In the case cited in the Reddit link, having files you legitimately own DRMed, replaced, or deleted seems like a pretty clear illegal act. I think the argument could be made that Apple could be charged with something worse than ransomware (since that merely encrypts your files and doesn't change, delete, or prevent them from being used as before once they are unencrypted).
Didn't see your comment before making mine - but yes - I think it is
indistinguishable from a ransomware attack in every way except for who
is doing it and the fact that unlike cybercriminals to whom you can
pay bitcoin to restore your files, Apple will almost certainly refuse
and prosecute you for trying to restore your data. So yes, worse
than a ransomware attack. I simply cannot understand how big tech
companies get away with their behaviour.
In this case, the user is mistaken. It didn’t replace their local files.
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.
Apple Music includes the old iTunes Match features, so it matches your local library with the Apple Music library if you allow it to do so, and uploads only the songs it can't match.
This process is not perfect so some songs might be matched to a different version.
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.
I can guarantee you that they either currently do change your files, or did at some point in the past. My entire catalogue of music imported from physical CDs was switched to different files, with different metadata and all (overriding my manual classification), and sometimes replacing uncensored versions with radio-safe versions, etc, sometime after 2010.
I think there was a bug in an early release of the matching feature that replaced the files, but it hasn't done that in ages (unless it's become buggy again).
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.
I can guarantee you it is not true.
If the matched song is removed from itunes store, I can only listen to it on my MacBook and cannot stream or download it on my iphone
Apple Music (The app) replaced iTunes (The app), and Apple Music (the service) contains a modified iTunes Match service (which used to only be a separate iTunes service) which is still available (the iTunes Match service). The service (iTunes Match) was optional where the Apple Music (the service) method is not optional when using a synced library since part of syncing is matching what is already there. I think that might be what the comment was hinting at.
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.
It does. I used to have iTunes Match, subscribed to Apple Music, cancelled iTunes Match, and still enjoy its functionality (that my music (ie all the ripped CDs I have had for ages) is available on all my devices).
My understanding is that with iTunes Match, your rips stay your rips and are not DRMed. But without iTunes Match, Apple Music replaces your rips with DRMed tracks from the store.
They happily let you pay for both even though Apple music includes the functionality. I recently found this out when I moved, and had to escalate at apple support to get them to cancel the remaining 6 months of my itunes match subscription and everything kept working via Apple Music.[0]
[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.
I have curated local music library in Music app, with many rare recordings and versions that does no exist in streaming anywhere.
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.
Yeah, I gave up on iTunes very recently and moved to owntone because iTunes does not play nice with network shares. If the share isn’t available when you launch the app it reverts to storing files locally without telling you. It also can’t really handle artists with arbitrary Unicode in their names, and forgets where the file is under conditions that I could never quite determine.
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.
"If files are important to you, keep a backup, outside of cloud, or in another vendors cloud."
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:
I had my entire music collection stored on Google Play Music for a time, at one point being my only backup. When I tried to export my music collection, I discovered that not only were the file names and folder structures completely messed up, but I would sometimes get lower bitrate version of the songs or songs with "clean" lyrics - which I know for a fact wasn't what I had originally uploaded.
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 had a different experience, on export my files were all in the original encoding. The value of Google Play Music was that you could upload files. I have also never had any files replaced.
I have enjoyed self hosted solutions since YouTube Music broke the smart Playlist and integration for uploaded files with steaming files.
Ditto. I kept >200GB of music on GPM and had no issues with codecs or bitrates getting changed when I had to move away from it (much less being replaced with clean versions).
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)
When GPM launched, there was definitely no deduplication in place. Even if two users uploaded the same file, there would be two copies — more if you count replication and RS-encoding. It was so because... somebody ordered so.
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 know for a fact that YTM still has poor metadata support, the only way to fix it is to reupload the entire file. That's a huge reason why I moved to a self hosted solution. I know there were multiple cases where the metadata was wrong and two separate versions of a song were tagged as the same track. But I never lost any data. I would recommend doing a takeout and exporting all the songs if possible.
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.
> I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side
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...
Since always. For clarity, they are using the commercial offering from backblaze, not backblaze's personal/home use product.
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
Backblaze B2 makes sense for large libraries over a few TB, but for 2TB... even Google One with 2TB of storage for Google Drive outcompetes them on pricing. For $99/yr of 2TB of storage, you end up saving $140 per year over Backblaze B2 and rclone is an amazing third-party client, or if you prefer regular snapshot backups then you can use restic.
Hey, I can agree with that! I still keep an MP3/FLAC collection I've been building since 2005-ish (when I was a teen). A lot of music has come and gone, but one thing that hasn't changed is that I still use foobar2000[1] on my personal computer to access my collection. Last year, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM for cheap + an old SSD I had laying around, installed OpenMediaVault[2] on it, connected it to my router via Ethernet, and now I'm able to access my music from all of my home devices. I use RhythmBox on my Linux machines, and I'm pretty sure there's a way to interop with Plex.
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.
FYI to anyone else currently using Plex but annoyed with its inability to stream music nicely, there's a separate app called PlexAmp (android and iOS) which works much better.
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.
I just checked and I don’t see any of my files replaced. I store them in lossless ALAC. iTunes Match has weird behavior sometimes but I have a hard time believing they would delete and replace my original files. Stuff you download from the store should be stored in a cache folder anyway.
Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care about.
The initial back-up isn't the problem. It's keeping it current over time as you add new music. Then you need to keep track of which songs are on which drive and also access your backups often enough that some of the routine error checking happens to mitigate bit rot.
Especially a problem with flash storage since it really isn't designed for long-term storage without being plugged in.
The media is dirt cheap, but doing the backup is fraught. I think only Time Machine actually "solved" that usability problem and frankly kept me on Apple products longer than I would otherwise have endured. I still don't know the right way to backup a Windows 10 machine that doesn't involve hours of research, testing, tradeoffs and probably $$$.
Yeah, this is really what I'm talking about. The comment was about why everyone doesn't do backup. I contend it's because most people aren't using Macs, because if they were, there is one obvious, almost foolproof option that covers 95% of end-user requirements, and that you don't need to think about.
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.
I think it's understandable that someone wouldn't expect to need a backup of their music library. At a bare minimum, I would expect iTunes to keep both versions of a file if an identical one can't be retrieved from Apple servers.
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.
iTunes should do this, but ultimately it and a shitload of other things can change your files in a negative way and give the user no recourse. Versioned, deduplicating, infinite history backups are the solution, the friction to get started is far less than the friction to repair your files after a loss incident.
The “Bitcoin” people have that saying, cautioning people about wallet ownership and the danger of cloud wallets: “Not your keys, not your coins.”
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.
"If you can't hold copies of it, it's not your data."
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.
Imagine one of those short films from grade school with drunk driving or drug abuse or whatever, but with a severe data loss incident. Show it off to kids nationwide, they'd take the sentiment home to their parents.
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".
In German there is 'Kein Backup, Kein Mitleid'. It translates roughly as 'No backup, No sympathy', as in you'll get no sympathy for your data loss. It's a bit negative though.
My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl.
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.
Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not recognize will be a bit-for-bit copy.
The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices.
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.
Not even thinking about whether the rip is bit perfect there's no expectation Apple even keeps serving up the version of the master you originally bought and want to keep. It's not even about the rip, it's that they might swap in a rip taken from a different version of the recording.
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.
I wish a company like synology who operates in this space would drive marketing hard to try and get through this barrier. We're at a point in the world now where billions of people rely on google/apple/microsoft/whatever to do their jobs, and bring that reliance home with them and store their treasured photos or music or videos on these services that could ban them without recourse without a second thought.
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.
holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important?
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.
Deduplicating backup software has existed for ages, they would only have a backup of each distinct file, so when A.mp3 is "silently changed" the backup software now has "A.mp3 (before)" and "A.mp3 (after)" etc. Look into borg, restic etc if interested. If you saw in your backup software that a shitload of files changed you would both be alerted of the "silent change" as well as able to revert it.
Okay, but you're now moving away from "How could people not know to make backups???" to "This problem could in principle be avoided by people who use specific types of backup software and maintain complete snapshots going back at least five years". Still a good idea, certainly, but it feels like we've moved well out of "holy shit" territory. (Also, isn't Apple's own built-in Time Machine exactly the sort of backup that you're talking about here?)
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!
I agree with you on the ease of use front. Someone should make a company to do all this shit in the background but not get rid of the "your computer" part. Offer a NAS or a Pi derivative and some companion software that wraps restic/Borg/whatever and handles all the hard parts for you.
> You know Apple Music doesn't actually delete your stuff, right?
I don't use Apple Music so can't comment, but the post explicitly says that it does. Perhaps you could explain what part of the post is wrong, or what the poster has misunderstood?
I neither deletes nor changes you files; the reddit post is simply based on a misunderstanding of how iTunes Match works (You import a file on one device, then all other devices receive the matched version.)
This whole thread is terrible and should be deleted, IMO.
HN users love apple though. Something which will never cease to mystify me. You would think relatively tech savvy people, programmers and computer super-users would utterly detest apple with a burning passion.
Why should I detest things that usually serve their intended purpose really well?
I actually like macOS on my MacBook Pro, I don’t have to tinker with it to keep it working like my Linux desktop.
I’ve been frustrated with iOS but I originally switched because I was tired of my phone being randomly off or otherwise having some unexpected behavior causing it to be unreliable.
I can understand why other people prefer Windows, Linux or Android. How can it be mystifying why some might prefer macOS or iOS?
I'll explain my POV. Getting Linux setup the way u want is work, but at least you can set it up the way you want. With macOS for example there are plenty of things that should be trivial do to on a computer that are made impossible or extremely difficult because the bean counters at apple want it that way. That type of thing is just an affront to me.
Another way of putting it would be macos is designed to do what apple wants the user to do, not what the user wants to do with their own machine. The only thing holding back Linux is the a amount of money and development being put into it, real technical issues. The people developing Linux are doing everything they can to empower their users and let them do as much as possible with their own machines. The developers at apple are intentionally hobbling their machines so they align better with the corps agendas.
I could probably survive and do my job on apple. But its the principle of it. These corps are just so slimy and unethical. I would feel dirty, and the artificial restrictions would constantly piss me off. An honest error or bug is much more palatable.
Your attitude is reasonable for non computer expert. Not someone who has to work with computers every day. It's mystifying to me to see that attitude in computer experts, programmers etc. It'd be like an expert 5 star chef eating mcdonalds for dinner every day, or an experienced car mechanic using a childs set of tools.
I think car mechanics are the perfect analogy. Most of the ones I know have rather boring daily drivers because they value reliability and don’t always want to be tinkering. They do have very interesting project vehicles though.
You’re quite condescending and smug. Maybe you should try to understand why other people might have different priorities than you instead of being judgmental, seeking to understand is generally a good skill.
I, as a user, want the best user experience I can have.
Who else cares more about the user experience and provides a viable alternative? Google goes out of its way to buy and kill products, and even their core product is so bad that I'm often finding myself making fun of how absolutely awful their search results are.[1].
Could I make Android work for me? With time and effort, probably. I'm very short on both of those and now it's not just my personal method of interaction - it's my entire family. So I'm not going to.
Just working seamlessly and caring about UX are pretty gigantic. It's not that Apple is that great, it's that all of the alternatives -- like searches on the Amazon catalog these days -- result in a surfeit of garbage.
[1] The most recent one I have was my search with the following three terms, no quotes in this order: ssri neuron mechanism. The first hit was a link to a Google Books book titled "Textbook of Rare Sexual Medical Conditions". I got that result last week. I just searched again and was unable to find that result anywhere on the first page today. What happened then that isn't happening now? I couldn't tell you but my email is the only thing I rely on Google for anymore and I'm very seriously considering migrating away from it in 2023 just because I don't trust Google with that most important part of my digital identity any longer.
Wow this currently has 111 points and is sailing to the top of HN... based on a user misunderstanding...
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.
> Are Dark Patterns the fault of the user or the company
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.
The user was led to expect that their data would be in Apple Music. At that point, it would be completely reasonable for them to delete all copies of the files themselves in the understanding that Apple Music would actually absorb and retain the content it claimed to have imported.
Ah, but the User would be wrong, because the MPAA and RIAA outsource copyright enforcement to everyone else. So business-wise, you have to assume that anything you "try to import" will be looked at as tainted, lest it put the company on the pedestal of "accomplice to copyright infringement".
You must consider every service provider a hostile entity. No exceptions.
“Was led to expect” or “expected”? It may be the former, but I don’t see any clear evidence for that in this page.
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.
If the user told it "import these files over here", or "absorb that collection over there", and it said "OK, I did it", without providing a big fat "you must click to acknowledge this specific fact" sort of warning about lost or modified files, then it led the user to expect that the stuff was imported.
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.
> 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.
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.
The responsibility for a defective product that allows harm to be done
to it's user through misoperation and lack of safety features lies
with the manufacturer. Supplying the equivalent of a chainsaw without
a blade guard, and then blaming the victims is not okay.
Based on a "misunderstanding" of obscure user-hostile behavior that no sane person would expect. Behavior that no sane designer would design, and no sane coder would code, absent evil corporate pressure.
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".
I can't find the solution post that you seem to be referring to here. The closest I've found is a link to Reddit where someone said "Turn off Sync Library and all that data will come back". But the original user responded saying that while the majority of songs came back, a few hundred were gone for good, and that Apple Support told them "sometimes that happens".
Is there a different, better solution that I haven't spotted yet? Or, what was the misunderstanding?
It's interesting that the mechanism, process and outcome of what Apple
is doing is in every way identical with a ransomware attack. At least
the overtly criminal gangs let you know and offer to restore your
original files for some bitcoin payment.
I gave up on iTunes after realizing how aggressively and poorly it matches your library against its catalog. I remember times when I intentionally deleted a "match" and when the scan was triggered again it would erase my copy again. I thought there was something I was doing incorrectly since I couldn't find much online about it.
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.
I don't think this is actually true. I have a bunch of obscure music in my library that isn't "matched", and while it is transcoded to AAC, it doesn't have DRM in it and can be downloaded and played on a second Mac in VLC or IINA.
- 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 have iTunes Match, but 1) it isn't free, 2) it doesn't seem to do what I want - and often mis-matches, and 3) it doesn't seem to play well with Apple Music songs. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to maintain a hybrid library that includes your (owned/library) songs as well as Apple Music (rented/streamed) songs and lets them coexist peacefully and easily sync and stream across devices.
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 can’t speak to the problems you alluded to since the system works well for me, but my pushback on the superiority claim is really just that I don’t think a ton of people have this problem. I think the average person is fine with the streaming services.
I think I was saying "it's superior for solving this problem" (based on context, OP's problem) and you're saying "the problem is uncommon in the streaming era" (different context, not OP's proiblem.) I don't find any disagreement.
I recently started using plexamp and it’s been fantastic. I only use Music.app on my machine to rip CDs to a directory on my NAS that plexamp is serving.
I haven’t used Apple Music (various applications and incarnations) for a very long time, going back to iPod days.
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.
I've was going to say I've encountered this problem in the nearly 20 years I've been using itunes. But actually I remember back in the day it happening a few times with downloaded mp3s, if metadata for track was missing or if there were typos in some of the metadata (for artist for example).
177 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadThey 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.
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.
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.
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/
[2] https://www.openmediavault.org/
[3] https://newpipe.net/
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.
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.
I don't use Apple Music so can't comment, but the post explicitly says that it does. Perhaps you could explain what part of the post is wrong, or what the poster has misunderstood?
This whole thread is terrible and should be deleted, IMO.
I actually like macOS on my MacBook Pro, I don’t have to tinker with it to keep it working like my Linux desktop.
I’ve been frustrated with iOS but I originally switched because I was tired of my phone being randomly off or otherwise having some unexpected behavior causing it to be unreliable.
I can understand why other people prefer Windows, Linux or Android. How can it be mystifying why some might prefer macOS or iOS?
Another way of putting it would be macos is designed to do what apple wants the user to do, not what the user wants to do with their own machine. The only thing holding back Linux is the a amount of money and development being put into it, real technical issues. The people developing Linux are doing everything they can to empower their users and let them do as much as possible with their own machines. The developers at apple are intentionally hobbling their machines so they align better with the corps agendas.
I could probably survive and do my job on apple. But its the principle of it. These corps are just so slimy and unethical. I would feel dirty, and the artificial restrictions would constantly piss me off. An honest error or bug is much more palatable.
For my needs, I can’t think of anything my Linux desktop does that my Mac cannot.
Why is it so hard, to the point of being mystifying, to understand that others have a different opinion?
You’re quite condescending and smug. Maybe you should try to understand why other people might have different priorities than you instead of being judgmental, seeking to understand is generally a good skill.
Who else cares more about the user experience and provides a viable alternative? Google goes out of its way to buy and kill products, and even their core product is so bad that I'm often finding myself making fun of how absolutely awful their search results are.[1].
Could I make Android work for me? With time and effort, probably. I'm very short on both of those and now it's not just my personal method of interaction - it's my entire family. So I'm not going to.
Just working seamlessly and caring about UX are pretty gigantic. It's not that Apple is that great, it's that all of the alternatives -- like searches on the Amazon catalog these days -- result in a surfeit of garbage.
[1] The most recent one I have was my search with the following three terms, no quotes in this order: ssri neuron mechanism. The first hit was a link to a Google Books book titled "Textbook of Rare Sexual Medical Conditions". I got that result last week. I just searched again and was unable to find that result anywhere on the first page today. What happened then that isn't happening now? I couldn't tell you but my email is the only thing I rely on Google for anymore and I'm very seriously considering migrating away from it in 2023 just because I don't trust Google with that most important part of my digital identity any longer.
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?
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.
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.
- 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.
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.