How Apple Music Can Disrupt Users' iTunes Libraries

An anonymous reader writes: Early adopters of Apple Music are warning others they could get more than they bargained for if they intend to download tracks for offline listening. Since Apple Music is primarily a streaming service, this functionality necessitates turning on iCloud Music for syncing purposes. The way Apple syncs files is to scan your library for known music files, and if it finds one, the service gives your account access to Apple's canonical copy. Unfortunately, this wipes out any custom edits you made to the file's metadata. For those who have put a lot of time into customizing their library, this can do a lot of damage to their organizational system. Apple's efforts to simplify and streamline the process have once again left advanced users with a difficult decision to make.

Comments

Apple = Buggy

[countach]

I'm not even using Apple Music and the update wiped out all the music on my iPhone. This was a long standing bug with IOS when the iPhone 6 came out, and I thought they'd finally nixed it a few months ago, but no now it's back. Meanwhile my iMac is at Apple for 10 days because of their failed 3TB iMac hardware, Argh, so I can't even synch it back on. Apple's quality has really dropped the last couple of years.

You're all idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

So many stupid comments about how Apple users cannot be advanced users, including troll moderators that support such idiocy.

Guess what, idiots? They're advanced users, not hackers/coders/programmers. Stop being elitist jerks and accept that there's people less knowledgeable than yourselves.

Looking to move off of iTunes

[QuietLagoon]

For this reason and others.

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I want to be the one in control of my music library. I do not want Apple, acting as a proxy for the media industry, taking inventory of the songs I have and changing the metadata for those songs.

iOS is toys, OS X is Unix. Learn the difference

[raymorris]

You're thinking of the iPhone and iPad, toys for people who don't care about control over their property, but perhaps do care about build quality, vs. Macs, which are powerful Unix computers.

I've been a developer for 17 years. My name is in the kernel changelog. I've designed and built custom servers with power tools. I use Mac Pros for work.

iTunes never cared about directories so why tags

[fluffernutter]

Even more important than the music tags in my mind is the directory structure. I have many media devices that rely on // directory structure to have the music organized properly. I found it very distasteful that iTunes seems to put all the music in a big glob on the disk and expects you to use their UI to access it. So I'm not sure why this is news that they don't care about the tags, because they never cared about the structure on disk.