Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
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Anyway, even if I download a matches song it's DRM free on my Mac, and Apple Music won't automatically delete your local files. But I guess bugs happens, the app is quite buggy in general.
Edit: it seems it download a version with DRM if you set it to download in Lossless format, but my songs weren't originally lossless, and if I set it to download the AAC version the file is DRM free.
That's an odd stance IMO. Should any service or software ever change a user's files without letting them know? I think not, regardless of what ever technobabble explains why it happens
iTunes / Apple Music match your with their catalog and basically flip a flag that says this song is in your library. If a song is in your library you can download the file on other devices, same as if you purchased the song from them.
If I download the song from iTunes via Match it’s a DRM-ed version because they don’t upload files that match the music catalog so there’s no original to download.
This caused me to stop buying music altogether.
Years ago I let it match all my content, backed up my original files, deleted them from disk, then let iTunes pull down the higher quality matched versions.
It does not - it’s a separate subscription, though you can use both at once.
[Edit: maybe I’m wrong? See ensuing discussion below.]
You can use Apple Music (the app) with Apple Music (the service) and disable library syncing, but enable iTunes Match. But at that point, you might as well use Apple Music (the service).
Selecting AAC does work in both cases if it's about DRM.
Maybe I’m paying for iTunes Match for no reason? I guess it’s time to back up and try turning it off and seeing if my music disappears…
[0]Because you can't change regions while having an active subscription. Normally you are blocked from doing so but apparently if you use family sharing, the head of the family can change regions and your account will be broken.
Edit: What's more, the person pointing to the solution isn't even the top-voted comment on this thread. Just everyone repeating their usual anti-Apple fixations.
But you - and supposedly the other people downvoting me - don’t seem to realize that absolutely nothing has happened to the user’s original files. They simply misunderstood how to sync files to their other devices.
You must consider every service provider a hostile entity. No exceptions.
The case that Apple led users to believe that, for me, would require showing what they tell users when you allow Apple Music to sync with your old iTunes library.
Do they even use the word “Sync”? I wouldn’t know, and AFAICT this page doesn’t tell me.
Actually it would probably take several warnings. "The following files will not be imported. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with DRM-encumbered versions. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with versions that may be different performances, mixes, or encodings. Click to accept.". "The following files will be replaced with censored radio edits. Click to accept.".
Anything short of that is misleading. If "what they tell users" is ten paragraphs of crap with an oblique mention of their losing your files or replacing them with their "improved" DRM-and-censorship-included versions, that does nothing at all.
This is incorrect. You are wrong.
They are clearly misrepresenting what they are doing if the songs they are matching are not the same ones uploaded.
e.g. I upload version A, and I get back a different version (version B). Some songs are dramatically different from version A to B, and "matching" a different version is not acceptable.
Further, why people are down voting you has very little to do with what is happening and more to do with your comments and how they are in some ways inappropriate.
And, no, it being "documented" does not excuse it.
I don't have an anti-Apple fixation. My "anti-" is decidedly unfixed, and ranges over Apple, Google, record labels, and all of the other scumbags who operate or influence 99.999999 percent of "the cloud".
Is there a different, better solution that I haven't spotted yet? Or, what was the misunderstanding?
I have hundreds of CDs I started buying about 1992 or 1993 and did a big project at one point making MP3s and early on in the iTunes/iPod era they found their way into iTunes. I started playing around with MP3 Layer 2 and then Layer 3 around 1995-1996, but at that time it was still prohibitive to try and store your whole collection as hard drives were still barely the size of one CD. I think my computer in 1995-1996 had a 250MB HDD. In 1997 I think I got a 1GB one in a desktop build. But by 2002-2003 this started to not be an issue.
There have been so many shenanigans along the way (this reddit thread is just one of them) that I gave up about 9 years ago.
I ended up re-scanning every CD as FLAC and storing them all outside of iTunes and then ended up getting a Fiio DAP that could play them.
I don't use the Fiio all that much anymore, but I kept on buying CDs and ripping them to FLAC or buying FLACs directly. I definitely didn't buy as much music the past 10 years though.
Lately I have gone back to actually playing the CDs in a dedicated CD player and even got a Turntable and now have a very small # of vinyls. Everything is off on the NAS backed up but yet it's somehow just more fun to pull the disc out and play it.
It's like the entire physical media -> files -> streaming thing has been a 20 year bad trip. The loudness war didn't help either.
It boggles my mind vinyl is making a comeback now, but it seems obvious it is because of the double whammy of the loudness war and the endless shenanigans by Apple and all other digital music stores/streaming platforms. And the stupid thing is there are still tons of releases that actually sound better on Vinyl despite it being an inferior format because they have never gone back and fixed a lot of the loudness issues. Some of these are crazy. The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's album was re-released a few years ago. The Vinyl copy was an improvement on the older vinyl versions. But the CD version was a degradation of the 1997 version that I've owned since the late 90s! Sometimes the streaming services somehow have worse versions than the CD.
It's about focusing on the listening, but in some cases many albums are getting better masters on vinyl than any other format. It's technically stupid but it is what it is.
What's so stupid about the audiophile aspect of vinyl is most of the new ones I bought are dirty. You have to clean them right out of the package if you want them to sound good. Something is very sloppy about production right now. CDs are about a million times more robust.
Sometimes I download digital conversions of records but I never end up listening to them because I get too annoyed by any static.
So I just try to find the best digital copy that I can actually enjoy, even if the brickwalling pisses me off.
The iPhone foobar2000 version allows you, through its internal FTP server, to upload media in its native format (mp3,flac and many others) directly to the app. This means no more transcoding for iTunes, and all tags/filenames are retained. It also means your phone can act as a backup of your library.
The iOS Music.app is so bad. I've suffered long enough with it.
I also subscribe to Apple Music.
This works fine. The only gripe I have is I can't make playlists in Apple Music when its setup like this. I don't care much though because I don't use streaming like that.
If files are important to you, keep a backup, outside of cloud, or in another vendors cloud.
It’s never deleted a file though, not once in 15 years. A poorly-designed SSD whose rubberised coating kept it too toasty did kill a lot of my music, but that’s what backup strategies are for.
Agreed.
Broadly speaking, I don't think of my music collection as critical data ... and yet, when I examine the time, care and energy I have expended ripping CDs, naming and cataloging these files they are probably the single largest data input job I have ever taken part in.
So with that in mind I do, indeed, treat it as critical data and have it properly backed up.
"If files are important to you ..."
There is this UI element in itunes / apple music where you can choose what to arrange music by:
https://ipodiphoneitunestutorials.com/iTunesTutorials/i/img8...
... and note that "filename" is not in that huge, comprehensive list.
That tells you everything you need to know.
Now a days I download legal MP3's or rip my purchased CDs. ALL of these files are backed up on Portable drive. Hate to say it, but there isn't a company on earth that thinks we consumers actually own anything. As for cloud storage, those who trust it haven't been screwed yet, and yes, they think whatever you store there belongs to them.
Also, you probably shouldn't keep the portable drive in the same building as your PC (other backup)... I like to keep one portable drive in my car that update once in a while.
The drive gets backed up.
I know of at least one company - that thinks you own your own files.
It's actually a cloud storage company.
21 years and not one person screwed.
- deleting songs which were on my computer, but which didn't exist in apple's catalogue waaaay back when I originally signed up. That's long gone, but it still bothered me.
- letting me add and listen to albums for months/years, then suddenly marking one or more songs in that album as "not available" (Life Aquatic soundtrack has this, for me)
- relisting albums somehow, sometimes while leaving a single track hanging around
- moving some songs around, for example "Gun" by Chvrches disappeared from the album it was on (The Bones of What You Believe) but I discovered it has appeared under an album I never added - "Virgin Records: 40 years of Disruptions" - Various Artists. Looking under "Various Artists" is a way to find weird thigns like this
- editing the artist in some albums, so while I had a handful under "Prince" they got switched around at one point so they're now by "Prince", "Prince & the N.P.G." and "Prince & The Revolution"
Another fun one that annoyed me, Shazam decided of its own accord to add everything I'd ever Shazam'd into my library (I hadn't used it in months at that point, so it's not something I did).
Looking back on my old setup (folders with artists/albums/playlists, and xmms) with nostalgia :-/ I don't know how I could build that back up or do so in a way that I could listen to it on the go without having to carry an MP3 player.
Unfortunately (as OP noted) syncing through Apple Music streaming means that you get the Apple Music interpretation of your library rather than your actual library.
A (mostly vastly) superior system for users would be if they gave you a terabyte of cloud storage for free and allowed you to upload and stream your actual music library. Didn't Google's cloud music player used to work this way? The main user down side is that uploading your library for the first time takes forever. And from the service provider perspective it wastes a lot of storage and is costly.
Another scheme that I think was sued out of existence matched a CD locally and then gave you access to the streamed version of the same CD. This is sort of what Apple Music/iTunes match is trying to do, and they've actually resolved the legal and licensing issues, except that 1) a CD-matching system is less useful in the post-CD streaming era 2) they aren't matching the bits on the original disc and are using a Shazam-like inexact match of the song instead, and 3) the licensing resolution seems (?) to use DRM for lossless songs, 15 years after Steve Jobs' anti-DRM "thoughts on Music" and DRM-free AAC music via iTunes Plus.
I wish that Apple would deliver DRM-free and lossless iTunes purchases as Jobs intended.
That's iTunes Match: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146
It works really well for the parts of your collection which aren't available on streaming services — for example, I have some obscure records, soundboard recordings which the artist released on their website but didn't put on a label, etc. It's much better on precision than the described Apple Music feature — it either matched entirely or uploaded but I've never found it to have mis-identified a track.
I would disagree with the “mostly vastly superior” label, however, since it's really only better for [generally us older] people who have a ton of existing music — someone who only uses streaming services or sites like YouTube won't have much saved locally and may never have owned a CD.
It does that optimization which you're describing, as well. MP3.com was sued because licensing but Apple has both existing business agreements and a lot more lawyers. When you look at tracks it'll show the status as an exact match or an upload — in my case, it matched basically everything I got off of eMusic back in the day but many of the independent tracks which bands had released and some CDs had to be uploaded.
I don't understand the part about why my suggestion wouldn't be a better system for cloud syncing and streaming a local Music (formerly iTunes) library, if you have one, across devices, which is the original context of this discussion. It would seem to solve the OP and PP issues. Pure streaming is clearly a different use case, as users only need to sync playlists and metadata and won't run into those problems in the first place.
The part I do understand is that Apple doesn't seem to care as much about local music libraries anymore, probably because they don't create recurring subscription revenue. And because Steve Jobs turned out to be wrong about people wanting to own rather than rent/stream music and video: renting/streaming is just too darned convenient, and manual curation is such a pain that most people don't want to deal with it - while automatic curation is buggy and often doesn't do what you want.
I refuse to use music streaming services these days - sometimes resorting to less than legal means, but for the most part I purchase drm free music from Bandcamp.
I have enjoyed self hosted solutions since YouTube Music broke the smart Playlist and integration for uploaded files with steaming files.
It definitely butchered my metadata, however. I've spent a couple years now slowly fixing everything.
(I still miss the Play Music iOS app's offline playback, it was miles ahead of anything else)
Perhaps things changed later, but I'm skeptical, because the "somebodies" never change. Also, as recently as a couple of years ago, I noticed broken metadata/cover art in my library that I actually wish YTM would fix for me. I suspect it's more likely that the original bits were/are still in there somewhere and some UI made it harder to get to them. With YTM, accessing your own MP3s is a bit convoluted. I'll give it a shot later tonight, to see if I can download some music that I know to have specific metadata and bitrates.
I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side, otherwise even a 100,000 song cap would be too much data to host for free. Google doesn't play ads on uploaded tracks. Google stores not-transcoded music files and has since "Google Music". When GPM first came out, it was a storage locker and felt more like direct competition to Grooveshark than iTunes.
Record companies seem to have a very tight not just on the songs, but also the metadata surrounding them. No service really offers the "radio mode" or suggested tracks for local playback, from what I found. I'd happily give a company playback metadata if in return I got that feature back. I wonder if Pandora has patents for certain parts of music recommendation algorithms. Spotify and YTM can rely heavily on user-generated music connections, but maybe that is why it can't work for local/uploaded files.
It's been a decade since I helped with GPM storage, but one thing I can say is that Google won't dedup anything without the OK from lawyers on _both_ sides, with all the consequences that ensue. Somebody could turn this and similar launches into a TV show, but it wouldn't be as funny as Silicon Valley. On the contrary...
Some people's exports miss the metadata entirely, some don't. Some even miss files out.
B2 is similar to s3, and B2 charges for api calls + egress. Ingress is free, and they have a generous free daily api calling limit that covers some of the core api
I don't have the RPi connected to the internet though. I just load my phone with MP3s like the old days, and open up NewPipe[3] when I want to listen to something I don't have stored.
[1] https://www.foobar2000.org/
They are just labelled as shared seedbox.
Honestly, I don't know how to get that much bandwidth, that much space for the same price as a seedbox. I suspect reliability of data is not as good as a proper VPS.
Apple didn't "replace" the OPs files, the OP downloaded their music library to a new device, using Apple Music's sync feature.
This is a much less egregious issue than replacing files in situ.
These days 99% of my music library is FLAC (either ripped from CDs or bought from a lossless store). For use on Apple devices, I maintain an AAC version of my library that iTunes can do whatever it wants with.
They synced the files to a different machine, and the service as stated, gives you what it considers de-duplicated files.
It’s not a music backup service, and it’s very clear about that. It’s an “upload your own stuff, and we’ll only host what’s not already in our library”
Granted it does overly aggressively match songs sometimes, but it still doesn’t delete your content.
Why do people accept this?
There's a million different ways around it, but none of them involve accepting Apple and their bullshit.
I buy CDs and rip them to flac, or buy non-DRM encumbered files and sync my music to my own storage.
One of the most annoying things was the inability to play an album as recorded. If I want to listen to Mozart’s Requiem, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, I need to be able to listen to the tracks in the order they are intended. Last I checked this was still impossible.
My entire library of hundreds of purchased music CD’s is stored in Windows Media Player. I can listen to albums exactly as the artist intended.
Has Apple fixed this? If not, why?
I also remember that importing my CD’s into Apple-whatever was a nightmare. Among other things, the metadata that Windows gathered without effort was gone, and the concept of albums seemed to be nonexistent. So, I gave up. At some point you just can’t continue to waste time with bad software.
Google Play Music was the last true third party hosted solution, in my opinion. YouTube Music allows you to upload files but segregates your uploads from the YouTube Library for recommendations and smart playlists. I haven't found a great "smart recommendation" service for self hosted files.
If you turn off Sync Library in the Apple Music settings then plug into iTunes and sync there again then all that data will come back.
Sync library is basically asking them to do exactly what you described so it is more available across all devices without having to use iTunes
If you end your subscription then it does delete that data that was being streamed like created playlists which is main complaint of missing music
They don't revoke your rights to those songs or make you buy them again. You just need to sync it to iTunes again. Everyone gets confused on that process
Source: used to work for Apple Support"
And boy, do they hate you owning files.
Alway keep a back up.
Meec. Not yours.
It is utterly despicable either way, and exactly the behavior I would expect from a sociopath.
I understand the aesthetic appeal of the relatively well-designed products but anyone who buys Apple products is enabling a hugely powerful abuser.
Just say no to rotten fruit kids!
Especially a problem with flash storage since it really isn't designed for long-term storage without being plugged in.
I mean the system restore process is embarrassingly good (or was when I left the ecosystem): replace dead HDD, boot off installation media, attach the TM drive and say "yes please" when it asks you if you want to restore everything. The options you list are aimed at the "power user" and burdens them accordingly.
People that care enough to keep a library of music after the popularity of Spotify are the same people to leave the ecosystem permanently when this kind of stuff happens.
I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates.
Not your drive, not your data?
I don’t know, I’m not creative.
As in: two external drives, unplugged, one in each hand, each with a complete, usable copy. Bonus points for storing them in separate buildings miles away from each other.
It is somewhat too tough, and I haven't yet said it to anyone in his/her face. In my mind I think it often.
Not your bits, not your beats.
Imagine being a 40something and having your kid come home and say "Are our family photos backed up locally, redundantly on a rotating schedule with a tested disaster recovery plan?" "An untested disaster recovery plan isn't a disaster recovery plan".
There is no substitute for self-hosted.
He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network stream. I imagine many tech companies are quite happy to let the confusion continue.
As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits.
But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.
Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control.
In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version.
The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit.
In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.
Reminds me of that post about the parents banned from gdrive after syncing a picture of their child's genitals (for medical purposes, verified) while sending it to a doctor. I'm pretty sure they're still permabanned and without access to their data. I think they even took his phone service, Google Fi away.
Someone with money in the game needs to pounce on this, even if it's another for-profit like synology etc they would at least get the mentality that storing things you care about in the cloud is foolish at best.
But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially.
So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.
Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.
80% of the effort should be spent on how to handle the thing the automatic system didn’t.
A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files.
Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and audit every change made on them hour by hour.
As for carefully monitoring your backup software to keep track of when files change, 1) I think we're getting even farther into the "not reasonable to expect of ordinary users" range here, and 2) if I did somehow happen to notice that a bunch of music files had changed, I'd be a lot more likely to assume that Apple Music had updated their ID3 tags than that it had completely rewritten the music!
Correct. Just to be clear, though: Apple Music does not do that.