Well, yes and a bit no as well here. Of course nothing to debate in the backup side. OTOH Apple is strongly suggesting to trust their iCloud and related services as a seamless replacement for local storage.
Yes, when people say things like 'Apple strongly suggest' that usually means is 'this is what I've decided Apple means inside my own head'.
What Apple says is that if you put things on iCloud then it will show up on all your devices. What Apple also says is that if you delete an item it will be removed from all your devices.
Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but even I wasnt surprised to find that deleting something from iCloud also deleted it from every device connected to iCloud. That's kind of how the Cloud works. iCloud is not a backup tape drive, it's a syncing engine.
And even if Apple did say it was a replacement for local storage then I don't see the problem: local storage still needs to be backed up.
I think it is boiling down to two things:
1. Let's take Photos in the Cloud. The idea is that I can release a lot of local storage by putting all into the cloud, right? However, as it is not a backup, I still need to somehow have all photos/videos downloaded to e.g. my Mac, then make a backup, or something analog through iOS. This is exactly opposed to the marketed idea of "don't worry, just upload all and you'll be save and never have to worry about local storage" - implying backups in a way.
2. When I trust Apple with my music in the exact way the service is specified, I expect to not have stuff erased seemingly at random, or being replaced by different versions. If it is a bug or a feature, I do not really care form a user perspective. And if they put a bold, red warning up saying: Achtung! you might loose some songs, or find your rare bootleg being replaced by the 3:30 radio version without notice!" then again this defeats the purpose of the service.
For exactly these reasons do still keep local backups of my media, hence rendering the cloud idea less convenient than what marketing suggests.
Regarding your first sentence: Blame me for not posting the links, but I have seen more than once in the Apple discussion boards people contacting Apple Support regarding lost music through Apple Music / Music in the Cloud and unanimously receiving the answer "Apple strongly suggests to backup all your files regularly".
Earlier this month media outlets latched onto a blog post from freelance composer James Pinkstone, who claimed iTunes deleted some 122GB of music from his laptop, including original works. After speaking with Apple support representatives, Pinkstone came to the conclusion that the mishap had roots in the way Apple Music and iTunes handles music files.
Specifically, Pinkstone believes Apple Music scanned his iTunes library, matched those tracks with streaming copies -- or uploaded originals -- then automatically removed the local files.
And people wonder why I’m skeptical of the “cloud-only” future that so many companies want to push.
Except that iTunes can't do that and doesn't do that.
The problem I had with local files is that, after you let Apple Music take over, when you switch it off, all local files (whether you own them or not) are unplayable if Apple Music found the same file in their streaming library previously.
So you need to make copies of all music you own before you sign onto Apple Music, and if you finish your subscription you need to delete everything and then re-import from your backup. But how would anyone know that? (And I'm not talking about backing up your data regularly). Who would anticipate Apple Music would replace the songs you bought with copies which will only play with a valid Apple Music subscription??
When I reported this to Apple last September, they said it's not a bug; it is supposed to work like that.
There is also another similar bug in iTunes and Apple Music; that of uploaded songs being replaced by totally unrelated songs. This is particularly troubling when it affects original works that are not available in the iTunes Store.
When I first read about this bug, I thought I would check my own iTunes music library. Sadly, I immediately found that I had been hit as well. Several unique Prince recordings, that had been uploaded when I joined Apple Music, were now pointing to entirely unrelated music tracks by bands I had never before heard of. At first, the original cover art of the songs remained. But after a few playings (of the bad tracks), even the cover art was lost and replaced by that of the "bad" song. Now, all I have left of those songs is the metadata (MP3 tags) — the rest is gone. Today, there seems to be no known way of retrieving the originals tracks from Apple Music or iTunes. (For examples reported on this bug, try google something like iTunes match play wrong song or "Apple Music" play wrong song.)
To me, it doesn't matter what anybody is recommending regarding backups etc. I merely state that there is a customer need (and quite possibly a business case) for a service that completely does away with the need for local copies. I think Apple should focus on that.
Sorry but Apple doesn't put out shit. If you can't appreciate the genius that is iTunes then maybe you'd be happier with Google's iTunes clone and on some other site.
Yes they do. iPhotos has always been a POS. iTunes used to be good until they ruined it by turning into a Swiss Army knife. The power cable for my MBPR is a POS. Image Capture used to be brilliant but now won't recognise my scanner, even though third party apps do.
I commented, long before Apple Music came along, that iTunes was doing this, randomly, to a small number of my music files. Reported it to Apple, too, but, as now it involves a pay service, now they are finally taking it seriously...
"As some have pointed out, however, iTunes' song matching mechanism does not remove local files without user authorization." Brilliant...yes, well, if it weren't receiving authorization, that's exactly why it'd be a problem, wouldn't it.
Apple was reborn with 4 product lines - iMacs, iBooks, PowerMacs and PowerBooks. Rock solid quality.
Now there are watches, iPads, MacBooks, MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, Mac Pros (no update in almost 3 years), Mac Minis, Spaceship campus, electric cars, iPhones, Apple TV, OS X, iTunes, Beats... Just look back to 1995 to see what's wrong with this picture.
Apple has grown immensely since then and is still well run. Their 4 product grid was great for the time and they needed to streamline to prepare to grow. You can't reasonably compare the company of 20 years ago to the powerhouse it is today.
I have had all the issues with iTunes people are describing here. It didn't start until whatever version of iTunes was released late last summer/early fall. All the Apple-advised methods of restoring my library failed. Among the issues: my huge ripped CD collection was replaced with inferior versions, replete with incorrect artwork, re-records instead of original (my) versions as well as erroneous titles (striking example: "Breathe" by Pink Floyd suddenly became "Breathe In The Air," which was the song lyric, not the title). Custom tags I'd added manually (or corrected) were deleted and replaced with Apple's overly simplistic, often incorrect, data. [Apple's iTunes music category designers have always been deplorably ignorant of the fact that there are more than a handful of major musical genres. Not all music produced outside the US is "Reggae." Art Garfunkel is not a "Country" singer. What exactly are the criteria to be a music "curator" for iTunes? Access to Gracenote?] Years of my manual entry and tweaking metadata and making playlists vanished with one iTunes update. Poof, gone. Thanks, iTunes!
It might be great if Apple is finally waking up to the fact that iTunes has been a hot mess for a long, long time. It doesn't handle large collections well, though it used to do OK. Maybe they'll fix the software before they have a class action to deal with. I'll never risk my collection to their ineptitude again. They can't say they didn't see this coming—sometimes "outlier" cases are wake-up calls.
I no longer use iTunes for my music player and library management and don't expect to ever again. It's become a revenue generator, not a serious piece of software for the music aficionado. It's a hugely problem-riddled software Hydra. I agree with someone's suggestion that Tim Cook needs to do some major head rolling on the iTunes dev team; it needs new blood and a major recalibration.
Especially as concerns his original music (which presumably wouldn't be matched), this is what I don't get: Any original music you create would most likely be in a directory separate from the iTunes directory. If you open that track, it does open in iTunes, but iTunes actually makes a copy of it automatically. That copy is in the iTunes directory. If you delete it from iTunes, iTunes asks you if you want to trash the original. If you say "no", you've still got two copies - the actual original and the iTunes copy even if it's not on the iTunes track list. If you trash the original, it only trashes the iTunes copy, not the original that you have stored in a different directory.
I do this all the time. I have original audio files that I need to edit. I copy them to the computer and then open them in iTunes and rename them. I then edit them in Garage Band or another app. That creates a totally separate file. I then delete the unedited iTunes copy. Both the original and the edited version are still on my computer. Only the iTunes version that I manually deleted is gone.
So based on all that, I find it very hard to believe that his original music somehow got deleted. Either this guy accidentally deleted his music files or he "lost" them on his computer.
Matching is a different issue (and I don't use that service) and obviously Apple should not be deleting any local file without clear warnings to the user (and probably not at all). One problem is that Apple's messaging has become quite poor in recent years. It used to be fantastic. Maybe instead of spending $1 billion on a taxicab service, Apple should improve QC, customer service and software design.
Especially as concerns his original music (which presumably wouldn't be matched), this is what I don't get: Any original music you create would most likely be in a directory separate from the iTunes directory. If you open that track, it does open in iTunes, but iTunes actually makes a copy of it automatically. That copy is in the iTunes directory. If you delete it from iTunes, iTunes asks you if you want to trash the original. If you say "no", you've still got two copies - the actual original and the iTunes copy even if it's not on the iTunes track list. If you trash the original, it only trashes the iTunes copy, not the original that you have stored in a different directory.
I do this all the time. I have original audio files that I need to edit. I copy them to the computer and then open them in iTunes and rename them. I then edit them in Garage Band or another app. That creates a totally separate file. I then delete the unedited iTunes copy. Both the original and the edited version are still on my computer. Only the iTunes version that I manually deleted is gone.
So based on all that, I find it very hard to believe that his original music somehow got deleted. Either this guy accidentally deleted his music files or he "lost" them on his computer.
...yet Apple confirms the problem that you don't believe can happen?
.I no longer use iTunes for my music player and library management and don't expect to ever again. It's become a revenue generator, not a serious piece of software for the music aficionado. It's a hugely problem-riddled software Hydra. I agree with someone's suggestion that Tim Cook needs to do some major head rolling on the iTunes dev team; it needs new blood and a major recalibration.
This does concern me. I have a major catalogue of music organized by iTunes (~200k songs). All of it is stored on a network server however, which is backed up daily. But I don't use Apple Music with it, nor iTunes Match. I had been seriously considering Match since they substantially increased the number of songs they matched in order to reduce the amount of server space the library takes up. However, I couldn't possibly take a chance with it in light of this.
iTunes really has gotten confusing to the point where I'm terrified before clicking anything, especially when I know it will result in file deletions, like "delete duplicates", a feature I used to really appreciate. Part of that is most Apple users have gotten used to the "it just works" mantra, and while that may be true, it's gotten a lot more complicated without much warning -- part of that is due to Apple trying to maintain that illusion of one-click simplicity. But as apps become increasingly more complicated and powerful, there's a lot more the customer needs to know -- some things for which it's often hard to get a simple answer.
Especially as concerns his original music (which presumably wouldn't be matched), this is what I don't get: Any original music you create would most likely be in a directory separate from the iTunes directory. If you open that track, it does open in iTunes, but iTunes actually makes a copy of it automatically. That copy is in the iTunes directory. If you delete it from iTunes, iTunes asks you if you want to trash the original. If you say "no", you've still got two copies - the actual original and the iTunes copy even if it's not on the iTunes track list. If you trash the original, it only trashes the iTunes copy, not the original that you have stored in a different directory.
I do this all the time. I have original audio files that I need to edit. I copy them to the computer and then open them in iTunes and rename them. I then edit them in Garage Band or another app. That creates a totally separate file. I then delete the unedited iTunes copy. Both the original and the edited version are still on my computer. Only the iTunes version that I manually deleted is gone.
So based on all that, I find it very hard to believe that his original music somehow got deleted. Either this guy accidentally deleted his music files or he "lost" them on his computer.
...yet Apple confirms the problem that you don't believe can happen?
The article states that Apple confirmed that it had received reports of the problem, not that the problem actually exists.
Especially as concerns his original music (which presumably wouldn't be matched), this is what I don't get: Any original music you create would most likely be in a directory separate from the iTunes directory. If you open that track, it does open in iTunes, but iTunes actually makes a copy of it automatically. That copy is in the iTunes directory. If you delete it from iTunes, iTunes asks you if you want to trash the original. If you say "no", you've still got two copies - the actual original and the iTunes copy even if it's not on the iTunes track list. If you trash the original, it only trashes the iTunes copy, not the original that you have stored in a different directory.
I do this all the time. I have original audio files that I need to edit. I copy them to the computer and then open them in iTunes and rename them. I then edit them in Garage Band or another app. That creates a totally separate file. I then delete the unedited iTunes copy. Both the original and the edited version are still on my computer. Only the iTunes version that I manually deleted is gone.
So based on all that, I find it very hard to believe that his original music somehow got deleted. Either this guy accidentally deleted his music files or he "lost" them on his computer.
...yet Apple confirms the problem that you don't believe can happen?
The article states that Apple confirmed that it had received reports of the problem, not that the problem actually exists.
So Apple is going to roll out a fix next week for a problem that may or may not exist and the fix may or may not work? What an odd story then.
The article states that Apple confirmed that it had received reports of the problem, not that the problem actually exists.
So Apple is going to roll out a fix next week for a problem that may or may not exist and the fix may or may not work? What an odd story then.
The story was that Apple had confirmed having received reports, and is investigating. Not that Apple is rolling out a fix. They appear to be making some changes to make it harder inadvertently to cause the reported problem, which still does not confirm that iTunes is the problem. Neither does it rule that out though. Seems like an entirely appropriate story.
The story was that Apple had confirmed having received reports, and is investigating. Not that Apple is rolling out a fix. They appear to be making some changes to make it harder inadvertently to cause the reported problem, which still does not confirm that iTunes is the problem. Neither does it rule that out though. Seems like an entirely appropriate story.
You’d be a valuable addition to the boys in DC with that sort of banter.
But seriously, you’re dead on about what’s happening here.
Comments
1. Let's take Photos in the Cloud. The idea is that I can release a lot of local storage by putting all into the cloud, right? However, as it is not a backup, I still need to somehow have all photos/videos downloaded to e.g. my Mac, then make a backup, or something analog through iOS. This is exactly opposed to the marketed idea of "don't worry, just upload all and you'll be save and never have to worry about local storage" - implying backups in a way.
2. When I trust Apple with my music in the exact way the service is specified, I expect to not have stuff erased seemingly at random, or being replaced by different versions. If it is a bug or a feature, I do not really care form a user perspective. And if they put a bold, red warning up saying: Achtung! you might loose some songs, or find your rare bootleg being replaced by the 3:30 radio version without notice!" then again this defeats the purpose of the service.
For exactly these reasons do still keep local backups of my media, hence rendering the cloud idea less convenient than what marketing suggests.
Regarding your first sentence: Blame me for not posting the links, but I have seen more than once in the Apple discussion boards people contacting Apple Support regarding lost music through Apple Music / Music in the Cloud and unanimously receiving the answer "Apple strongly suggests to backup all your files regularly".
So you need to make copies of all music you own before you sign onto Apple Music, and if you finish your subscription you need to delete everything and then re-import from your backup. But how would anyone know that? (And I'm not talking about backing up your data regularly). Who would anticipate Apple Music would replace the songs you bought with copies which will only play with a valid Apple Music subscription??
When I reported this to Apple last September, they said it's not a bug; it is supposed to work like that.
When I first read about this bug, I thought I would check my own iTunes music library. Sadly, I immediately found that I had been hit as well. Several unique Prince recordings, that had been uploaded when I joined Apple Music, were now pointing to entirely unrelated music tracks by bands I had never before heard of. At first, the original cover art of the songs remained. But after a few playings (of the bad tracks), even the cover art was lost and replaced by that of the "bad" song. Now, all I have left of those songs is the metadata (MP3 tags) — the rest is gone. Today, there seems to be no known way of retrieving the originals tracks from Apple Music or iTunes.
(For examples reported on this bug, try google something like iTunes match play wrong song or "Apple Music" play wrong song.)
To me, it doesn't matter what anybody is recommending regarding backups etc. I merely state that there is a customer need (and quite possibly a business case) for a service that completely does away with the need for local copies. I think Apple should focus on that.
Reported it to Apple, too, but, as now it involves a pay service, now they are finally taking it seriously...
"As some have pointed out, however, iTunes' song matching mechanism does not remove local files without user authorization."
Brilliant...yes, well, if it weren't receiving authorization, that's exactly why it'd be a problem, wouldn't it.
I would also prefer a rose gold version.
It might be great if Apple is finally waking up to the fact that iTunes has been a hot mess for a long, long time. It doesn't handle large collections well, though it used to do OK. Maybe they'll fix the software before they have a class action to deal with. I'll never risk my collection to their ineptitude again. They can't say they didn't see this coming—sometimes "outlier" cases are wake-up calls.
I no longer use iTunes for my music player and library management and don't expect to ever again. It's become a revenue generator, not a serious piece of software for the music aficionado. It's a hugely problem-riddled software Hydra. I agree with someone's suggestion that Tim Cook needs to do some major head rolling on the iTunes dev team; it needs new blood and a major recalibration.
Any original music you create would most likely be in a directory separate from the iTunes directory. If you open that track, it does open in iTunes, but iTunes actually makes a copy of it automatically. That copy is in the iTunes directory. If you delete it from iTunes, iTunes asks you if you want to trash the original. If you say "no", you've still got two copies - the actual original and the iTunes copy even if it's not on the iTunes track list. If you trash the original, it only trashes the iTunes copy, not the original that you have stored in a different directory.
I do this all the time. I have original audio files that I need to edit. I copy them to the computer and then open them in iTunes and rename them. I then edit them in Garage Band or another app. That creates a totally separate file. I then delete the unedited iTunes copy. Both the original and the edited version are still on my computer. Only the iTunes version that I manually deleted is gone.
So based on all that, I find it very hard to believe that his original music somehow got deleted. Either this guy accidentally deleted his music files or he "lost" them on his computer.
Matching is a different issue (and I don't use that service) and obviously Apple should not be deleting any local file without clear warnings to the user (and probably not at all). One problem is that Apple's messaging has become quite poor in recent years. It used to be fantastic. Maybe instead of spending $1 billion on a taxicab service, Apple should improve QC, customer service and software design.
iTunes really has gotten confusing to the point where I'm terrified before clicking anything, especially when I know it will result in file deletions, like "delete duplicates", a feature I used to really appreciate. Part of that is most Apple users have gotten used to the "it just works" mantra, and while that may be true, it's gotten a lot more complicated without much warning -- part of that is due to Apple trying to maintain that illusion of one-click simplicity. But as apps become increasingly more complicated and powerful, there's a lot more the customer needs to know -- some things for which it's often hard to get a simple answer.
But seriously, you’re dead on about what’s happening here.