Debate Rages Over Whether Apple Music Automatically Deletes Users' Owned Music Collections

[Planey28]

Apple Music and iTunes needs a complete overhaul, including making it much more user-friendly. Some of the prompts are downright scary. Just hit the wrong thing and there's a good chance you're going to erase something you didn't intend to. That being said, anyone with values their data should have a local hardcopy back up. Never, never, never rely on the cloud for important information.

iTunes is the main problem. It's a 13/14? year old app that has had tons of features shoved into it, it was never built for a streaming service or the cloud. Javascript Apple Music pages, different UI styles in different tabs, video playback, two stores, device syncing. It's mad.

It needs to be completely scrapped and new apps written. I think Apple knows this and it will be coming. Apple Music on iOS on the other hand has been great for me.

 

[puma1552]

dear god what a mess, iPod classic plus local files and no Apple Music = win

 

[lifeseeker]

I have a ~~~ 100 GB music library, about 600 CDs purchased and ripped losslessly over a few decades. Signed up for Music but NOT Match. Upload took three days, works perfectly. Nothing deleted from my iMac library. I do occasionally scratch my head about the program's logic but don't find the interface confusing. Maybe because I've been writing code for thirty years.

 

[FedUpFanBoy]

There are these things called backups. One would think a professional musician would know of it.

 

[smacrumon]

If it's a bug Apple obviously needs to fix it. If it's caused by user confusion then both have some work to do.

The user can be confused at every step, but it's the design of the software that gets the user from A to B safely. If the software can't do this, it shouldn't be made available to be used.

 

[PaulRustad007]

Did this man have TimeMachine turned on and working? I back up to three different external drives with Time Machine and I have never had a problem loosing files....

 

[macs4nw]

iCloud Music Library, iTunes Match etc. are just a mess. I ripped a song off Soundcloud, added it to iTunes and a week later I still can't play it on my iPhone. The song is there but it's grayed out and I get an error message when I try to play it. Also I used the app SongShift to import Spotify playlists but many of the songs aren't matching the correct album. A lot of tracks matched to greatest hits albums not the original album the song came from. So annoying.

My biggest beef also. Sooooo glad I'm not using the cloud for my music listening enjoyment.

 

[ouimetnick]

I'm sure I'll sound like the "Apple is doomed" people, but they really dropped the ball. Several of my friends tried Apple Music and also had their content deleted. Combine this with the Apple Watch, and it doesn't look to good. I don't know why they keep Cue around. I've never been a huge fan of iCloud. It's web interface sucks.

They should have kept Forstall around. He might have been a PITA, but Jony Ive has gone overboard with some of the UI design in my opinion.

 

[morcutt11]

I don't use Apple Music, but I can say that iTunes seems to do a horrible job managing my music. It hates NAS - every time I rebooted my iMac iTunes didn't immediately see the NAS (I presume), so it kept changing the location to my music to the default location on my internal hard drive and then complaining all of my music was missing. Giving up I moved everything to a connected external drive (I really don't want iTunes trying to store 2TB of movies/music on my iMac's 1TB drive), which has further irritated iTunes. iTunes will now remember the location during reboots, but it seems confused as to what is available locally vs. the cloud, insisting that I need to download seemingly random tracks from the cloud, then complaining that there are multiple copies of the songs locally when I do. I recognize that Apple is trying to automate the management of the media library but I really, really wish I had a way to just manage it manually. On top of that, I'm convinced some music is missing, even though I don't allow iTunes to delete anything unless it is redundant copies of a particular song. For whatever reason I don't seem to have the problem with movies - just songs. And don't get me started about it screwing up playlists when it is synching with my mobile device; I started with a playlist called "workout" and now iTunes has created "workout 1", "workout 1 1", "workout 1 2", etc. and, of course, they have different songs...

 

[drcorrell]

This is exactly what happened to me. I have 27gb of music and it changed around 1gb to AM. Luckily many are CDs I've had forever, but it will take days to reburn them to iTunes.

 

[slapppy]

I'm not doing it till it's safe. I backup my own CD to an external drive. I also have all my CD saved and out away. Even with that safety net I'll wait till it's truly safe that Aplle won't delete my stuff by accident.

Seems like MS engineers geeks are writing these messages that make so sense for normal people.

 

[imwoblin]

I lost 2gb of original music (purchased) after my Apple Music trial ended. Poof, gone. Luckily, I backed everything up.

 

[drcorrell]

This is exactly what happened to me. I have 27gb of music and it changed around 1gb to AM. Luckily many are CDs I've had forever, but it will take days to reburn them to iTunes.

 

[morcutt11]

Anybody who spent thousands of dollars and umpteen hours to create a music collection,
should spend a few more hours and $ more for a decent back up (better, even 2)

It has never been an issue of how and why storage media fails,
it has only been a question of WHEN!

As for iTunes, I stopped synching libraries long time ago when the messages of what would happen were not clear. Hasn't changed and I only use iTunes now to home share movies through Apple TV.

iTunes is a big bag of hurt (And Apple has many these days)

Have you tried restoring backups with iTunes? iTunes can't manage media for crap to begin with, then it gets really unfriendly when you try adding back in songs, creating duplicates, refusing to upload them to the cloud, etc. This, of course, presumes that you even know the songs are missing before you start overwriting backups.

 

[oliversl]

Someone should be able to reproduce this bug and screencast it in youtube. Apple has too many bugs on its software, they are doing too much and have lost focus. I don't see the will on the exec-team to re-focus on quality neither, so we all are doomed!

 

[dannys1]

Isn't what he's describing also 'iTunes Match'. As far as I know Apple Music doesn't upload tracks that only you own (eg rare mp3's) that are not in its database and serve them from the cloud...I thought thats what the iTunes Match subscription is for.

And if Apple Music is now doing that too, why have we still got iTunes Match separately?

 

[Zoboomafoo]

Just give me the right cover art, please!

 

[malexandria]

It's not even a debate is it? It DOES. First iTunes Match did it and destroyed my music collection then It took me 3 months to rebuild and Apple Music did it a 2nd time - I didn't activate the Upload feature it just did it the first time I signed up for the crap service.

 

[JonneyGee]

I use Spotify, but I didn't have this problem when I used Apple Music during the trial period.

However, I do think Apple Music is ripe for improvement.
1. iCloud Music should be a separate offering from Apple Music. I'd gladly pay for more iCloud space to take advantage of this feature since I do have a fairly large music library and would love to free up some hard drive space.
2. Spotify has a much easier method for syncing music locally, on a Mac or iOS device, than Apple Music. There's a lot Apple can learn from Spotify here.
3. The Music iOS app needs to be revamped for a better experience for non-Apple Music users. If you don't use Apple Music (or arguably, even if you do), the 8.3 interface was far superior to the 8.4+ interface. Users should still be able to manually set tabs at the bottom of the screen, and Artists/Genres/etc. should still be separate tabs instead of lumped together in a clunky "My Music" tab. That's a whole lot more useful than a useless "Connect" (Ping 2.0) tab wasting space at the bottom of the screen.

 

[freepomme]

That's y'all fault. Y'all dumb. Paying Apple Music.

 

[malexandria]

Apple now does the same thing with eBooks! I had about 200 Comics and another 100 eBooks in my iBooks collection that I downloaded/purchased from other sources like Bittorrent's Big Bundle. iOS9.3 finally support eBooks/iBooks on iCloud. It uploaded to the service and then when I decided I didn't want to deal with iCloud and turned it off. EVERY non-iTunes purchased book was DELETED from my account AND off my hard drive! Luckily I had it backed up. But that's just BS.

 

[testcard]

This is why I'll never use AM, I simply don't want to risk losing my entire music library (and yes, it is backed up). A music streaming service should be completely separate from the user's personal music library. Spotify works for me and that's why I'll stick with it. And on a side note, MR should hire Serenity Caldwell - she's a great writer.

 

[DEMinSoCAL]

Glad I have Google Play Music on all my devices (including Mac and iPhones). Never a glitch and works great.

I personally despise iTunes...for me it gets more and more un-intuitive as time goes on to the point now that I can't figure out where most stuff is in it! It's a real mess.

 

[adamhenry]

I don't care about a AM refresh. I am long gone. I didn't care for the Rube Goldberg contraption that AM was. I am now a happy Spotify user and AM now sets in my "useless" folder.

 

[mike1982]

I haven't had this issue, but I do have the issue where it matches the wrong track. It's a big pain. Apple's remedy is to re-add it to my library with an altered track title. Sometimes that works.

Apple Music is the center of a heated debate this week, with involved parties arguing over whether or not the service is deleting Apple Music users' song collections from hard drives after uploading them to iCloud Music Library.

Vellum's James Pinkstone wrote a long complaint on May 4 accusing Apple Music of doing just that. According to Pinkstone, Apple Music deleted 122GB of his original music files after he joined Apple Music and had his music library scanned by Apple to make his personal content available across multiple devices.

The process Pinkstone describes above is not how Apple Music's matching feature works, according to an in-depth explanation shared by iMore. Apple will match songs and upload original songs by converting them into an appropriate format, but it does not delete without user intervention. iMore theorizes that Pinkstone accidentally wiped his own library by misunderstanding confusing dialog options.

Confusing the issue further is Pinkstone's conversation with an Apple Support Representative named Amber, who seems to be just as perplexed about how Apple Music functions when merging an existing music library with the Apple Music service.Amber's statement is inaccurate according to an Apple Music support document. Original files are never altered and remain available and deleting personal content is not the intended behavior of the service, but it continues to be unclear if Pinkstone and other Apple Music customers who have had content deleted have experienced a bug or mistakenly deleted their content themselves because of a confusing user interface. Multiple Apple Music listeners have disagreed with iMore's point of view and have said they too have experienced music deletions that weren't self-initiated.

Regardless of what actually happened, it's clear that Apple Music is in need of a serious overhaul. Rumors suggest Apple is working on revamping Apple Music and will unveil changes at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Hopefully that revamp will extend beyond cosmetic changes to clear up many of the confusing aspects of how music libraries are handled.

Apple Music users with personal music collections should create a backup on an external hard drive, which will ensure no music ever goes missing through user error or an Apple Music bug.

Article Link: Debate Rages Over Whether Apple Music Automatically Deletes Users' Owned Music Collections