critical defect in a matter of hours.
This app is not supposed to move anything. Just copy it. The deletion part of "moving" is a fraud, and possibly illegal.
WAVs support sampling rates up to 192khz, whereas mp3 only supports up to 48khz. However, you're unlikely to come across anything higher than 48khz anyway unless you specifically look for it, or record it yourself (as the author did).
Sampling rate has (basically) no effect on audio quality beyond the highest frequency the file can contain - you can drop the sampling rate right the way down to 8khz and it'll just sound a bit muffled but otherwise fine. The primary reason to prefer WAV files over MP3 is that encoding something to MP3 irreversibly mangles it, and the author would be justified in being extremely pissed off that Apple decided to unilaterally do this and delete the originals. It would be like deleting someone's RAW photos and providing Facebook-sized jpegs as replacement, or deleting their home movies and offering back gifs of them. Apple have committed a cardinal sin here, the seriousness of which can't really be overstated.
Mp3 is lossy. Many audiophiles and audio engineers argue that Mp3 actually sounds better (the compression gives the drums a "crunch" not normally present), but the point is you can go from WAV to Mp3, but you can't go back the other way around. Apple is irrevocably damaging some of his files.
Quote please! Don't specifically mean it as a challenge to you, but as a musician, composer, and audio engineer (I'm not sure I identify as audiophile since that has baggage, but I know friends who do) I have never heard such a thing even mentioned and have a hard time believing there are serious engineers that think this.
The data reduction in the MP3 algorithm is designed around the frequency masking principles of human hearing[1] (EDIT: Spelling and citation), this technique can lose a lot of data with a small impact on perception when applied to harmonic sounds. Enharmonic sounds (e.g. is where the MP3 algorithm falls down); as I said, I've never heard any engineer say they think this sounds better.
Again, I don't say this to argue, I'd just be curious to know what these unicorn engineers have to say about this.
Google Music is the cat's meow - and will locally sync all of your music down to your local folders. Seems like the best of both worlds - you get a secure backup, and the ability to have local copies
Lots of people swear by winamp.
Didn't notice the typo within the edit window; didn't mean to imply I wrote that other article.
That really sucks, but I do hope you have a local backup and/or offsite backup and not mentioning that for effect?
It's still amazingly evil by Apple, but I hope you still have your files.
"syncing" with a cloud service - stupid
not backing up - stupid
The problem with "syncing" is if I delete a file on one device, what does sync semantics say should happen? It is ambiguous, which is why syncing is a stupid semantic. Copying files and deleting files is unambiguous.
Tough love, people. Time to stop enabling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11635410 and marked it off-topic.
> As a freelance composer, I save WAV files of my own compositions rather than Mp3s.
Computer systems fail for all kinds of stupid reasons. What will you do when that disk fails?
I admit this is a particularly stupid and infuriating reason for data loss, but how little would it cost to have a backup of 122gb?
So it all factors down to "this software didn't do what I thought it would; had to restore from backup. Careful everyone" but was then radically over dramatized with "Apple stole all my music!!!"
"Matches found, press OK to delete [list of files] from your computer and phone FOREVER" is what 99% of customers want.
Debate the quality of the match algorithm (it sucks), argue the proper UX for a pretty basic function (it also sucks), but knock off the Orwellian sky is falling stuff. Because that's obvious bullshit.
Apple has its own view of the culture, and has a pretty obvious way of mining it for profit. You ain't changing them. You can perhaps however nudge them if you're not a total asshole about it.
However, that is really shady on Apple's part to make that mandatory, and should be looked into.
- Copy files that don't belong to them without the owner's explicit permission: some people call that piracy. I believe individuals caught doing that with movies have been faced with some hefty fines.
I understand the purpose, but it needs to come with a big, massive, Allow Apple to pirate your data, trust us, it's for your own protection checkbox. Who knows, it might even initially be true.
- do you know of any good backup solution that forcefully deletes the files it's backing up? Do you think there might be a reason why not?
I find this entirely unacceptable behaviour from Apple, and I say this as someone who has been using OS X almost exclusively for 10+ years now.
I doubt it. The only hefty fines were for redistribution, not mere copying/download.
[1] I think the US term is "a tort"?
[2] Fines and prison time, not damages.
Only to the user they got the audio themselves. Any proof they're redistributing random X users not tagged in their collection files to others?
In any case, the whole "piracy" angle is BS (not to mention it lacks intent and profit from explicit piracy).
What's at stake is plain bad program behavior -- deleting users files without explicit confirmation, making bad matches to different versions of songs, etc.
How do you know that?
And it is irrelevant either way. That you are the sole owner of the rights of a piece of music does not grant Apple an automatic license to distribute it "just to you".
I'm smart like that. Or rather I have read in detail about how Apple Music works. Besides, the burden of proof is on those making that claim.
>That you are the sole owner of the rights of a piece of music does not grant Apple an automatic license to distribute it "just to you".
I call BS. That's exactly the same as Dropbox/Google Drive whatever making a copy of your files and distributing them just to you, and tons of other Cloud services handling your files besides.
At the moment you use Apple Music (which is a services for moving your music collection to the Cloud among other things) you are implicitly allowing Apple to upload and serve you your music files. Plus, you explicitly approved the whole process and granted that right when you clicked on the iTunes/Apple Music license agreement. Nothing different than what happens with thousands of other services.
A further problem arises when a user has a non-transferrable IP that Apple doesn't sell in his left pocket and some generic track that Apple sells in his right pocket, and Apple picks both pockets with the intention of becoming a redistributor. The user does not have permission to transfer, nor has he indicated to Apple that he's given permission, for Apple to acquire the proprietary IP and redistribute it. It is entirely plausible that this proprietary IP was never intended for sale, was a trade secret, was a nude tape, or was a classified recording.
There's all sorts of issues with Borg-style cloud IP assimilation under the "Fair Use Doctrine", and commercial usage of the IP for "backup" while simultaneously being a vendor of the IP (and competing products) make it unlikely that you could apply fair use credibly for something this expansive.
>On your original Mac, Apple Music will never delete songs without your knowledge. Your original library is scanned into iCloud, but your songs are yours, and Apple will not automatically delete them, or replace them with its own proprietary copies.
http://www.imore.com/no-apple-music-not-deleting-tracks-your...
How do you know?
And they should have better content matching so they don't destroy user data.
The user in question committed his data, his 'life' as he calls it, to a service that is made for mom+pop, without reading the EULA, and he complains?
The guy's a composer and keeps his masters into.... iTunes? Seriously?
He discovers /after the fact/ that his special recording he care so much about has been replaced? Hasn't he tried google, or perhaps do a bit of due diligence about it before committing 120GB of his precious data to a cloud provider?
... To a service that is /meant/ to be able to replace songs automatically? What's not clear about 'automatic'?
Now I don't mean apple is /right/ here, it's very likely done so that apple can sell machines with less flash, for more -or something like that- there's no doubt that there is a reason why they delete the data.. a reason that doesn't need to benefits the user ultimately.
However I don't have a lot of sympathy for that particular user; he comes as someone who should know better.
I'm a mac user since 1984, and I don't use Apple Music, iCloud, or any of these fancy subscription services. I'm also a musician, and a photographer, and it wouldn't cross my mind for a minute to just commit my stuff to a place that might decide the data is 'theirs' in their next update.
However, OP shouldn't claim that Apple 'stole' his music files. He signed up for a paid service and he should have checked how the service will affect his computer. We as users are responsible to know what software we're running on our machines and what it does to our data. I understand that a standard TOS agreement is ridiculously long and impractical to read, and I guess that's how we are trained to be lazy about protecting the integrity of our systems and our data, but that does not give OP the right to blame Apple for delivering exactly what they promised. I hate Apple but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim Apple stole OP's music.
It's a sad state of affairs but as a user, trust and reviews are the main factors available in the decision to run software or not.
"I recovered my original music files only by using a backup I made weeks earlier."
> I recovered my original music files only by using a backup I made weeks earlier.