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I think James Pinkstone is right -- and Apple is WRONG WRONG WRONG. I too subscribed to the initial free trial of Music but frankly found it to be no great benefit AND much of my music just disappeared!--on my iPhone 6s Plus, that is, and on my Macbook Pro. Luckily, everything is still intact on my trusty iPad version 1, still going strong but running some ancient version of iOS and unaffected by Apple's's iCloud shenanigans. It ain't perfect (it ain't Apple-like) but I can live with it as long as my iPad lives.




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.

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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.

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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
 
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.

Does Google automatically delete the original without warning after uploading? No. Apple does that.
 
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I never authorized Apple Music on any device but my iPhone. Certainly not my Mac, on which all my music is stored. Why? Because the Apple Music interface definitely told me it would erase my music. Further, I've got music which is not available on iTunes; further, this music does not appear in the cloud so I can't listen to my own music, say, via Apple TV.

Also, Apple Music no longer contains the metadata it once did -- like composers, and lyricists.

Yes, iTunes is a mess. With all the Apple employees, one would think Apple would have plenty of people working on improving their own products, but that's not happening. Apple is too top heavy; my guess is a whole lot of employees are putting a whole lot of time doing tasks that never see the light of day. Like the old Army idea of digging holes just to fill them up again.
 
I think that merging iCloud music with iTunes Match was a big mistake. It made everything overly complex and introduced so many bugs!

When Apple Music first launched I subscribed hoping to be able to ditch Spotify and unify my local music collection with my streaming. I had an iTunes Match sub at the time and ended up with my music library losing artwork and my iPhone with heaps of duplicates songs. It took me hours to fix and apple could not provide any help at the time. I quickly went crawling back to Spotify and doubt I'll consider Apple Music again.
 
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Apple Music + iCloud Music Library + Keep My Music Files Organized = DISASTER

I have been using iTunes to manage my personal music library for years, since the first iPod and when Apple Music came out last year, it was buggy, full of problems esp if you mix it with iCloud Music Library, here you go after I activated Apple Music and iCloud Music Library, iTunes scanned entire library, uploaded whats missing, I can access everything from any iOS device, Apple Music has a huge collection...everything worked perfectly, it's heaven....

Two days later, iTunes started to lose my music files, can't find single tracks, some times whole albums and started to download copy of these files from Apple Servers, store it in another folder (Apple Music folder) and give it different Info and started to appear as duplicated music / albums...
The core problem that iTunes was a mess in matching and it has the permission to keep my music files organized, it was renaming my music files to match Apple settings! without editing the info in my local XML file which created the problem!

Although no file was deleted by that time, but the hole mess took me like two weeks to fix, so I will never ever trust Apple Music and iCloud Music Library again, and what happened with this guy actually could happen! it might be a bug and iTunes can easily delete your files.
 
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I've noticed that a lot of my songs have changed....updated to different/worse versions of the same song. Some more obscure artist were replaced with things that I've never heard of....unfortunately I'm probably much too late to fix this....
 
How can Tim Cook remain head of Apple when they constantly release poor quality software like this?
 
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.

oh thats fine they were only mp3s in the first place :)
 
I have a question. There are some dance music lovers here. Did you try to upload one of those 10-12 remixes American CD singles? Has that worked? I have a lot of those, and I am not quite into having them "match" to 10 album versions.
 
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I will briefly explain my experience losing all my music in iTunes. Back in November, my iTunes Match sub was renewed. On the day it was renewed. All my music, playlists, and music data, about 3000 songs, was automatically deleted on all my devices.

I called Apple Support, which they looked into it with a few different levels of techs all the way to the software engineer.

They first thought it was a payment issue, since it happened on my renew date.

After seeing that the payment charge went though okay, then they blamed it on Apple Music. I had never set up an Apple Music account, but that was their best guess because they had so many similar issues at the time about Apple Music deleting libraries.

After a week going by and many phone calls some over 2 hours long, their final determination of my iTunes Match issues was that I never had any music uploaded to iTunes Match. According to everything they looked at, I never used iTunes Match, even though I know I did.

Basically, some glitch of their, maybe Apple Music related, deleted my Library, and they did not have anything more to say about it than I never uploaded anything to iTunes Match.

Luckily I had a backup with almost all my music, maybe 90%, but all the playlists, and music data was gone forever.
 
OK. After reading so many comments blaming Apple music and especially, iCloud music library, I choose to hold off and keep staying away from Apple Music even longer, even though I am sure I am eligible for student discount anyway.

I have a fairly small music library, with 3200 songs, 88GB in total. But almost all of them are lossless format, and artworks plus lyrics are carefully added/adjusted to match either actual data or my own need.

Unlike others, however, I don't have space to backup my entire music library to anywhere else. So, such disastrous feature shall not be allowed to enter my life, no matter when, no matter where.

Plus, no matter how many times Apple claim their music library is "the largest one on the world", there are still tons of songs in my library Apple iTunes Store would never have anyway, including some "limited edition", "special songs" packed with BD Box and so on.

Because Optus gives users ability to stream Spotify mobile data free, I would give it a try and use free tier to do so. But, no, Apple Music. You are not for everyone from the beginning, and you will never be the choice for everyone.
 
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Haha. People who had their artwork scrambled probably did it all manually then forgot about it.
I've had iTunes Match put the artwork for Missing Persons onto Rush, Live in Rio. Robert Plant artwork ended up on some of Ted Nuggets albums. Why on earth would I do that myself? It's not all the songs on the album but usually, the artwork gets switched beginning with the third or fourth song in an album.

I have 13,000 songs, about 125GB worth and in playing all of these the last few months, I am amazed at how many of these, iTunes Match messed with. It's also done this on all three of my computers. I have the same music collection on all three and iTunes Match has gone in and gave random artwork to whatever it felt like doing.
 
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That was /s
Of course I know people didn't go manually changing their artwork to wrong one. It's a bit of shout out to people who say "AM works perfectly for me so everybody else is holding it wrong".
 
That was /s
Of course I know people didn't go manually changing their artwork to wrong one. It's a bit of shout out to people who say "AM works perfectly for me so everybody else is holding it wrong".


Oh, I thought you were serious too.
 
Unlike others, however, I don't have space to backup my entire music library to anywhere else. So, such disastrous feature shall not be allowed to enter my life, no matter when, no matter where.
You haven't got space at home for a cheap 1TB back-up drive?

What you are doing is very risky, even if you do stay away from Apple Music. It's well worth the small financial outlay and the time & effort to keep at least one regular up to date backup system in place.
 
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Oh, I thought you were serious too.
It's a sad thing that AM is such a clusterduck that saying something like that can indeed be taken seriously. I wasn't around for MobileMe so this is the worst ever Apple product I encountered. Somehow I can sync local and streamed files using Spotify and nothing needs to be in a cloud, deleted, have its artwork changed or magically turn into a different version.
 
You haven't got space at home for a cheap 1TB back-up drive?

What you are doing is very risky, even if you do stay away from Apple Music. It's well worth the small financial outlay and the time & effort to keep at least one regular up to date backup system in place.
Yeah, after witnessing so many outrages about Apple Music, I will try to make space for backup library.
 
It's obvious that a lot of people can get confused by the differences between iTunes, iTunes Match, iTunes in the Cloud, and Apple Music services, as well as the differences between files that have been ripped, purchased through iTunes, matched through iTunes, or temporarily downloaded from the Cloud or Apple Music. It really is fairly complex and probably needs to be consolidated or simplified down the line by Apple. Part of that is just legacy software, and how complicated it can be to transition to something truly new. That's really where all the "---- deleted my music" comes from: confusion. None of the software actually deletes the users original source files. The user has to choose to do that themselves, which certainly can happen by mistake sometimes.
 
What if no one had backups of their day to day data ? Its the same thing with music..

I've gotta settle with iMore, this guy is not the only one who doesn't understand the options.

I will admit there are problems, but that's why u keep a backup..
 
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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.

Glad to see this discussion - after I updated to ios 9.3 I noticed that all the albums I had put on my phone from CD's I owned had disappeared. I thought that maybe I had inadvertently deleted them, but certainly didn't remember doing anything that could have caused it. Spoke to someone the an Apple Store, who couldn't figure it out - suggested that I just call Apple technical support. Never got an explanation or solution.
 
Spoke to someone the an Apple Store, who couldn't figure it out - suggested that I just call Apple technical support. Never got an explanation or solution.

Pretty much the same for me. The Apple techs were useless, hell the Apple engineer was useless.

This was the beginning of a continuous streak of frustration with Apple products. I am not sure what is going on at Apple, but in the past few years, their QC went into the toilet.
 
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