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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.
Nowadays I just follow Spotify's, or Napter's, or Deezer's or Apple's. They do all the work for me already. For $9/month that's a lot of time that I save.
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.
That makes kernel developers who use a Macbook as development environment what?
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.
If you use Apple products you are not an advanced user. It is as easy as that.
Wow, I guess that means that more than half of all advanced computer users that I encounter in my day to day life must have machined their own custom laptops to look just like Macbooks!
No, but seriously, many advance users do not care to have advanced control over their music library.
Many advanced users unwittingly had Itunes destroy their music organization about a decade ago when they switched from Winamp to Itunes. They swore about it for a while, then accepted that Apple controls their music folder now and that having advanced control over your music organization is nice, but not essential. If we turn off our RDF deflectors temporarily we might even think of it as a feature. Remember what a time sink music file organization used to be.
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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.
Think different - as long as it is exactly as we tell you to.
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.
You're talking about me.
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.
It seems GP might think that Apple only makes iPhones. Mac Pros, which run certified Unix (OS X) are possibly the _best_ option for serious professionals. There are also a couple other companies making one or two choices in well-built hardware you can install enterprise Linux on, of course.
This isn't a feature. There are good reasons to want to customize your tags.
- The "official" ones are often wrong or inconsistent. It is especially bad for compilations and collaborations.
- You want custom fields.
- You want to change language (e.g. transliterate names into Japanese)
Tagging hasn't been a time sync for over a decade. When you rip the tags are grabbed off the net, the same as what iTunes does for you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And now we know why Linux will never be more then a blip on the desktop radar. That superiority complex drives everyone away. Enjoy your crappy buggy software. The OS is just there so we can run the applications, and all your applications are amateurish and shitty.
You're a great example of the parasites every great endeavour attracts.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If you're only claim to being an advanced user is your ability to customize your system, then you aren't an advanced user. You're just a person who wastes their time customizing their software, and who will waste even more time trying to figure out how to use the default configuration on other people's systems.
People who actually know how to use their software, even if it is to better organize their music collection, have a better claim to being an advanced user. Personally, I'd set the bar a fair bit higher than that. On the other hand, at least they are actually using their knowledge to do something productive.
There is an option in iTunes to leave the song files in their original location. I keep all my songs organized my way on a NAS and just point iTunes to it. The songs are not copied or moved to my Mac.
Apple destroys user data
oops
No, Apple doesn't restore some user data. You don't get Apple's version of the file unless you delete your copy or never had it on a particular device in the first place.
Apple looks for matches in your library with Apple's library. If it finds a match it makes note of it. If it does not find a match it uploads your copy of the file to Apple's servers. When you restore files you get Apple's copy for matches and your copy for non-matches.
The issue is that Apple only analyzes the music to determine a match. It does not consider the meta data. So the same music with different metadata is a match according to Apple so your edited copy is not saved on Apple's servers. This makes sense given that there is no standard metadata for ripped songs. When ripping a CD one often finds multiple incarnations of metadata to apply.
You're metadata-editing wrong.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If it doesn't work as expected, or a change in feature set results in data loss or poor performance, it's because you're doing it wrong... much like when the iPhone 4 introduced the faulty easy-to-short antenna design when holding the phone the way anyone holds ANY cellphone, Jobs excuse was "you're holding it wrong." Therefore in this case, extending Apple reasoning to the current use case, if you're editing metadata, you're doing it wrong.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
iTunes will leave the songs where they are OR will organize them into artist/album/song.ext for you if you choose. Those are two little checkboxes in the preferences, pretty sure the default is to move them into your iTunes library structure and organize them.
You have to have a seriously messed up configuration before it just dumps them into the same directory. I have experienced what you're referring to but I also do a bunch of weird crap with an AFP on a FBSD box using a ZFS store for it all, so I have a seriously messed up configuration :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Google Music, in my experience, has the exact same problem Apple Music does. It ignores your manually input album art and other metadata, and decides to substitute what it thinks your tracks should have attached to them instead.
The only good thing Google does that (so far), Apple doesn't is gives you a button to tell it the data is wrong for a given track so you can override it. (Still, that's a LOT of pointless extra work to put back what was there in the first place.) Well, that, and the fact they're not going to trash your "master library" of music since they don't act as the application all of your music is stored in. They just mess up the copies of the data they put up in the cloud for you to stream back down from your devices.
I *wish* these cloud music services would simply ASK FIRST if you'd like to replace all of your existing metadata, or if you'd rather they only add metadata to your tracks that don't yet contain any at all.
Since Apple Music is primarily a streaming service, this functionality necessitates turning on iCloud Music for syncing purposes.
Not at all. iCloud Music stores your own music in the cloud (and has the "features" described). Apple Music is a streaming service. The two are only related because both are managed through the Music app. Otherwise there is no link and no need to enable one to use the other.
> Who cares whether a Unix is certified? Linux is the big daddy of the server rhythm these days
Linux has a huge installed base, absolutely. Most of my work throughout my career has been on Linux. We also know that GNU stands for Gnu's Not Unix. Linux is popular, and it's explicitly Not Unix. There is no guarantee your Unix software or integrations will continue to work on any particular version of any particular Linux distribution, as they try out a third init system in as many years.
So who cares about certified Unix? Two groups of people. People who have enterprise production systems running Unix software that MATTERS care. If you're running a payroll system for 10,000 employees and a glitch means missing a pay day, or perhaps ending up with the decimal point in the wrong place on everyone's pay check, certification of the whole stack is good. You can, at a cost, show that the software uses only official Unix apis, and will therefore run on any certified Unix. Similarly , regulators and such like certified components for similar reasons.
The second group is represented by alot of the systemd comments. Certified Unix means you have certain guarantees about how things (still) behave. You won't have important stuff changed out from under you, if you interface with the system as a Unix system, not as a Brand X version y.z system. Apple CAN'T fuck certain things up in the next version, systemd style, without losing their certification. That can be attractive to a lot of people.