I will never forget the time iTunes deleted my music library, or it's inability to deduplicate identical songs.
Power.
Yup. Same here.
This is why I don't have my large collection of CD's in my phone and just use Pandora.
Going back to iPhone 3 days, iTunes did not allow me to import my CD's into my device and play them as entire CD's.
If I want to listen to Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" or Pink Floyd's "The Wall", it's a nightmare. iTunes is song-based, not album based. Well, the above, and many others, are works you pretty much listen to in order as recorded. In some cases (The Wall, Brandenburg Concertos, etc.) the works span multiple CD's.
I stopped using iTunes and storing music on my iPhone because of this. I don't enjoy music the way Apple seems to think you should. I have no clue if they fixed this since iPhone 3 days. I would not be surprised if they have not.
In sharp contrast to this, I have not problem playing single or multi-CD works as intended using Windows Media Player on my desktop, where I have my entire CD collection stored.
This, for me, is the single reason I would instantly jump into a Windows phone if Microsoft got their heads out of their asses, committed to doing a good job and integrated a phone experience with the desktop. They would have to regain my trust, but as a life-long user of both Apple and MS desktop products, I would absolutely welcome a better phone experience than Apple has delivered over the years. I really want to abandon iPhone and go to a good Windows phone, but MS does not seem interested in creating that opportunity.
Oh, yes, and to address iCloud, back in the early days it managed to delete not only whatever I had on iTunes (which I own on CD's so I don't care) but all of my contacts. Thankfully I had my contacts stored in my prior phone (I think it was a Blackberry). After disconnecting from iCloud I entered them manually and never again enabled iCloud all the way up to my current iPhone X.
I was so pissed of, i’ve avoided iTunes & Apple Music ever since.
Torrent the actual files.
The same kind of problems existed on my Mac, iPhone, and the web UI, but each one had its own set of fucked up metadata.
I had the same music library since iTunes 1.0, moved from one Mac to the next for almost 20 years. I wanted my play counts and the last time I played things and all of the nice metadata that iTunes used to have.
Worst of all, I couldn't restore from a backup because the cloud library becomes the canonical library as soon as you enable it. I tried restoring my library from a backup, but as soon as the cloud library synced, it would screw everything up again. As long as I was offline, my restored backup was in perfect condition.
Apple support was useless of course. They just told me to delete and add my music again. That's thousands of songs, and doing that deletes the metadata I wanted to keep. All I wanted was for them to reset my cloud library as if I'd never synced anything, so my working library could sync up. The only way to do that would be to stop my subscription and then subscribe again.
I spent probably 30 hours trying to fix it but ended up just accepting that my personal metadata was gone, other than existing on the last working backup. Doing what Apple support suggested was not reliable either. Deleting music in one UI had unpredictable effects in another. Adding the music I own, ripped from CDs, failed often when Apple tried to match it and then get the various libraries in sync. I had to remove and import some albums 3 or 4 times before it was consistent across devices and the web UI.
My library is still fucked in a lot of ways, but the music I want to hear most often is mostly there.
The thing that prevents me from just going back to syncing to my phone is that some music is only available from their music subscription, and that can't be synced over a wire.
They're also the only streaming service that will actually upload music it can't match. I'd move to Tidal or Spotify or somewhere else if any of them offered that. I want to be able to hear my obscure music in the same app as I use for big label music.
Rant over, back to work.
But i tend to be cloud adverse. So my library is on a NAS.
When my mac mini blew it up, i had to restore my entire music library. Then every single file could not be found..So I deleted the entire itunes library (which deleted the music folder structure, i thought i told it not too, but it could have been my fault). So i restored the directory structure again, and then had to re-import and rebuild the library.
All playlists were gone. Play counts, favorites, checked songs (because itunes loves to convert things and make duplicates) were gone and needing to be redone.
And now it seems it wont recognize flaac files anyhow.
I have been meaning to setup something like Navidrome and be done with it but i dont really like the thought of another self hosted server.
What could go wrong?