Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
not sure if this is happening to everybody - I have 152GB in my Music Library - I have had both iTunes Match and Apple Music since they were both offered - nothing on my system has been deleted without my permission.

That is part of the frustration. So many of us were negatively impacted while others with similar setups had no issue. Apple was less than clueless on helping, discovering, or correcting the issue.
 
Haha. People who had their artwork scrambled probably did it all manually then forgot about it.


Well this makes me feel safe while in loving embrace of Apple. "Create a backup in case we accidentally ruin your library which by the way is never altered".


I have both an onsite and off-site backup solution, but my concern about this is how long before I even notice that a song or songs have been deleted, given this is really a potential issue? My backups go back a year, but I have so much music and might not realize it in time.
 
  • Like
Reactions: navaira
Part of Apple Music is what the complaint is addressing - you can ALSO upload your personal/local music to the cloud, acting as a sort of digital music locker that you can mix with Apple Music tracks. That's part of the $10/mo and a great compliment to the service.

Apple Music has a ton of issues, but there's a lot of good value in it too.

Wait, have they fixed the issues that wouldn't let you have a playlist with songs you own and Apple Music? To me this was the most glaring deficiency, although a close second is the fact that you can <3 songs on Apple Music, but there's no possible way to find them after the fact if you haven't already downloaded them...
[doublepost=1462568347][/doublepost]
Just my 2 cents...I've had nothing but problems with iTunes Match. Never tried Apple Music because of my bad experiences with Match. I don't trust Apple's use of the cloud.

Make sure you always have the originals or good backups of the originals. I just synced my songs down from match when i bought my last macbook and wiped the old drive to give to my daughter. When I unsubbed I found that all my music had been infected with DRM and would no longer play. Fortunately I backup everything...
 
iTunes Match was probably the worst piece of garbage ever made. It had the right intent at launch but continued to disappoint constantly. The product would go through my laptop and delete songs and playlists... and then create duplicates of other items if you were using multiple devices at once. If you attempted to delete the duplicate playlists, more would show up as you were going through this process on the devices you weren't on and then recopy back to the one you deleted it from.

Apple TV 3 and below doesn't recognize playlists on iTunes Match if the playlist contains anything streamed from Apple Music.

What happened to "It just works!"...
 
this was an accident-- the real post is below. it will not let me delete this one now
 
Last edited:
I have a massive iTunes library, including tons of music not available on Apple Music, or iTunes in general. I have used Match since it debuted, as well as a continued subscription to Apple Music. I have used Match to move the same massive library to new computers, over time. I have never lost a song.

I think theses services work as intended, and work very well. This sounds like user error to me.

... until you unsubscribe and you realize most of the songs you imported yourself aint playing anymore cuz it replaced them secretly with AM drm files
 
This has been a problem especially on windows based computers for a long time. A friend of mine recived an Ipod a couple years ago and had to register and install Itunes software. She had appox 200gb on her laptop and it did the same to her and took over every media function in the laptop. I service computers and had warned her. There are several better applications that will do what itunes does without all the invasive tactics.

I personally have been a music collector since 1965 and have music ranging from the very first ever created wax tumblers in 1890 (not a typo) to the current billboard charts and host streaming radio shows on a few hobby streaming networks and as of this writing have just under 12tb of music in various drives. Musicbee, winamp and several others will do everything itunes does without the cloud and also; NEVER do anything with an online storage and retrieval/sharing/streaming system without having at least 1 solid backup on an external that is not connected to the comp when you are first setting the account up. That's just good computer practice and applies to everything, not just music.

Itunes by default assumes that any music you already have did not come from them and looks for drm files stored in the system that would prove you own it or that it was ripped on that computer you are using it on. Usually it figures out what was ripped cd's or what was random free downloads. It also knows the difference between a converted you tube file and the real thing and will destroy those on sight. The microcode is in the you tube file and most don't even know that it exists.

Personally I wouldn't use itunes on anything, not even a mac. I have seen this several times before. Good luck.

Edit-afterthought; One thing that apple and microbotch are both guilty of is that they create operating systems and somewhere along the way they forgot how and what the real task really is. This is only supposed to run our hardware and do it well. Nothing more. They have no clue of how vast some peoples libraries are and what they have, be it music, pictures, ebooks or video and people only seem to write software for "a few thousand files" not multiple file types or files spanned across drive systems. I have more than a million files in one 4tb drive. They don't get it, and they never will because they are too busy trying to market things we don't want than they are to pay attention to their existing customer and user-base and give us what we ask for. the best software written is user based and open source and more people need to connect to the real world and broaden their horizons.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: splitpea and dk001
Just my 2 cents...I've had nothing but problems with iTunes Match. Never tried Apple Music because of my bad experiences with Match. I don't trust Apple's use of the cloud.

In the beginning I had all kinds of IT Match issues and worked a lot with Apple to get it to work. Part of my issue was I had multi-regional music (US, Asia k-pop, German Metal, etc..). It was frustrating but finally worked.
Then I tried the trial AM and BAMF!. Not again.

Currently use Google Play Music and have had no issues. I hung iTunes (other than device backups) and AM up.
 
Good thought however I will never trust them with personal data at this scale again. They need to re-earn my trust and an announcement won't do that.

They lost my trust since iDisk and iWeb, .mac. mobile me etc. and I am not good at going back to somebody who provides a subpar product, no value or tries to limit what one can do.

Add the chintzy GB/TB allotments for storage, which others double or triple and you can see why people are looking for better solutions.

Even under jobs "services" were terrible. He fired people over that.
They should have been miles ahead, but yet it seems now they are also rans in services.

I still prefer Apple products over PC stuff, but I think the higher ups at Apple may want to take a look and hire 600 service experts for iTunes app store etc before embarking on the iCar.

Apple, how about you: Innovate your own stuff.

Set up properly that should run "autonomous"
 
  • Like
Reactions: dk001
The fact there is debate and confusion over the behaviour of Apple Music says it all really - Apple software is declining in quality and if you cannot trust an app with your data they are in real trouble. Adobe went the same way with their dirctory deletion fiasco recently.

Given the respurces of Apple there can be no excuse for poorly thought out and executed software and for loss of customer trust......too many stock options for rich execs and too little to show for it as far as customers or shareholders are concerned.
 
  • Like
Reactions: splitpea
Somewhat related, I enabled iCloud for the first time just to sync my calendar and contacts with my Mac.

In the 10 seconds that all the features were enabled by default before I disabled all but the above, disabling syncing favorites deleted them all from my phone.
 
First, Cue needs to go. He's a total useless moron. AM did have a major bug when they first released it for the trial. It screwed up my music and did delete songs and confused some of my own music with AM stuff.

I cancelled after the 3 month trial, and followed a few blogs that documented the progress of AM getting updated and fixing various bugs. One of the blogs was where I had discovered that the song deletion or "mismatch" issue was not just me, but something other people were also experiencing.

iOS 9 brought a more reliable AM from what I read so I signed up for the service. This time around, everything was fine. My own music (75GB) was matched so that I could listen to it on other devices, but left alone in iTunes. AM specific music shows up with the cloud symbol, and my music shows no cloud symbol. This is different than what happened the first time I used AM for the trial period.
 
I'm getting real confused about what's going on.

I'm not an avid iTunes nor Apple Music user, but I do have Apple Music (and use it on my iPhone, I hardly listen to music on my Mac and if so mostly radio streams). I'm also using the iCloud library, have uploaded all my personal music, which I'd had before Apple Music. I don't use Match.

So is this an iCloud, Match, or Apple Music problem?
Will it only erase music in the iTunes folder (where your music will end up when importing with the default option) or also music on external paths?

Is this an user error (when choosing the wrong option) or does Apple indeed "just like that" delete your files?

Thanks for any clarification. I have not had this problem - in contrast, I actually restored ALL my music from iCloud on my phone after a reset, including all the ones that are neither on Apple Music nor had I bought from iTunes.
 
it replaced most of "my" music with AM files. i only noticed after i unsubscribed to AM and all my music was greyed out and not playable. thankfully i had it all stored in Google Music as well


If you uploaded FLAC or WAV files to Google Music (nee Google Play), guess what?
When you want them back you get 256kbps MP3 files... if you didn't save backups of your original lossless files, they're gone.
 
I just went through an identical situation, but with iBooks instead of Apple Music. I run an eBook store so I have 500 PDFs in iBooks. New update came to allow you to share PDFs over iCloud to all devices, so I clicked to turn it on. It uploaded the books, then deleted them all from my computer. When the Metadata was incorrect on my other devices, I turned iCloud for iBooks off. Then, of course, iBooks was completely empty, books lost forever.

I had a Time Machine backup and Apple Support was able to help me find the hidden iBooks folders I would need to restore to get my books back. I definitely won't be turning on any iCloud file sharing services without a very recent backup.
 
I suffered from this bug. I had iTunes Match when I enabled Apple Music. A lot of my own music got incorrecty labeled as Apple Music in iCloud.

If you have iTunes Match you can delete your own local music files and later get your own DRM-free files back from the cloud.

But that failed for those files that was incorrectly labeled as Apple Music. I did lose those files (after I deleted them). Apple Support could not help me.

Now, this was a known bug when Apple Music was just released, but my mislabeled songs still have the wrong label to this day. When I download them, I get a DRM version.

So yes, you can loose your music files. Even with iTunes Match.

(And there are plenty more serious bugs in iTunes and iCloud library. I have 6 open bug reports with Apple.)

I use Apple Music and signed up to iTunes Match when it first came out.

Although I love Apple Music and think what's it's given me ( well access to my entire music library anywhere and also practically every song ever recorded - yes yes there are notable absences) outweigh any niggled it is sometimes so confusing and I think has effected my own library.

Sometimes when I go to play an album I know I legitimately ripped from cd into iTunes it's not there and I have to download from the cloud. But if I am using my iPhone it won't let me do this on my Mac as it says I only gave 1 Apple Music user- we don't have a family deal. Then other times it doesn't do this. All I know are songs I know I ripped or brought through iTunes are now in the cloud.

The whole syncing cloud thing is so confusing I don't understand it
[doublepost=1462577627][/doublepost]
I feel like no one has addressed this: It's important to make the distinction between "Apple Music" and "iCloud Music Library." You can have Apple Music and NOT use iCloud music library as I have been from day one. Yes, there are features of Apple Music that will not be available because of this, such as making playlists with music from Apple Music, but the streaming itself works just fine. It seems it is the iCloud Music Library side of this that is causing all the issues.
Yes I think you're right but without iCloud it effects the Apple Music experience ( for me anyway)
 
Even if only user error (which seems iffy to me based on the description of the user in question), things like this are why I keep my music (and video) library completely separated from anything to do with Apple Music. I am not a big fan of processes doing things that I do not understand in complete, open detail. I know I lose out on some functionality as a result, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to never have to worry about something like this.
 
Who in their right mind would trust AM anyway? Clearly apple is trying to exploit our product loyalty for their own gain, without delivering very much in return here. There are already a ton of superior music services out there.
 
I just went through an identical situation, but with iBooks instead of Apple Music. I run an eBook store so I have 500 PDFs in iBooks. New update came to allow you to share PDFs over iCloud to all devices, so I clicked to turn it on. It uploaded the books, then deleted them all from my computer. When the Metadata was incorrect on my other devices, I turned iCloud for iBooks off. Then, of course, iBooks was completely empty, books lost forever.

I had a Time Machine backup and Apple Support was able to help me find the hidden iBooks folders I would need to restore to get my books back. I definitely won't be turning on any iCloud file sharing services without a very recent backup.

Yes I have iBooks issues but nobody talks about it as I don't think it's widely used- I have lots of audiobooks and it's so confusing!!
 
They should revert the matching process to the one iTunes match uses.....I had to many acoustic renditions of a song being replaced with a total different version and it sucks because I don't have the original files anymore
 
I just went through an identical situation, but with iBooks instead of Apple Music. I run an eBook store so I have 500 PDFs in iBooks. New update came to allow you to share PDFs over iCloud to all devices, so I clicked to turn it on. It uploaded the books, then deleted them all from my computer. When the Metadata was incorrect on my other devices, I turned iCloud for iBooks off. Then, of course, iBooks was completely empty, books lost forever.

I had a Time Machine backup and Apple Support was able to help me find the hidden iBooks folders I would need to restore to get my books back. I definitely won't be turning on any iCloud file sharing services without a very recent backup.


This happened to me too. How did you get your PDF's back? Where is the hidden iBooks folder? Thanks.
 
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.

I think the buttons can be labeled better. Maybe have "Delete local copy", "cancel", "Delete all copies".

applemusicdelete.jpg
 
  • Like
Reactions: sofila and dk001
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.