Apple Accused of Deleting Songs From iPods Without Users' Knowledge

SternisheFan writes with this excerpt from a story at AppleInsider that says "During in-court proceedings of Apple's iPod/iTunes antitrust lawsuit on Wednesday, plaintiffs' lawyers claimed Apple surreptitiously deleted songs not purchased through the iTunes Music Store from users' iPods. Attorney Patrick Coughlin, representing a class of individuals and businesses, said Apple intentionally wiped songs downloaded from competing services when users performed a sync with their iTunes library, reports The Wall Street Journal. As explained by the publication, users attempting to sync an iPod with an iTunes library containing music from a rival service, such as RealNetworks, would see an ambiguous error message without prompting them to perform a factory reset. After restoring the device, users would find all non-iTunes music had disappeared. ... It is unclear if iTunes or iPod encountered a legitimate problem, though Coughlin seems to be intimating Apple manufactured the error message as part of a supposed gambit to stop customers from using their iPod to play back music from stores other than iTunes. For its part, Apple said the system was a safety measure installed to protect users."

Comments

I knew it!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been making backups of my iTunes library for years because a long time ago I noticed that a large number of my songs had just gone missing. I never heard anything about it so thought it was just something I had done wrong.

Re:I knew it!

[boristdog]

My neice tried to load a thumb drive of MP3's from my music library into her Ipod a couple years back. Itunes instead reformatted the thumb drive. I thought she just screwed up, so I reloaded the thumb drive from my PC and we tried again. Itunes gave some message about "scanning media" and reformatted the thumb drive again.

I said then that I would probably never buy another Apple product. I still feel that way.

Re:I knew it!

[_xeno_]

Did iTunes do it or did the OS she was running do it?

Because as far as I know, unless the thumbdrive was an iPod itself, iTunes isn't capable of formatting it.

I'm guessing that you did something like create a thumbdrive using NTFS or whatever Mac OS X's file system is (HFS?) and then tried to use it on the opposite OS, which balked, and offered to reformat the drive into a filesystem it understood, which your niece just hit "OK" for.

Because iTunes may be a piece of shit (as far as I can tell, when iTunes Match released, Apple intentional broke syncing so it's no longer possible to sync music from iTunes), but I've never heard it do that. (I really should clarify that last one since you can get it to sync, but it easily breaks such that it will stop adding new music to an iPod/iPhone until you factory reset it and copy everything over again. At which point it will break again, so every time you get a new album outside of iTunes, you're in for another "factory reset and copy everything over again" loop. Which sounds like what this lawsuit is about, actually. Oh, and based on the last time this happened, it will then copy things over wrong so that metadata for songs refers to the wrong songs and some songs don't copy completely. I'm not arguing that iTunes isn't a completely broken piece of shit - it is - just that I've never seen it format thumbdrives.)

Sounds more like technical short-sightedness

[boondaburrah]

Having not read the article, this sounds more like the age-old behaviour of auto-synch.

If auto-synch is left on, of course it erases the entire library and replaces it with your iTunes library. If the non-iTunes purchased songs were loaded onto the iPod from another source, then of course they don't get re-added until you go and add them again from the other source. People have been aware of this at least since my friend and I would load songs onto eachother's 3rd gen ipod with dock connector back in highschool.

If you owned an iPod back in the early '00s

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

This shouldn't surprise you. ITunes, especially on Windows, was a nightmare to manage in parallel with any other music software. Odds are this was just a happy accident that AAPL just didn't do anything to fix.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[greenwow]

How is it unsubstantiated when it is true and has been proven? I rsync my iTunes drive to a remote server every night so I see email reports every day with a list of my music files that Apple deletes. The last delete happened Monday night:

deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/30 Rock 'n' Roll High School.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/29 Indian Giver.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/28 The KKK Took My Baby Away.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/27 I Just Wanna Have Something To Do.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/26 Chinese Rock.mp3
deleting iTunes/The Ramones/Mania/25 We Want The Airwaves.mp3 ...

And so on. Apple decided to delete every Ramones song from iTunes. That is why people hate them. Apple considers us subhuman and has no respect for us or our property.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny the way apple fans come in to defend them like this. "No no, what you are seeing is not possible, I know how this piece of proprietary software works!"

Im not saying who is right and who is wrong but to come in and say he cant be seeing what he is seeing based on your assumption of how something works is pretty ridiculous. Either work to better understand the situation or give some evidence to back your opinion especially when you are talking about the behavior of proprietary software.

Re:Not surprising at all.

[_xeno_]

I'll bet if you do constantly rsync your iTunes music directory you will see deleted files. Because if you have iTunes set to "manage music" it will rename files according to some scheme that seems to randomly change over time. (Or because you changed some metadata like the song's name.) So it's entirely possible that a whole bunch of files were "deleted" - because iTunes moved them to a different location, and as far as I know, rsync doesn't have the ability to track files being moved around. (And a bit of Googling suggests this is in fact the case and offers some workarounds.)