I am surprised at people trying to rationale Apples wrongdoing by pointing at Google and bringing some crazy examples.
There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, but rather are willing to go huge lengths to please music industry.
Only because you eating in the restaurant it doesn't mean waiter can run to your house and smash all of your food in the fridge reasoning "from now on you are covered".
Remember the U2 fiasco, when Apple decided to break into your computer and push their new album through iTunes? It seems like whenever Apple decides to take control of your files, shit happens.
Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.
I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.
While the U2 fiasco was a bad move, I don't think that "break into your computer" is a fair characterization of what they did. They added it to your available downloads and, depending on your sync settings, it was downloaded to devices.
I'm not a huge fan of having my media managed by the companies I buy hardware from, but when I found a user's manual document on my Kindle I didn't consider it 'getting hacked' by them.
A more appropriate analogy than a user guide would be finding Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter on your kindle one day, because Amazon did a deal and decided you should have it, or perhaps having your copy of 1984 erased because of copyright violations. ++ungood.
A user manual is expected on a new device, having media on your device added and deleted by a corporation on their whim is not so pleasant, mostly because it makes their view of your true relation to them apparent.
Fair enough. "break into your computer" does sound like getting hacked by them, which wasn't technically true, at least from what I know. Thanks for pointing that out.
Apple fundamentally does not understand software. A shame, as the software, really, was their original special sauce with the Mac 128k and beyond.
Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.
I worked with a Google engineer once and he offered me advice as I was considering buying a new phone, namely the HTC One: "Phone manufacturers know how to make hardware. Google knows how to make software. When you marry the two with both knowing their place in the world, things work out. When one tries to make what the other does, you get crappy stuff on top of your system. Stick to vanilla Android, man."
Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.
Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).
Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)
At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.
El Crapitan has so many problems it's ridiculous. They broke not only all kinds of Open Source software with their overly paranoid system protection, but also a bunch of hardware by messing up the USB drivers. There are now tons of musical instruments, Arduinos, and other USB devices that don't work with El Crapitan. Apple's response was: ... there was no response.
Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.
My HTC One has gotten dreadfully slower since release from Android releases. I don't think it's exclusive to iPhones - in fact I think android phones are more prone to it.
I guess I'm also lucky to have the latest 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5 running smoothly. Yes, it did get a bit slower after some updates, enough for me to notice it, but considering it shipped with 4.4, I'm still pretty happy with it.
But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.
If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”
Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?
It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.
I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.
Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?
Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.
> I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because they didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design.
I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.
I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.
A/B testing data is only as good as the samples provided. They may have done wonderful A/B testing, but that the alternative designs were just so bad that the current design version made it through ;)
If they did, they'd quit shortly after learning that, if they wanted to move around inside Apple, like to a different group, they have to interview and be evaluated just like an outsider. Apple is so secretive, people cannot even change groups.
One of the worst widely distributed and used pieces of software. There are many, many, crappies, buggier, pieces of software out there; it's just that nobody has to use them.
And it wants you to be a consumer badly.
The case described here, is of a producer/artist loosing unique works due to a consumer software rationale, that assumes that all in the reach of the software is not yours and thereby at whims of the license givers/maintainers.
Also Apple only begrudgingly supports Enterprise customers with their iDevices. It seems like it should be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to make a dent with their mobile platform but they decided to focus on the consumer market as well.
Defense in depth is a good thing as well. In my case, the first line of defense would be ZFS snapshots on my homebuilt NAS. If malware scrozzles my NAS, a rollback to the last snapshot can be a quick way to fix it.
Other systems get backed up to the NAS, and the NAS drives are periodically backed up onto a second ZFS pool that is normally kept physically offline.
I've survived for 48 years eating too much steak, drinking too much beer, and exercising too little. In your opinion, does this give us useful information that tells us that I should keep doing these things, because obviously, I will live forever?
Some people in this post are assuming that this is something iTunes does to everyone intentionally. Other people are saying this is not something iTunes has ever done to them. I'm not sure it's worth debating whether this practice is ethical or not unless we know whether iTunes will actually delete your MP3s under normal circumstances. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that iTunes is too hard to use.
But other people have posted here and said they enabled Apple Music and their music was not deleted, so clearly this doesn't happen under all circumstances, and this wouldn't be the first time a technical support representative was wrong. This is a pretty extraordinary claim and I'm not really willing to believe everyone loses all their local music when they turn on Apple Music without more data to confirm.
Another point of data in favor of "they deleted my music" here. And when they did it, they were only matching on the file metadata, so the album they removed was truly lost, since I got some weird techno album in its place.
Thankfully, it's one I can recover from a CD, when I find it again.
All ethics of the deletion aside, matching on metadata is a weird, crappy approach (and that itself is pretty consistent with my other experiences with iTunes).
It shouldn't be hard to imagine that metadata will have collisions, and include something like a hash of the actual data.
I don't know if it's intentional filling in for songs they couldn't license or metadata matching gone wrong, but occasionally on Spotify a song on an old album is replaced with an inferior remix from a newer album.
Intentionally or not, history (what songs actually were on an album) gets edited unless you manage music files yourself.
(The Apple behavior described in the article is way worse than what Spotify does, of course.)
ITunes will rename albums and artists and songs and give the wrong album or cover or strip the album cover because they don't sell it, Apple doesn't care about your collection, they want to curate it their way for their benefit.
Thanks for the confirmation. I've been weighing my options between Apple Music and Spotify Premium and that makes up my mind. iTunes is enough of a pain in the ass without worrying about whether it'll delete my music collection.
The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.
Go try Google Music. You get non-destructive music sync (10,000 songs or something?) and a massive library. Plus, the curated stations are all the old Songza content that was pretty awesome. $10/mo
And you get Youtube without ads for the same price.
Their curated playlists are seriously top-notch. I've found so many new bands through the Blogged 50 and Gorilla vs. Bear playlists.
Plus, Google Play Music's UI blows the others out of the water. My favorite part is the "Play Next" and "Add to Queue" choices for unobtrusively adding songs to what's currently playing. Something that iTunes actually used to have, but then they removed it for no reason.
Sort of ironically, the older iTunes Match system did audio fingerprinting, but Apple Music does not. I have gotten some very weird new metadata occasionally since the switch.
For the record, I've never lost any music, and I'm not entirely sure how that's possible short of a catastrophic iTunes bug[1] -- I'm not disputing anyone's stories, but even "post-Cloud" I've never seen iTunes delete files without me actually clicking on delete somewhere. Despite what the blogger was told by the rep, I'm pretty sure that's not how Apple Music is supposed to work. You enable it on a "primary" Mac, it matches tracks to the iTunes Store library, and then it uploads tracks that aren't in that library to iCloud. The files in your original library will be left alone unless you delete the original files.
[1]: Not that "catastrophic iTunes bug" sounds unlikely. I've heard friend-of-a-friend stories about deletion bugs in the recent past.
Even if they do audio fingerprinting the match is simplistic. I have a large collection of different versions of songs, and Shazam identifies them all as the studio version.
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
>When iTunes Match adds these songs to your iCloud Music Library, iTunes Match doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside on iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
I've never seen that happen. iTunes loads the data/metadata about the songs and attempts to match them to their database of songs. Then if you were to sign in on a different computer with iTunes Match enabled, it would download the songs that it matched from the original computer as a 256kb AAC.
This is part of a push from Apple to move users' data from devices to the cloud. They're doing the same thing with photos (optimised storage deletes local copies), videos, and documents on iCloud.
The advantage for users is that your data is available everywhere you have an apple device and Internet. The disadvantage is a corporation manages and controls increasing amounts if your life, private and public, and leaving them for another becomes unthinkable, and of course the corporation chooses what information it is appropriate for you to rent access to.
It literally only does this if you very explicitly tell it to. They're mad because their computer did exactly what they told it to. This is a simple case of user error, followed by a user lashing out over their own mistakes.
It's like being mad at Linux for letting you 'rm -rf ~/Music' it simply did exactly what you told it to.
I use iTunes Match across a myriad of devices and it is a wonderful service. It's sad to see a frustrated end user spreading such FUD.
I'm not sure if that's the link you intended to post but I see nothing in that comment rationalizing Apple's actions, in fact it seems to share the opinion of the original article.
Yeah, buro9's comment is the only one that seems to fit, but I don't read the comment as supportive of Apple at all, quite the contrary, it reads to me damning of Google.
This is almost certainly not apple acting alone. There will have been lengthy contract negotiations (and probably a lot of pressure from the major labels). The auto-overwriting metadata issue is probably apple alone though, they've long been very exacting about the metadata of music in itunes. They already throw their weight around in the supply chain by demanding that metadata is correct or they won't accept music, which they can do because they control so much of the market. I'm not surprised they're expanding that to user's devices (presumably for matching purposes for igenius). The industry sucks, so many middlemen with so much power :(
God forbid there is a bug in software! This article is crap, maybe he ran into an issue but I've helped over a dozen people get setup on Apple Music and not once has there been file deletion. I am very skeptical that theoretical phone rep said any of these things either. Obviously there is a bug that needs fixing, but this is definitely not a platform wide attempt to delete anyone's data.
A few years ago, after a couple of weeks of ripping my CD collection to FLAC, I decided to import it into iTunes.
What happened next was an epic fail exactly like the article describes - iTunes trashed my collection, "organised" the files in it in ways that were buggy and just plain wrong, and turned two weeks of part time effort into completely wasted time.
This was before iCloud, and fortunately I keep my own music on a separate disk, so it didn't try to trash that too.
In a sense I was lucky. Two wasted weeks is a learning experience. Two years would have been heartbreaking.
Two decades? I. Can't. Even.
Since then I haven't allowed iTunes anywhere near my FLAC collection. I've also warned anyone with a music collection to never, ever to allow iTunes anywhere near it.
My first attempt at syncing an old iPod to a new machine saw a similar outcome. Aside from the slow and unsuccessful "auto-transfer" attempt between the devices, iTunes promptly decided to rearrange and relabel everything I had.
For a live music fan, that's a disaster. Many thousands of live performances pulled out of their identifying folders because they had similar metadata. A significant number of labelled, sorted tracks pushed to "unknown artist". Random, inaccurate assignments of album covers.
Suffice to say, it was easier to uninstall iTunes and restore from a hard backup. One of the perks of smartphones is that I can get music onto my device without even considering iTunes, and I can't imagine giving it another shot.
There used to be an alternative iPhone management tool created by some of the same developers who were jailbreaking iOS. Certain features only worked with jailbroken phones - but you could still manage your music library even on unmodified devices.
It's been a few years and I'm not sure if its still in development. I believe it was called iFunbox? On mobile now and don't have the opportunity to search for more info - I will edit this later.
I have an iPhone and don't use the standard Music app. I use Plex or CloudBeats to access and store music/audiobooks locally on my device. All of this music is stored on my Windows machine that acts as a server. It is accessed via Plex or Dropbox. I have no trouble accessing the files on my MacBook either. However, all of the music/audio is in a folder hierarchy and backed up. I don't touch iTunes.
I stopped using anything from the i* suite after my first Mac when I learned that it messed up my folder structure. All my carefully organised music and photos were imported into an opaque database that gave me no visibility into how things were stored.
Did something change? Because the iTunes internal organization for music at least is quite easy to understand.
From the library folder:
Music/Artist/Album/Track# Title.ext
If your files aren't tagged correctly (which is distressingly common), then the auto organization will make a pig's breakfast of your library.
A common example: "Artist" and "Album Artist" are two different ID3 fields - if you have an album with an Album Artist but a blank Artist, iTunes will catalog it as "Unknown Artist" when the consolidation happens.
This is slightly annoying to fix, but the mass tag editor in iTunes works well.
A complaint I've heard before is that this works fine for most modern music, but the Artist/Album/Track layout doesn't apply to a lot of classical collections.
In which case you can just turn off the folder organization, but there's not an easy way to undo it once iTunes has gone and dicked it up.
"A complaint I've heard before is that this works fine for most modern music, but the Artist/Album/Track layout doesn't apply to a lot of classical collections."
More importantly, and more generally: what if my music organization format predates OSX/iOS/iTunes and I am not interested in altering it for todays fad ?
This is not apple-specific, either - many devices and services (audi MMI, Sonos, etc.) assume certain naming and organizational practices - and work very awkwardly with any other layout.
Granted, my Sonos system has never deleted anything or reorganized directories ... but my music is mounted read-only just in case.
"Today's fad" has been the iTunes standard since the application existed.
Also, take your pick. If the files aren't organized to a consistent standard, that means a database has to be stored somewhere with that info so the app can do its job. In iTunes' case, that's an XML file.
"Also, take your pick. If the files aren't organized to a consistent standard"
Actually, that's not true - one alternative to an organizational structure or a database is to actually name the files verbosely, which is what I decided on in 1996 when I ripped my first CD:
Artist Name - Album Name - ## - Track Name - time.wav
For instance:
Ferry, Bryan - Taxi - 03 - Answer Me - 2m46s.wav
This file can now be dropped into place anywhere without losing information, requires no DB and gives you full "metadata" for wav files that don't actually contain metadata.
You just described the reason for the existence of ID3. But, if you insist on using files that don't have a metadata standard, the only way to organize them is in the database of the library application. Which generally won't be portable to other applications.
Your proposal to store track info in with verbose naming isn't very robust and doesn't solve even the most basic problems that a simple metadata scheme does.
For one, even in your specific limited case of Bryan Ferry's album _Taxi_ there are 5 different versions of the album from 5 different countries[0].
Furthermore, your verbose naming proposal is not only unequipped to handle something as basic as alternate versions and international releases, it has no affordances for providing basic information such as year of release, publisher, and composer, let alone information about bitrates and compression schemes.
Even were we to restrict our attention to just the metadata your scheme does encode, your proposal would fail when cataloging an entry where the band/album/track name contains a hyphen surrounding by whitespace. There are also some albums which have more than 99 tracks (archival records, for example, which are distributed in multi-CD collections).
My response may seem a bit like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer but, having worked in a library and taken classes in information science, it's crucial to illustrate why hastily-conceived proposals to replace metadata with file naming conventions should never be taken seriously. In fact, I believe they should only be taken jokingly!
Metadata schemes are so important to information and library science that, in my opinion, any proposal to replace metadata schemes with "verbose naming" should be shown to be untenable unless the goal is to index fewer than 100 files in a restricted-access repository (and maybe even then).
From the standpoint of a librarian or digital archivist, you may as well have proposed storing the binary data in the file name, too, essentially eliminating the file name which itself is a piece of metadata.
> Your proposal to store track info in with verbose naming isn't very robust and doesn't solve even the most basic problems that a simple metadata scheme does.
But that's how anyone who is serious about collecting digital music has been ordering it since ages. Sure, I never considered putting track length in the filename as :) (but I can see why), and if I can help it I have them tagged correctly too. But the file/folder structure is how I keep it organised.
There may be better ways to go about this, but it at least needs to be an actual improvement. iTunes is not.
Currently I'm experimenting with a command line tool called 'beets', which from reading its docs, definitely has a philosophy that aligns with mine. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out how to tell it where to get the metadata from, it defaults to MusicBrainz which seems to have quite a few inaccuracies in their data (spelling of "Kung-Fu", hyphenated or with spaces I don't care really but if you use both spellings on the same album, one of them is wrong). It's got plugins for discogs and figure-out-from-pathname so that's good, but then it still uses MusicBrainz too. All in all it's a bit fiddly, but I can't really imagine a way to do it better, if you want have accuracy, keep control, some assistance with automatic tagging, but without messing up weird edge-cases like the classical albums and bootleg recordings mentioned above (for which 'beets' tries real hard to do the right thing, that being what you decide it to be).
There is an option now to not let iTunes organize files. This way, you can still add songs to iTunes' database but iTunes will reference the original media files in their original location.
Yeah, the "Keep my iTunes Folder Organized" option (under "Advanced") is not your friend. It frustrates me that it is on by default. I guess that's fine for casual users, but if you care at all about your music, turn it off.
Really? Just because you have helped over a dozen people it means that this issue doesn't exist? Did you bother to check every local file on the person's drive that you were helping? If you didn't know about the potential issue how would you know to check. The author isn't saying its intentional hs's saying this is a side-effect of this model. Incidentally this is not the first type questionable practice from Apple Music. See this:
The article you linked to appears to describe something totally different. It says that if you delete your music from your computer, then re-downloading the music through Apple Music will give you DRMed files. But it also says:
> If you haven’t deleted your own copies of your music, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you download onto other devices from Apple Music, those devices will get the DRM versions, but you’ll still have your DRM-free originals.
> Either way, if you’ve used iTunes Match as a convenient way to free up space on your Mac by deleting your own copy of any of your music, don’t cancel your subscription in favor of Apple Music if you want to keep that music DRM free.
Given the reference to freeing up space, it seems like he is talking about the original music files within iTunes and not a backup.
There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, but rather are willing to go huge lengths to please music industry.
Only because you eating in the restaurant it doesn't mean waiter can run to your house and smash all of your food in the fridge reasoning "from now on you are covered".