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rodanmusic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 24, 2013
25
12
I love your products...at least OS X, mac iOS, iPhone, iPad, and iPod, etc...but when you released iTunes match you royally messed up my music library so badly I will never be able to recover.

I will forever be stuck with having multiple copies of every song.

Today I tried to remove duplicates since having so many of the same song is so annoying. Well that screwed it up even more so I'm not going to bother with your BS music products again.

I hope someday you fix this pathetic product (and hopefully decouple it from the iPhone, app store, and everything else). I had every single song categorized into genre, playlists, and other categories. My playlists are gone. My genre's are gone. Some of my music is gone. Some of my music is duplicated.

It's a fiasco. I should've stuck with organizing my library in folders on the hard drive. 10+ years of musical structure and organization forever lost. Thanks a lot Apple. It only got worse with the Apple Music release.

Oh well I've learnt my lesson. I won't be using apple for music ever again. I just needed to vent.
 

Paradoxally

macrumors 68000
Feb 4, 2011
1,981
2,891
I cannot believe someone who has a music collection for 10 years does not think to make at least one backup of their library on an external hard drive or something. What if the drive had corrupted?

Come on now. Apple has many issues but you gotta protect what you deem valuable, be it physically or digitally.
 

Porco

macrumors 68040
Mar 28, 2005
3,345
7,093
Oh well I've learnt my lesson.

I sympathise with you deeply and realise how disheartening it must be, but as Paradoxally alludes to, I think the big lesson here for you is always back-up anything that would upset you like this has.

Obviously it's not going to feel great right now to read people saying 'you shoulda done this or that', but next time it might be another company you trust to not mess with your stuff - better to take what control you can of the situation so that whatever services you use in the future, whether from Apple or anyone else, if they fail, you can get back to where you were before the fail. :)

If you do eventually get some order back into your music collection, invest in an external hard drive or two to back up your Music, and anything else that is important to you. Because this might have happened this time because of Apple's poor quality control (I use iTunes MATCH, and sometimes it's so rubbish at *MATCHING* it astounds me), but again, as Paradoxally says, if you didn't have a back-up to go to all this could have happened just as easily through your hard drive or SSD dying on you without warning, and then your big FU would be for the Hard Drive or SSD manufacturer I guess(!?).

But I do sympathise - yes, we should all back-up, but that still doesn't make it right that the user is inconvenienced because of algorithms and software services that don't work nearly as well as advertised. I hope you can eventually get your music collection back in some state you're happy with - maybe see this as an opportunity to go back through your music and re-discover some old favourites as you re-build your library and playlists etc.
 
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JackieInCo

Suspended
Jul 18, 2013
5,178
1,601
Colorado
I quit using iTunes Match when I ended up with over 1,500 duplicates not once, but more times then I could count. Plus, I would activate it on two computers and that made things even more confusing. I have over 200 music videos, about 150 of them were purchased on another account that Apple locked and then closed on me about three years ago. Music videos are DRM free so they can be played on any device these days but, iTunes Match would never upload those due to having purchased them on another account. The problem comes with this in that iTunes Match shows two copies of each of those, one being on each computer AND, they would show as two copied on my iPhone/iPad though I could never play them through the cloud because they would never upload.

Several months ago, I spent hours removing those 1,500+ duplicates from my 14,000 song library and then I copied it to my other two Macs after of course, turning off iTunes Match. I already had them copied to other Macs for the past several years but I didn't want to spend hours removing duplicates from each Mac so I just deleted the libraries and then copied them over from the good library. I lost a few music videos that are no longer sold in the store but I'm OK with that. Being rid of iTunes Match and having NO duplicates was worth losing a few videos.

I have no idea how I got to over 1,500 duplicates but I think maybe it was duplicating songs each time I synced my iPhone/iPad.
 

Apples n' Stone

macrumors 65816
Apr 13, 2015
1,422
939
Maidstone, U.K
I love your products...at least OS X, mac iOS, iPhone, iPad, and iPod, etc...but when you released iTunes match you royally messed up my music library so badly I will never be able to recover.

I will forever be stuck with having multiple copies of every song.

Today I tried to remove duplicates since having so many of the same song is so annoying. Well that screwed it up even more so I'm not going to bother with your BS music products again.

I hope someday you fix this pathetic product (and hopefully decouple it from the iPhone, app store, and everything else). I had every single song categorized into genre, playlists, and other categories. My playlists are gone. My genre's are gone. Some of my music is gone. Some of my music is duplicated.

It's a fiasco. I should've stuck with organizing my library in folders on the hard drive. 10+ years of musical structure and organization forever lost. Thanks a lot Apple. It only got worse with the Apple Music release.

Oh well I've learnt my lesson. I won't be using apple for music ever again. I just needed to vent.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll let Tim know.
 

Tech198

Cancelled
Mar 21, 2011
15,915
2,151
10+ years is a long time.. But why are u relying on the cloud anyway ?

For that matter why would u rely on anything ? get 2 externals at the minimum an dkeep backups in sync.... cos one external is not a backup... but its too late now,,, so i hope u lean this hard lesson..


we all go down that track, even i did, but at least i punish myself for it and realize my mistakes.... Some don't.
 

rodanmusic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 24, 2013
25
12
I guess I wasn't clear enough. I have backups of all of the actual music files. I have my music backed up using backblaze.com, and two external drives. Unfortunately the last time I exported actual playlists was a long while back and even at that point they didn't work correctly when imported.

However iTunes and iTunes match are the problem. iTunes is really the only good audio player on OSX and using it I have duplicates of everything. I'm missing songs and there are a ton of other issues.

The biggest is that it lost all my playlists. Multiple times. I have the songs on the drive but not necessarily organized like I had them in iTunes.

I trusted Apple a little too much and I shouldn't have.
 
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