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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But his name is in the kernel changelog!
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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