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'Apple Stole My Music. No, Seriously' (vellumatlanta.com)
Vellum's James has written about his ordeal with Apple Music which many people can relate to. Apple Music, the Cupertino-based giant's online music streaming service, deleted 122GB of music files that James had stored on his computer. He writes: What Amber (supposed Apple Support representative) explained was exactly what I'd feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users' computers. When I signed up for Apple Music, iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple's database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn't recognize -- which came up often, since I'm a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself -- it would then download it to Apple's database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted. This isn't the first time Apple Music has deleted a user's locally stored music files. Long-time Apple watcher Jim Dalrymple canceled his subscription last year and called Apple Music a "nightmare" after the service allegedly deleted over 4,700 of his previously bought songs. At the time, he wrote: At some point, enough is enough. That time has come for me -- Apple Music is just too much of a hassle to be bothered with. Nobody I've spoken at Apple or outside the company has any idea how to fix it, so the chances of a positive outcome seem slim to none.Incidentally, Apple Music is rumoured for a reboot at the company's developer conference in June. It's not clear if fixing the aforementioned glitch is among Apple's imminent agenda.
Seriously. This is no different from some Russian malware encrypting your disk for a ransom.
Its a very valid story, for a new generation.
Happened to my kids, and their music. "Hey let's sign up for this new Apple thing for a free 3 months - what's to lose?".
Then, all there previous music disappears... Blame siblings for doing something wrong. Yell and berate dad (me), well just because.
Backups? What backups? Everything's in the Cloud dad. They've never purchased a song on any physical media. Probably recognize the term "MP3", but it's equating "mp3" as a file, that can be copied and actually manipulated? That's grandpa talk.
It's a good lesson.
Of course he'll solve his problem another way - getting his "backups" from another source... Teenagers have no dearth of places to grab, *ahem* "free" music. They've no problem paying for it, if it's convenient, and reasonably priced. Now that that's all broken...
I'm not disputing that this happened to this guy, but deleting local files is not the standard behavior. I am also an indie musician with dozens to hundreds of my own compositions in my iTunes library. I signed up for Apple Music and none of my local files were touched at all. Sounds like he got hit by an unfortunate bug. Sucks that it happened, for sure. Hopefully anyone who signs up for a streaming service in the future will think to make a backup first, but it stinks that you have to do that.
no longer working for cnet
isn't in a country with cyrillic or chinese writing systems, but in SV.
uhm, silicon valley is now dominated by chinese and indians. you walk down the hallways of bay area tech companies and you can go a whole day without hearing any english. not kidding; wish I was.
I'm also seeing lots of bay area job offerings that INSIST you speak chinese in order to get the job. no, its not just travel related jobs; desk jobs for software people are now 'asking' that you speak chinese.
hint hint, nudge nudge. but there's no h1b problem here. no sir!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It's an interesting insight into Apple's view of the world. All music must be either ripped (and thus backed up) or bought from iTunes. Therefore, deleting it isn't an issue, you can now stream it and iTunes will re-download it if you have an iPod. There are no other use cases, all other workflows are incorrect. iTunes manages all your audio files, you shouldn't even be looking at them. You click play in iTunes, it plays (subject to internet connection, fees may apply), it works perfectly and in the most intuitive and revolutionary manner possible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You would know if you had read the articles that Apple's terms of use explicitly state that they are going to delete your local files. It was quoted in the article. This was an intended feature along with the inability to recover you music after cancelling the service. This is no bug. It is blatant theft of digital property.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
accept that this is a feature you can turn on or off to save disk space... which defaults to on.. the whole article is much to do about nothing, user should learn to configure his stuff before setting a torch to his local content
It may be one of the few cases of actual theft since the result is that Apple gains a copy and he lost one.