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Comment by simonster | Hacker News Reader

Some people in this post are assuming that this is something iTunes does to everyone intentionally. Other people are saying this is not something iTunes has ever done to them. I'm not sure it's worth debating whether this practice is ethical or not unless we know whether iTunes will actually delete your MP3s under normal circumstances. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that iTunes is too hard to use.

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But from the article, Ms Amber said the SW was functioning as intended.

But other people have posted here and said they enabled Apple Music and their music was not deleted, so clearly this doesn't happen under all circumstances, and this wouldn't be the first time a technical support representative was wrong. This is a pretty extraordinary claim and I'm not really willing to believe everyone loses all their local music when they turn on Apple Music without more data to confirm.

Another point of data in favor of "they deleted my music" here. And when they did it, they were only matching on the file metadata, so the album they removed was truly lost, since I got some weird techno album in its place.

Thankfully, it's one I can recover from a CD, when I find it again.

All ethics of the deletion aside, matching on metadata is a weird, crappy approach (and that itself is pretty consistent with my other experiences with iTunes).

It shouldn't be hard to imagine that metadata will have collisions, and include something like a hash of the actual data.

Someone should make a tool that creates mp3s having the metadata of other real songs for apple to match on.

There already is... https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

Apparently Amazon uses this tagging service to keep its online music library organized.

what the parent poster meant was crafting audio files and metadata that would match what apple checks against ones, such as to get free music

Clever.

I don't know if it's intentional filling in for songs they couldn't license or metadata matching gone wrong, but occasionally on Spotify a song on an old album is replaced with an inferior remix from a newer album.

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.)

I'm very surprised that they would perform such a destructive operation based only off of metadata (instead of some sort of audio fingerprinting).

I was under the impression they did do audio fingerprinting. Otherwise, you could gain access to a ton of music.

Even if they do audio fingerprinting the match is simplistic. I have a large collection of different versions of songs, and Shazam identifies them all as the studio version.

Audio fingerprinting is also pretty hit and miss for classical music where the work is the same and the artist differs.

Sort of ironically, the older iTunes Match system did audio fingerprinting, but Apple Music does not. I have gotten some very weird new metadata occasionally since the switch.

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.

ITunes will rename albums and artists and songs and give the wrong album or cover or strip the album cover because they don't sell it, Apple doesn't care about your collection, they want to curate it their way for their benefit.

Thanks for the confirmation. I've been weighing my options between Apple Music and Spotify Premium and that makes up my mind. iTunes is enough of a pain in the ass without worrying about whether it'll delete my music collection.

The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.

Go try Google Music. You get non-destructive music sync (10,000 songs or something?) and a massive library. Plus, the curated stations are all the old Songza content that was pretty awesome. $10/mo

And you get Youtube without ads for the same price.

Their curated playlists are seriously top-notch. I've found so many new bands through the Blogged 50 and Gorilla vs. Bear playlists.

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.

The best part of the deal must be no ads on YouTube though. I am not competent enough to block all of them on mobile even when rooted with adaway.

I think it is $15 for five people.

If you're still curious, Firefox for android has full support for all of the desktop extensions, including uBlock.

The same thing has happened to me as well.

I'm afraid to use iTunes at all at this point. Most of my mp3s were ripped from CD or bought from Amazon

I haven't used it in years and am happy never to go back. There are so many other programs out there that can manage your music.

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 :)

Apple Music doesn't delete the original files.

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.

But then that is clearly wrong as per the article posted. There OP claims his songs are replaced with inferior version online.

That sentence is from the iTunes Music Match section, not the Apple Music section. They are different.

>When iTunes Match adds these songs to your iCloud Music Library, iTunes Match doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside on iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.

What's the difference?

It's definitely a confusing situation: http://www.loopinsight.com/2015/07/24/i-got-my-music-back-at.... I wish we could get an accurate official explanation of when (if ever) local files will be moved/deleted/replaced with cloud versions.

Maybe the answer is never, but I sure am not confident about that.

I've never seen that happen. iTunes loads the data/metadata about the songs and attempts to match them to their database of songs. Then if you were to sign in on a different computer with iTunes Match enabled, it would download the songs that it matched from the original computer as a 256kb AAC.

In the words of Microsoft, "Its a feature, not a bug"...

This is part of a push from Apple to move users' data from devices to the cloud. They're doing the same thing with photos (optimised storage deletes local copies), videos, and documents on iCloud.

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.

Just to be clear, this was only with a subscription to Apple Music.

Signing up for Apple Music is what prompts iTunes to replace your local music library.

It literally only does this if you very explicitly tell it to. They're mad because their computer did exactly what they told it to. This is a simple case of user error, followed by a user lashing out over their own mistakes.

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.

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