Apple Says It Doesn't Know Why iTunes Users Are Losing Their Music Files (theverge.com)

Earlier this month, an Apple Music user James Pinkstone claimed that the online music streaming service deleted 122GB of music from his library for no apparent reason. Several Slashdot readers noted they had also faced a similar issue or knew someone who had. The iPhone maker has now acknowledged a bug in iTunes that is apparently causing the glitch, however, it adds that it doesn't really know why "some" users are facing this issue. The Verge reports: The company confirmed that "in an extremely small number of cases, users have reported that music files saved on their computer were removed without their permission." However, Apple was unable to reproduce the bug, indicating it doesn't really know what's going on here. The company adds: We're taking these reports seriously as we know how important music is to our customers and our teams are focused on identifying the cause. We have not been able to reproduce this issue, however, we're releasing an update to iTunes early next week which includes additional safeguards. If a user experiences this issue they should contact AppleCare.

Comments

Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

122GB of music? Does he even have the time to listen to it?? Jesus!

Re: Digital hoarders

[tysonedwards]

The person in question is a composer. Further a large amounts of their music is in wav versus compressed audio formats to serve as a master of their work.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Locke2005]

At one point I calculated it would take a full month of 24/7 listening to go through all of my 80GB of audio files, so yeah, we are talking several weeks worth of music here.

Re:Digital hoarders

[HornWumpus]

I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.

If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.

Re:Digital hoarders

[rakslice]

Based on the contents of my 24/96 FLAC folder it averages about 1.2GB/hour. Getting into the hundreds of GB is very doable.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point I calculated it would take a full month of 24/7 listening to go through all of my 80GB of audio files, so yeah, we are talking several weeks worth of music here.

And . . . . . ?

Unless you are planning to die in the next couple of months why wouldn't you want a large collection of music so you can have a wide variety of things to listen to?

Re:Digital hoarders

[ArmoredDragon]

There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's, which means that extra information is effectively just wasted space. 24 bits per sample is also a waste unless you work in a studio type environment and are working with a master copy that you intend on mixing, however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, why are you assuming human ear? If you ARE in a studio/editing type environment and want to edit stuff, you can find yourself suddenly running out of resolution/bitrate/color depth/sample rate/framerate/etc really really quickly. (mentioning similar arguments for graphics&video)

Re:Digital hoarders

[Noah Haders]

i don't care about your corpus callosum. maybe you should take better care of it?

Re:Digital hoarders

[TheGratefulNet]

tl;dr; its not about hearing, its about working with DAC chipsets, spdif and i2s inputs, and also brickwall filtering and post DAC i/v stages.

you are somewhat right, but you don't know everything...

Re:Digital hoarders

[ArmoredDragon]

That's why you'll want 24-bit for a studio master, because it gives you more room to adjust the individual samples and splice audio streams without hearing any kind of pop or static when it's re-sampled back to 16-bit. However going above 44khz still remains pointless, even for that purpose.

Here's Nyquist sampling theorem 101:

Strictly speaking, the theorem only applies to a class of mathematical functions having a Fourier transform that is zero outside of a finite region of frequencies. Intuitively we expect that when one reduces a continuous function to a discrete sequence and interpolates back to a continuous function, the fidelity of the result depends on the density (or sample rate) of the original samples. The sampling theorem introduces the concept of a sample rate that is sufficient for perfect fidelity for the class of functions that are bandlimited to a given bandwidth, such that no actual information is lost in the sampling process. It expresses the sufficient sample rate in terms of the bandwidth for the class of functions. The theorem also leads to a formula for perfectly reconstructing the original continuous-time function from the samples.

Even considering the editing example, if you were to splice two audio streams together, or even mix or transform them, the only reason you'd need more than 44khz is if for some reason you MUST go above 22khz because the intended listener can hear above that range, like say for example you wanted to create a lullaby for your dog, who can hear higher than that. In which case, you'd want to keep it at above 44khz even with the final (mass distributed) copy. However if humans are your intended listening target, there's never a reason to go above that, even for the purposes of mastering.

Or to put it another way, going above 44khz is every bit as silly as using wooden knobs and gold plated Ethernet cables in order to improve audio quality.

Re:Digital hoarders

[ArmoredDragon]

Ok, even when doing that, there's still no use for going above 44khz. 24-bit? Maybe, but only if you're doing some serious editing/mixing and want to eliminate sound artifacts (i.e. pops) from the final copy.

Re:Digital hoarders

[TheGratefulNet]

one more bit of info that you have obviously not thought about. maybe this will be of general interest to geeks.

some hardware can't accept higher samplerates. I have a crossover that 'stops' at 96k via its spdif-in. this is not uncommon.

some audio files are being released in 176k and 192k and even other stuff, dsd being one. I need to re-code such files if I am to send them digitally to my playback system.

having the CONSUMER files (not masters, but stuff you and I get) be as high res as possible, in both directions (time and amplitude) makes any resampling much better. I can downsample 176.4 to my 96k (or 44.1k) limit and have ok sounding files, done on the fly, for my mostly-digital playback system (I try to keep things as digital 'numbers' for as long as possible, just before the final D/A phases).

yes, most people don't need that. it does not really hurt, though. 16 bits did not convey enough dyn range to allow digital volume control to be useful (past, say, -10db down). with 24 bits, you -can- do digital volume control a lot further down before the s/n ruins things.

on the wire, 16bit vs 24 bit takes no extra space; as the extra 8 bits were already just header bits and crap that was not needed, anyway. going from 44.1 to 96 does take up more wire bandwidth but even simple opto toslink blocks and - mostly - handle 96k.

clock recover at the higher bitrates is also more reliable than resynthing clock from, say, 44.1 streams.

anyway, most of the reasons are tech and not about human hearing.

fwiw

Re:Digital hoarders

[TheGratefulNet]

read further, young padawan.

there's more to it.

lots of bad hype and bad info; and that confuses the issue. but once you remove the bad info, the good info does make sense.

i2s, spdif, receiver chips, dac chips, file processing and DSP on the files.

if I'm going to 'do things' to photo files, I do it at raw and full bit depth. well, audio is becoming like that and even vol control is a dsp math operation. you want high bit depth for doing math on files.

what I agree with you on is: at the final stage, you COULD pump out audio at 44.1k rate and even at 16bit res, once all the maths are done. but there's no harm in leaving the vol-controlled or eq-fixed audio in high bit rate. dacs and stuff like it that way and there's just no down side to leaving it in high res format.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Man On Pink Corner]

iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.

Re:Digital hoarders

[vel-ex-tech]

That's cute. When you're a DJ, 44khz isn't enough. 16 bits is fine. Do you know why? Should I bother telling you?

It has to do with that Fourier transform thing. When you have two different tracks that are in different keys and have different tempos, you need more samples than 44khz to do the pitch and tempo shifting to match the two tracks.

Keep feeling smug, though. Clearly I must be wrong.

Re:Digital hoarders

[dgatwood]

There's really no point in 96khz ever.

That's not really true. In a studio environment, when you're doing pitch correction, the pitch detection is more accurate at higher sampling rates because of the bin size of an FFT. I suspect that there are probably advantages for other operations like convolution, given how radically different the results often sound at different sampling rates.

Additionally, human hearing doesn't top out at 20 kHz. Adult hearing usually falls off way below that, and by the time it hits 20 kHz, most adults can't hear anything at all, but some people have the ability to hear loud sounds well past 22 kHz. There's usually nothing of value up there, but certain instruments (cymbals in particular) sound decidedly different if you roll off at or below 20 kHz (which you need to do if you're sampling at only 44.1 kHz to avoid aliasing artifacts near the sampling rate). That's why 48 kHz is the gold standard for audio, not 44.1 kHz. CD audio sample rates have aways been a compromise.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."

Re:Digital hoarders

[ArmoredDragon]

I don't think anything I said conflicts with any of that. Go to your comment 'volume control is a DSP math operation' for example: Consider if your source started at a low bit rate but you needed to i.e. increase the volume. What do you get? Basically a lot of noise that sounds like static, kind of like 80's era cassette tapes when played at higher volume. Hence using a higher bit rate makes sense for that application.

But again as I stated, higher sample rate (NOT bit rate, these are two different things) is pointless for any application. Why? Quite simply, the Nyquist limit.

Re:Digital hoarders

[sjames]

Actually, there is a very good reason. Anything above half the sample frequency will create aliases in the hearable range. To prevent that, you must use a low-pass filter to remove those higher frequencies but low pass filters are not perfect. They begin cutting before their set frequency. You can use multiple low pass filters, but then you introduce other distortions. Keep in mind, these are analog filters.

So high quality gear is sensitive well into the ultrasonic and uses a cutoff high enough that they begin cutting the signal above the threshold of hearing and so the cutoff is in the ultrasonic range. The sample rate needs to be double that frequency.

Consumer grade gear such as CDs use a "brick wall" cutoff and sample at 44K knowing that the audio won't typically be further mixed and that very few people have headphiones that go anywhere near a frequency response that would reveal the distortions, but that's consumer gear.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Kjella]

Actually 96 kHz makes sense in a mixing setting too if you're altering the pitch of a recording like autotune, then you're effectively stretching/compressing the samples causing interpolation errors in the time domain not just the amplitude. But yes for a final mix 48kHz/44.1kHz is enough, though since both systems are in use another advantage is that you can get perfect sound both for a 44.1 kHz CD and a 48 kHz soundtrack for a movie while a conversion between them would be slightly lossy. But to audiophiles "studio grade" has become a thing like "military grade" is to crypto.

Re:Digital hoarders

[angel'o'sphere]

You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture.
That is wrong. Double sampling frequency is the minimu you need to sample the signal. It is not enough to reproduce it accurately. How do you come to that idiotic idea?

Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's
That is nonsense, too.
Everyone can hear if a 16kHz base tone has a 32kHz and/or a 64kHz overtone added ir not. You don't need to be able to 'hear' 32kHz or 64kHz to notice if the sound is mixed in or not.

however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
A person like you, on a consumer device, likely not. But from proffesional sound engineers it is expected that they can.

No idea where you got your nonsense from ... plenty of the anove is common sense. You don't need a physics degree to graps that.

Re:Digital hoarders

[HornWumpus]

CD audio sampling rate is exactly the same as vinyl quadraphonic encoding rate. They selected it in an attempt to make it possible to put an old school analog quad signal on the CD. They never did though, good choice, just use 4 digital tracks.

Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Re: Digital hoarders

[93 Escort Wagon]

He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."

Except it doesn't move them to the iTunes library - it copies them. So unless you delete the originals yourself, you've got another copy of the file... but I can imagine a lot of people would do exactly that, because why would you want two copies on your computer?

I am not really sure how much I agree or disagree with the gp post. People do need to take some responsibility, and we tech-heads know better than most what can go wrong with tech. But most people aren't like us; and all of these companies sell their hardware and software with the message that it'll magically take care of everything for you - Apple perhaps more than most (it "just works"), although Google and Microsoft are certainly not hubris-free.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you figured that out after reading the last article about this (I remember the same, and thinking the same), but Apple could not even after several days?

Re:Digital hoarders

[Pembers]

My music collection is almost exactly that size, most of it originally bought on CD over about twenty years. If I was to play all of it non-stop, it would take about 80 days.

As others have pointed out, the person in question is a composer, so I expect a lot of his collection would be recordings of his own compositions, at the highest available quality (uncompressed or losslessly compressed). There might be multiple takes or versions of them. If he recorded them as multitrack recordings (each performer or instrument is recorded into a separate file, so he can mix and edit later), that really adds up. 192kbit/s MP3 occupies about 1.5 megabytes per minute. Uncompressed 96kHz 24-bit audio occupies about 15 megabytes per minute in mono, double that for stereo.

Re: Digital hoarders

[NicBenjamin]

iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.

I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.

Re:Digital hoarders

[PopeRatzo]

There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's,

Here's the thing: In modern music production, there's a lot of processing that goes on in the box, and outside the realm of human hearing. Working at higher resolutions and bitrates that are outside the spectrum of human hearing can make a big difference. There are good reasons that 24-bit 128khz is a standard resolution for professional music production. Of course, the file that's going to be distributed won't be at that resolution, but during production, it helps.

For example, with a high-quality EQ plugin, or delay, you can hear an audible difference if it's printing at 96khz than at 44.1khz.

It's the same reason movies are shot in HD even though they might eventually viewed at 480i. Because stuff has to be done to that signal before it gets to you.

Re:Digital hoarders

[PopeRatzo]

however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
A person like you, on a consumer device, likely not. But from proffesional sound engineers it is expected that they can.

More important, all those digital processing tools that are in the chain, from EQs to delays and dynamics processors and pitch correction, etc can most definitely tell the difference between a 16-bit signal and a 24-bit signal.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person

What the actual fuck?

The amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater than the amount of a sane person?

Re:Digital hoarders

[flargleblarg]

Or if you were Commander Data, you could listen to 900 of them simultaneously and get through it in half a day. :)

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't actually need it, but it sure helps to get it done real time.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

122 GB is around 350 hours if compressed with FLAC, at 350 MB/hour.

350 CDs is hardly a major achievement. I have that much in classical music alone. (The availability of cheap box sets is somewhat to blame.)

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. But a couple network drives and set up a daily r sync. That's what I do so I can never lose my stuff.

Re:Digital hoarders

[NotAPK]

These two videos are an excellent introduction to audio signal theory.

Highly recommended to all readers enjoying this thread.

Re: Digital hoarders

[NeoGeo64]

Well, that truly sucks then. Thank God I've never used the iTunes store. I feel bad for those users who are affected. I know I'd be more than upset.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

No iTunes actually deletes the files. If you want them again you are supposed to redownload them from apple music. But it will also "match" your song to its internal database, and if there is a match then the file doesn't even make it to the cloud, they just serve you the version they have. On top of it, if you stop paying for apple music, you loose access to the files you stored in the cloud.

Re:Digital hoarders

[maligor]

You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture.
That is wrong. Double sampling frequency is the minimu you need to sample the signal. It is not enough to reproduce it accurately. How do you come to that idiotic idea?

Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's
That is nonsense, too.
Everyone can hear if a 16kHz base tone has a 32kHz and/or a 64kHz overtone added ir not. You don't need to be able to 'hear' 32kHz or 64kHz to notice if the sound is mixed in or not.

however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.
A person like you, on a consumer device, likely not. But from proffesional sound engineers it is expected that they can.

No idea where you got your nonsense from ... plenty of the anove is common sense. You don't need a physics degree to graps that.

I really doubt anyone can actually hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit samples. The distinction and use comes in when mixing multiple samples together to preserve maximum accuracy in the result. (And yes, I have professional studio gear) You might also use higher resolution like 32bit+ these days because it's possible.

The frequency range of human hearing is more interesting, have you ever listened to music on studio gear for longer periods of time?

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a computer storing important work why would you put something like iTunes on it? we specifically ban (and enforce the ban through software) all music, browser and even phone software we didn't install and manage on a machine. Work files are too critical to entrust to the random crap that comes down in these categories.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Dutch Gun]

You've got it mostly right, but not completely right. Any sort of digital manipulation introduces noise into the audio stream due to the nature of floating-point math. The more accuracy (or "headroom") you have in both domains (frequency and amplitude), the closer the final mix will be to the original waveform. That's why many studio engineers use 24bit / 192khz source material... not because you can actually hear any difference in the original source, but because it preserves the pristine quality of the source longer as it moves through arbitrary numbers of digital filters and mixing stages.

It's moderately useful for masters as you stated, because those masters can still be digitally manipulated without introducing any additional audible artifact. As indicated by vel-ex-tech, you actually do need additional samples for clean pitch or tempo shifting, but I wouldn't call that a typical "consumer" application.

Of course, for consumer tracks (simple listening), it's utterly pointless, much like the ridiculous Pono player. No one can actually hear the difference, and nearly all reputable double-blind studies confirm this. It's just a "bigger numbers are better" fetish among audiophiles or people who don't understand the science of audio. And frankly, the "loudness wars" have actually decreased the require dynamic range for most consumer music by pumping up the volume and compressing the shit out of it.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I had mod points. Your attitude sucks.

Re:Digital hoarders

[angel'o'sphere]

You can hear it when you play with the volume, or listen to typical artifacts.

Ofc you don't here it when some transformation process calcs it down to 16 from 24 to simply make the output in the amplifier. But it is a huge difference if a hobbyist plays with sounds on 16 bit level and plays the end results or if you process the same sounds with 24 bits and only transform them to 16 bit in the final stage.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... ever hear of backups?

Re:Digital hoarders

[vel-ex-tech]

any application

Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will happen if lower by more. It will sound like shit. You will quickly see that those extra samples you think are only for "audiophiles" really do come in handy.

Now, what's truly confusing to me about your posts is that you seem to believe that you need more than 16 bits to adjust volume. If boosting the volume on something with 16 bits makes it sound a worn cassette that's a recording of a recording of a recording, what you're running into is compression. The way a lot of shit gets mastered these days, it's well, shit. You're not getting 16 bits of loudness. You're only getting 5 or 6 bits of loudness at most. At that point, using 24-bit for playback is a soggy band-aid because that waveform that only has 5 bits of loudness with 16-bit is only going to have, what, 7 or 8 bits of loudness in 24-bit.

Please educate yourself. For listening, a 16-bit 44.1khz recording is more than enough. People do more things with recordings than just listen to them in their room or work with them in a big corporate production studio. Well, who knows. You've probably never met a modern live DJ at a bar or rave. They do more than announce the weather and the next few songs like the ones the radio. I doubt an actual DJ would have any reason to wind up in your mom's basement.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

This issue should be a warning to everyone...back up your personal files. Music, pictures, documents etc...back up to at least two devices that are only connected to your computer when doing backups. Then store one in a different safe and trusted location.

I have never trusted any (Cr)apple hardware or software, especially iTunes after many years of reading horror stories about it! All of my music collection has been ripped from CDs that I purchased , or tracks purchased from Rhapsody or Amazon. Even though I have them backed up, I would be very severely pissed if any program deleted any of them without permission and/or confirmation.

I see this as an attempt by (Cr)apple to excuse their extreme ass-hole behavior by claiming that this is an unknown bug instead of an intentionally planned "feature"!

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see the big deal about so-called digital hoarding.

Physical hoarding is bad because you end up with an unsanitary house crammed with dangerously unstable piles of useless junk, socially isolated, unable to find a girlfriend/wife, possibly divorced and losing touch with kids, and probably depressed as a result (or underlying cause).

Digital hoarding? A few terabytes of files you don't look at on a hard-drive the size of a small paperback (or two, if you're a backup obsessive)? Big fscking whoop.

Re:Digital hoarders

[ArmoredDragon]

Unless you're a DJ. After shifting that track an octave and a half down and slowing that other track down about 50 bpm or so to match, you're really going to wish you had those extra samples. This is an exercise you can do on your own with free software like Audacity. Get a piece of music. Two exercises. 1.) Lower its pitch without affecting its tempo by at least an octave. 2.) Lower its tempo without affecting its pitch by at least 30 bpm. Both of these exercises should give you a hint what will happen if lower by more. It will sound like shit. You will quickly see that those extra samples you think are only for "audiophiles" really do come in handy.

No, this really won't work the way you think it will. It might make sounds that otherwise have a higher frequency come to within your audible spectrum, however anything that was already in your audible spectrum is inevitably going to sound different. This only has scientific applications, and is otherwise worthless for a DJ.

This all comes down to how fourier transforms work, by the way, which are the basis behind the Nyquist theorem. It's also analogous to making ultra-violet light visible to human eyes.

Now, what's truly confusing to me about your posts is that you seem to believe that you need more than 16 bits to adjust volume. If boosting the volume on something with 16 bits makes it sound a worn cassette that's a recording of a recording of a recording, what you're running into is compression.

That isn't even close to what I was pointing out.

Well, who knows. You've probably never met a modern live DJ at a bar or rave.

On the contrary, I've helped a few develop their tracks.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

All that effort and you still suck. You hate music, you just want to profit in a party atmosphere. Your skills are worthless. Why not just write a song instead of doing all that work to mash up songs that aren't even in the same key? You really think that sounds good? Your audience is either drunk or on cheap ecstasy, if they think it sounds good it has nothing to do with you. They're just retarded.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably didn't. iTunes scans your computer for music files and automatically "adds" them to your iTunes library. And then deletes them for you when it "makes them available from Apple Music."

Except it doesn't move them to the iTunes library - it copies them. So unless you delete the originals yourself, you've got another copy of the file... but I can imagine a lot of people would do exactly that, because why would you want two copies on your computer?

I am not really sure how much I agree or disagree with the gp post. People do need to take some responsibility, and we tech-heads know better than most what can go wrong with tech. But most people aren't like us; and all of these companies sell their hardware and software with the message that it'll magically take care of everything for you - Apple perhaps more than most (it "just works"), although Google and Microsoft are certainly not hubris-free.

At one point a couple of years ago, iTunes started just linking to the original file for me. I had to change settings to get it to start copying into the library again. I found that out because I do backup my original files elsewhere and just leave the iTunes library as the only copy on my main machine. I did my usual backup and delete of everything I'd bought that month and suddenly iTunes was falling over because the mp3 files were gone.

This didn't happen on my wife's machine though, so I don't know what makes iTunes decide by default to switch from copying into the library to managing in place. Sounds like the composer in the article might have had the same manage in place thing going on without realising it.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Changing by 30bpm may also mean it will be out of tune relative yi standard pitches, which to me would be about as pleasant as nails on a chalkboard

Re: Digital hoarders

[arglebargle_xiv]

iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions

That's an understatement. It's the Nero Burning ROM equivalent [0] from Apple, this vast bloated mass of crap hacked over and over with every imaginable feature ever dreamed up by every marketing manager ever thrown in and partially implemented by different developers without any coherent plan or interface.

[0] According to the Nero web site, Nero Burning Dumpster requires 5GB of disk space to install. 5 fucking gigabytes to burn a CD. I don't know what CDBurnerXP requires for install but the download is 5MB, so Nero is approximately one thousand times the size of my usual app for doing the same thing.

Re:Digital hoarders

[thegarbz]

Yes for Nyquist but no in the real world. Nyquist theorem assumes that you have a theoretically perfect ADC and DAC stage with theoretically perfectly filtering. That is not the case. In reality in order to properly filter the HF image post conversion you would need an incredibly sharp impossible to achieve filter just above the audible range. While filtering in the frequency domain is easy enough, doing so sufficiently to avoid distortion but without phase shifts below 20khz is impossible in practice.

The simple solution, increase the sample frequency to give you more headroom. You can do this in the recording stage or you can do this in the digital domain. That's why pretty much every piece of equipment has an oversampling DAC and then does the final conversion at 192khz even if it doesn't take source material with those specs. It makes the following circuit design simpler and does actually make a measurable improvement (arguable if it's audible) within the range of human hearing with no gold plating required.

Re:Digital hoarders

[BlackPignouf]

Exactly. It's like RAW images from your camera.
You don't see any difference between RAW and JPGs until you have to save blown highlights, change contrast/shadows/white balance.

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

122GB of music? Does he even have the time to listen to it?? Jesus!

122GB?, Let's see....currently online

me@server:/shared$du -hax Music

251G Music/

(DeadBeeF reports this as 104 days and a couple of hours worth of music)

What am I listening to now, at this very minute?
What is shared to other computers @home?
What do I stream to other devices @home?
What do I listen to @work remotely?
What do I share/stream to my mobile phones (yes, plural) when I'm out and around?

I wonder if you can guess?

(and yes, I have listened to it all at least a couple of times through by now..at a rough calculation of 8hrs average listening a day, that gives me 312 days worth of non-repeating music)

I do take the point about hoarding though, I do know people with Terabytes of Music who don't really listen to it at all, or they'll want just one track by a band so they then download the whole discography (real example, person wanted 'Shine on you crazy Diamond' so they downloaded the whole Floyd discography..)

Re:Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

..anyway, most of the reasons are tech and not about human hearing.

You do realise that a monster cable wielding brigade will be beating a path to your door this very minute solely to lynch thee using the buggers after a statement like that?
 

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

No iTunes actually deletes the files. If you want them again you are supposed to redownload them from apple music. But it will also "match" your song to its internal database, and if there is a match then the file doesn't even make it to the cloud, they just serve you the version they have. On top of it, if you stop paying for apple music, you loose access to the files you stored in the cloud.

But, iTunes Match is a completely Opt-In service. Not that losing ones' data is ever cool...

Re: Digital hoarders

[lucm]

One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.

https://blog.vellumatlanta.com...

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

iTunes is a dumpster fire of astronomical proportions, but at some point the user has to take some responsibility for not entrusting valuable data to a flaky consumer-grade application. This sounds like a case where the wrong tool was used for the job.

I suspect he had iTunes to listen to shit he bought, and pro-grade software to deal with his own compositions, but a) as a composer the amount of songs he has to buy is probably several orders of magnitude greater then that of a sane person, and b) it's not unlikely iTunes found his work stash all by itself, and then when he clicked the wrong dialogue on the "cleaning space" screen it decided "why does he need 6 separate versions of this one song we have on the iTunes cloud" and deleted his originals.

While your comments are kind of off-mark, it did make me think of the "De-Duplication" feature in iTunes. The user has to invoke it manually; but I could see someone doing that without thinking it through, and trashing large sections of their iTunes Library.

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

I'll have you know I could listen to my collection in only about 4.5 years. Assuming I never slept.

If I fed different streams to each ear and had my corpus callosum severed I could get through it in just over 2.

You don't see a correct Corpus Callosum reference everyday. Kudos!

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

There's really no point in 96khz ever. You can fully reproduce an analog signal with a digital one by simply making the sample rate double the spectrum that you need to capture. Since human hearing tops out at 20khz, there's no point in sampling more than the 44khz found in CD's, which means that extra information is effectively just wasted space. 24 bits per sample is also a waste unless you work in a studio type environment and are working with a master copy that you intend on mixing, however a human listener can't distinguish 16-bit from 24-bit.

You're wrong. And 16 bits is an even worse restriction.

There's this thing called "aliasing". You might want to look into it.

The devil is literally in the details, or lack thereof, in under-sampled signals. Listen to some music with some percussion instruments like Triangle, Bells, Tambourine, or some Cymbal-Types. I have gotten really sick and tired of 44/16 music with cymbals that sound like escaping steam, and tambourines with aliased "undertones" down into the upper-BASS regions.

That's why I buy my music on DVD-A whenever possible. Even my 60-year-old Male ears can DEFINITELY hear the difference. And as far as the bit-depth goes, whip out an oscilloscope and the Philips Test CD, and watch what happens with the -60 dBm Sine wave. Spoiler alert: It comes out as a SQUARE wave...

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

That's cute. When you're a DJ, 44khz isn't enough. 16 bits is fine. Do you know why? Should I bother telling you?

It has to do with that Fourier transform thing. When you have two different tracks that are in different keys and have different tempos, you need more samples than 44khz to do the pitch and tempo shifting to match the two tracks.

Keep feeling smug, though. Clearly I must be wrong.

What you are running into is math errors piling-up. That's why you need both higher sample rates and higher bit depth.

And no, 16 bits isn't fine for anything more critical than listening to a portable music player on the train.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Apple wants to get lots of music to sell on iTunes for free,.so they have programmed their software to steal it of composers' PCs.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

It just works

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

One of the links leads to a story where a guy complains about Apple Music (not mere iTunes). When you subscribe, they actually remove files from your machine and store them in "their cloud", playing you back whichever song they deem a match for your file. And you lose it all when you stop paying.

https://blog.vellumatlanta.com...

This is fast becoming an urban legend. But it just isn't true. Neither iTunes Music nor iTunes Match (two entirely separate services) delete ANYTHING from your computer/iPhone/iPad.

I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

Oops, forgot a link.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

Your logic is impeccable. 'It has never happened to me, so obviously it doesn't happen to anyone'.

By that thought process... I've never been shot, so I can say with authority that shootings never happen.

Re: Digital hoarders

[93 Escort Wagon]

No iTunes actually deletes the files.

My post, and the one to which I was responding, was referring to iTunes ability to search your local computer and add music files to its library on the device. That's a completely different thing than what you're referring to... and it copies rather than moves/deletes the originals.

Re: Digital hoarders

[lucm]

I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.

I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.

I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?

No, and if you'd get your head out of your ass, perhaps you would have heard of it. it's Apple's Streaming Service; and although I generally hate streaming services, this is pretty cool. They have the typical "channels", which I ignore; butmwhat is quite unique is that you have unlimited access to virtually the ENTIRE iTunes MUSIC Catalog, with no frickin' AI deciding what you " want" to hear. Just do a MUSIC search in the iTunes Store, click the Play icon, and voila! Even works on cellular (you have to enable that specifically in iOS).

Re: Digital hoarders

[Tyrannicsupremacy]

And the Biggest Shill of the Day award goes to you!

Re: Digital hoarders

[sh00z]

No iTunes actually deletes the files.

My post, and the one to which I was responding, was referring to iTunes ability to search your local computer and add music files to its library on the device. That's a completely different thing than what you're referring to... and it copies rather than moves/deletes the originals.

And, it isn't automatic, either. It requires opt-in.

Re: Digital hoarders

[Anonymous Coward]

... but not the way YOU want it to...

Re: Digital hoarders

[lucm]

I subscribe to iTunes Music, and it hasn't deleted a single byte of data from my work Win 7 laptop, my MacBook Pro, my iPhone nor my iPad.

I don't know what is iTunes Music. Is that a made up product that fanbois use to defend Apple when it's clear to everyone else that Apple did (again) a terrible job with one of their actual products?

No, and if you'd get your head out of your ass, perhaps you would have heard of it. it's Apple's Streaming Service; and although I generally hate streaming services, this is pretty cool. They have the typical "channels", which I ignore; butmwhat is quite unique is that you have unlimited access to virtually the ENTIRE iTunes MUSIC Catalog, with no frickin' AI deciding what you " want" to hear. Just do a MUSIC search in the iTunes Store, click the Play icon, and voila! Even works on cellular (you have to enable that specifically in iOS).

That mysterious "iTunes Music" of yours sounds a lot like "Apple Music", except of course that everybody knows that not the entire iTunes store is available on Apple Music. Even Apple marketing, which is famous for bullshit, doesn't lie about it.

Since you're such a big iSheep maybe you have access to a special VIP service called iTunes Music, it could be some kind of reward for being part of the Apple volunteer sales team. I mean, even your Slashdot username is an Apple ad, that's impressive. There's just no way such a dedicated unpaid salesperson would not know the real name of an Apple product and would be so badly misinformed about it.

Re:Digital hoarders

[mattventura]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but doesn't it still matter for artificial waveforms like square waves, since they're a composition of sine waves going up to infinite frequencies?

Re: Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

That mysterious "iTunes Music" of yours sounds a lot like "Apple Music", except of course that everybody knows that not the entire iTunes store is available on Apple Music

My mistake: I read "iTunes Music", and my brain "saw" "Apple Music". Yes, everything I said about "iTunes Music" actually pertains to "Apple Music". My apologies.

Having said that, I didn't "lie" about the "Entire Catalog" being available for streaming through Apple Music. If you will care to read more carefully, I said virtually the entire iTunes MUSIC Catalog is available for streaming through [Apple] Music." A few (very few) of the more "Top of the Pops" songs are not available. These are usually the same ones that are not available for single-song purchase. That isn't Apple's doing. It's the record labels that are controlling what is, and what isn't, available.

But in about 3 months of searching for, and listening to, many, many songs on Apple Music, I have only encountered about one or two songs that were in the Catalog; but weren't available for streaming. So, I consider it a pretty damned good deal to be able to pick and choose what I want to listen to from NEARLY the entire iTunes MUSIC Catalog, instead of having some stupid AI DECIDE FOR ME.

That's where Apple Music whips all over other streaming services; that is if you are in the U.S.A. (I think Apple Music may still be U.S. only). And I am not sure it is available on Android. I run iTunes on my work Win 7 laptop, and it does work there, though.

Re:Digital hoarders

[KozmoStevnNaut]

And no, 16 bits isn't fine for anything more critical than listening to a portable music player on the train.

Uh, yes it is.

16 bits gives ~96dB of dynamic range. That's larger than the difference between a very quiet room (~20dB) and a chainsaw going full tilt at a distance of 1 meter (~110dB). Now tell me, which music do you listen to that actually needs that much dynamic range?

Keep in mind that the average room has about 30dB of background noise, so to use 16 bit audio to its full extent, the peaks would have to be over 126dB. That's louder than the peak SPL at most rock concerts. Considering most popular music is mastered for maybe 5-6dB of dynamic range at the most, and even well-produced classical recordings are somewhere around 20-30dB. There are a few recordings out there with upwards of 40-50dB of dynamic range, but that's about it.

And then you have to take into account that with proper noise-shaping dither, you can move the noise floor to frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, and get an effective dynamic range of over 110dB when taking the studio masters down from 24 bit to 16 bit, anything beyond 16 bit for listening is absolutely ridiculous and a waste of storage space and processing power, even in a very quiet room on a very good stereo.

So please, stop the audiophoolery.

Re:Digital hoarders

[KozmoStevnNaut]

You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?

First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.

Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.

You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.

Re:Digital hoarders

[maligor]

You can hear it when you play with the volume, or listen to typical artifacts.

Ofc you don't here it when some transformation process calcs it down to 16 from 24 to simply make the output in the amplifier. But it is a huge difference if a hobbyist plays with sounds on 16 bit level and plays the end results or if you process the same sounds with 24 bits and only transform them to 16 bit in the final stage.

Well, technically you're correct, you would be able to distinguish 16bit to 24bit with enough volume. What I'm not entirely sure if your ear drums would still function after it... possibly. This is certainly something I've contemplated, but fortunately my current audio interface allows me to select the line level and also specifies the specific dynamic range for it.

But I will not question the plausibility of the placebo effect in audio.

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

So please, stop the audiophoolery

That's cute; you obviously have me confused with an audioPILE. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But I am an experienced Audio engineer, and, as an electronics engineer, I do understand the Nyquist criteria, as well as the dynamic range increase that each additional bit of bit-depth represents.

On the face of it, you are somewhat correct; 16 bits gives you 96 dBm (I believe it is dBm, but it might be dBV, can't remember offhand; but you didn't even bother to define which, which makes your use of the term "dB" ENTIRELY USELESS. Did you even know that?) of dynamic range, which is a lot, as your examples illustrate.

HOWEVER, it isn't the whole story.

You see, there's this thing called "quantization error", which occurs in ANY and EVERY A/D and D/A system. It is essentially like a Law of Thermodynamics: You just CAN'T cheat it, you CAN'T ignore it, and you CAN'T remove it. The only things you can do is MINIMIZE IT. That takes bit-depth. Yes, you can do analog and digital low-pass filtering, but in order for that filtering to not affect the frequencies of interest, the "quantization noise" must be very, very small. That again means more bit-depth.

So what? you say. That stuff is "down in the dirt", and with 96 dBm of resolution, it simply doesn't matter. Probably true if all you listen to is 128 kb/s MP3's with 2 dBm of dynamic range, through $15 earbuds; but you see, the biggest thing that quantization noise brings to the party is Harmonic Distortion. That is caused both by the quantization itself, causing your nice sine wave to turn into a stair step approximation of same; but also by the sharp edges of the steps themselves.

And the quieter the signal, the greater that noise plays a part. That's why they often characterize noise as an Equivalent Input Signal.

Have you ever had a stereo or musical instrument amp with a blown speaker? When the music is loud, you don't notice the voice coil scraping against the side of the magnet; but when the music is quiet, you can clearly hear the signal get "fuzzy". That's because the "signal" got quieter; but the "noise" stayed the same volume. Therefore, the signal-to-noise RATIO went up. WAY up!

So it is with quantization noise. And when you consider that, even when it is "loud", Everytime the waveform approaches a zero-crossing, it is momentarily "quiet". So, this means that the lower the bit depth, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and hence, the higher the Harmonic Distortion.

Period. That's physics, not audiopile bullshit.

Re: Digital hoarders

[MichaelJ]

I don't know what would change the setting (in the Advanced tab of iTunes preferences) behind your back, but I can tell you that whatever that selected behavior is, holding down the Option key when dragging files to iTunes from the Finder will reverse that preference for that drag-drop operation. A copy into the media folder will show a green + sign once you drag to iTunes (before your drop). A link to the existing location will not.

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?

First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.

Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.

You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.

I freely admit my personal frequency response ain't what it used to be. I'd say 12-14k with speakers is a pretty fair assessment. But that seems to go WAY up with good earbuds. Don't really know why; but it does. I'm sure it still isn't as good as it was in my teens, when I could clearly hear up to nearly 30 kHz (no, really); but especially with earbuds, it is still pretty good overall.

But frequency response does not correlate directly with accuracy, especially with a brain in the mix ( no pun). Hearing loss isn't exactly a simple low-pass filter. It's kind of hard to describe, actually; because the brain is so wrapped-up in the whole "hearing" process, you're just going to have to trust me that I really CAN still "hear" the difference between mediocre, good, and great audio recording and reproduction, with a few limitations, honestly, or ask other older males you know that would pay attention to this. Some day, you'll understand. Now, get off of my lawn!!!

But all kidding aside, yes, I have had friends help me conduct A/B/X tests; and with a very good recording, and very good reproduction, you can actually hear the difference between 44/16 and 96/24 (anything higher is probably not discernable by most humans), especially in instruments with high frequency harmonics (some of which extend well past 20 kHz).

This NOT about "music for dogs", or "AudioPILE voodoo"; the fact of the matter is, the "frequency foldback" of the 44 kHz sample frequency "beating against" the near-ultrasonic and ultrasonic overtones of some percussion and a few other natural instruments, and probably even more so for some electronic ones, creates "undertones" that extend WAY the Hell down into the audible frequency band, where NO filtering is really practical (at least not until there is a big leap in DSP speed), and where age-related high-frequency hearing loss plays ZERO part.

So, yeah, I can CERTAINLY hear the BY-PRODUCTS of insufficient sampling rate/depth, even if my ability to hear the raw frequency-response has somewhat diminished.

Re: Digital hoarders

[lucm]

But in about 3 months of searching for, and listening to, many, many songs on Apple Music, I have only encountered about one or two songs that were in the Catalog; but weren't available for streaming.

I see. That's how you came to the conclusion that "virtually" the entire iTunes music catalog is available on Apple Music. Just like the fact that you personally didn't lose files means that there's no way it happened to someone else.

I wonder if your thinking comes from using Apple products, or if you started buying Apple products because of your thinking. Either way those Apple conferences must be fascinating if they're full of people like you.

Re:Digital hoarders

[KozmoStevnNaut]

No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high. If you actually could hear frequencies that high under normal conditions, you are either a dog or a genuine medical curiosity. What you probably heard is distortion manifesting itself in the audible range, due to equipment that was unable to either handle ultrasonic content correctly and didn't remove it using a low pass filter.

This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor. And even if you did hear anything that high up, it would have been more like a sensation or feeling, not an actual identifiable sound. Either way, it would have been completely drowned out by the actual musical content, which obviously has a ton more energy in the audible frequency range.

The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.

Re:Digital hoarders

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Pro tip: Don't try to act smart if you don't know what you're talking about :-)

The decibel is a logarithmic unit. When I say a dynamic range of 96 dB, that is the different between the noise floor and a full-scale signal. 96 dB of difference is simple a relative value. Talking about dynamic range in decibel-milliwatts as you're doing, makes absolutely no sense at all. DBm is a measurement of absolute power, so you can't use it to talk about relative dynamic range.

Quantization error exists everywhere, even in analog media. But unless you're editing the audio, 16 bit audio puts the noise floor due to quantization around -96 dBFS, which is more than good enough and very very small indeed. A -96 dBFS noise floor is equivalent to Total Harmonic Distortion less than 0.002%. In other words, completely inaudble. The inherent noise from devices such as microphones is a lot higher and exists in all recordings of non-artificial music. And no, it doesn't turn a sine wave into a stairstep, it just makes it "fuzzy". You can see this with a sufficiently good oscilloscope.

You're either delusional, or you've completely forgotten everything you should have learned about analog and digital signal theory.

Re:Digital hoarders

[dave420]

You are assuming your subjective impressions are objective, which is patently not the case... Your A/B/X tests don't mean a lot if you don't provide the methodology behind them.

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high.

I said ALMOST 30 kHz. I could hear very well up to a little over 22 kHz, and under the right conditions, could "sense" stuff up to about 27 kHz.

BTW, your comment about hearing "artifacts" is exactly what I was talking about with "frequency foldback". In the case of me hearing the old-school ultrasonic traffic-sensors (which operated at around 27 K, and which used a JBL "Ring Radiator" tweeter as the transducer), I was probably hearing my own eardrum producing a subharmonic. In any case, what you are hearing is the "Difference" part of the "Sum and Difference" frequencies produced when two signals are mixed. This is how all AM radios work. It's called "Heterodyning" when speaking in radio-terms, but the same effect is called "Aliasing" when speaking in terms of audio-sampling.

This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor.

Actually, the 22 kHz figure is from a true hearing-test, under controlled conditions. I couldn't have quantified my upper hearing-limit by just listening to some musical samples on vinyl or tape. Having said that, vinyl particularly could demonstrably go way higher than 20 kHz, if you could get the signal onto tape. I submit as evidence the short-lived JVC CD-4 Discrete Quadraphonic encoding system for vinyl, that actually used a 38 kHz "subcarrier" to carry the rear channels. This 38 kHz was amazingly able to be picked-up by a production-quality phono cartridge (Audio-Technica "SS" series), and decoded into the rear-channel information. So, that is a system that PROVES that vinyl, at least, doesn't stop at 20 kHz. But I am NOT a vinyl fan: As much as I am whining about 44/16 not being enough (and it isn't) I loves me my CD and AAC collection!

The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.

You are correct that most mastering equipment has a brick-wall (24 dB/octave or greater) LPF (low-pass filter) to attempt to filter-out the ultrasonics before they are encoded and cause "foldback" into the audio-range. BUT, I have heard MANY, MANY recordings where the tambourine or "hand-bell" (don't know what those are actually called) part is almost unbearable, due to frequency-foldback effects WELL down into the midrange and even upper-bass regions. That HAS to be the result of one of two things: Overmodulation at the recording-end on the original track, or "Aliasing".

And I don't have exactly crappy playback equipment. The system I use at home consists of an Oppo DVD/CD player (which can do at least 24/96 with DVD-A) connected over TOSLink to an Arcam A/V Receiver (which can process at least 24/96 on the TOSLink inputs), and some Avid 103 speakers with Philips-dome mylar tweeters that go up at least an octave above human hearing. Not "TRUE Audiopile" stuff (don't have that kind of $$$); but CERTAINLY not a "Close-n-Play".

Re:Digital hoarders

[KozmoStevnNaut]

With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.

If the LPF part of the crossover doesn't work correctly, you get all the treble sent to the woofer as well, which can cause noticeable distortion. And if the HPF part doesn't work, you get all the bass sent to the tweeter, which is likely to kill it.

And there have been significant advances in speaker construction over the past few decades. My late-70s JBL 4410s are wonderful speakers, especially for rock, but they can't hold a candle to my Adam A5Xs when it comes to accuracy and clean sound.

Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.

Re:Digital hoarders

[macs4all]

With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.

Polyester caps used in the mid and high-freq xover section; which are QUITE stable over time and temperature. Don't think there is any significant leakage from the LF section into the tweets; that's a LOT of octaves-away!!! Plus, if it was THAT bad, I would have either wasted the tweets, or been moved to look into it, because the sound would be gnarly, regardless of program source or material. But that isn't the case...

Plus, the effect is sometimes even MORE noticeable with earbuds/phones, where there is no passive crossover involved. Sure, the IM distortion is a bit higher with single-driver configurations; but I am hearing the same thing there, too. And as long as you back-down from "ear-bleed" levels, my Sony headphones (yes, I need to get some Grados) and my Sony earbuds do a pretty good job at accuracy and definition.

Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.

Believe me, I know EXACTLY what THAT sounds like!

No, seriously. I have been listening critically to music recording and reproduction since at least my early teens; and I REALLY think I am hearing what I think I am hearing, in all seriousness.

Fortunately, most of the music I like to listen to doesn't fall into the "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" category; so that isn't much of a problem. Steely Dan has always had careful production techniques (and I am sure you know about the legendary Donald Fagen "Nightfly" album), and pretty much anything recorded/mixed/produced by Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree, et al) and most/all Peter Gabriel stuff is well-recorded and well-mastered, with sometimes scary amounts of Dynamic Range, and without ANY of the "Push it to 11" bullshit so popular with the Deaf-as-a-Post Producers of today.

As an aside, I have always been annoyed that, as soon as we got a reproduction format (CD) that was capable of that 96 dB dynamic-range, the frickin' Recording Industry IMMEDIATELY normalized everything up to 0xfffc, and digitally-compressed (which is at least better than analog compression) everything to within 2 dB of THAT...

And THAT, my friend, is a "Don't get me started" topic!!!

Re: Digital hoarders

[peawormsworth]

It happened because of: too much control

If you want Apple to control everything for you, then don't be upset when they inevitably fail.

Happens with photographs and emails as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds more like the flash memory being corrupted and the files being deleted. I've seen photographs I've taken become blank. Sometimes even important emails seem to disappear or get buried under a snow of postings from other forums. Sometimes one email will be repeated 20+ times.

122GB music collection?

[HornWumpus]

If I only had 122GB of music, I think I'd cry. Lame, what did he do, pay for it all?

Has anybody found a good client for playing/browsing a good sized music collection, one measured in TB? Seams the people writing these things expect to be pointed at thumb drives.

Things that don't work: Emby player on Roku, Roku media player, Yamaha DLNA client, iTunes. All unusable.

I'm using a file browser on a NUC, there has to be a better way.

Re:122GB music collection?

[zenlessyank]

Try MythTV. Although it is really a DVR of sorts, it is also a good music player and cataloguer. If you have your music ripped and tagged proper then this program is pretty nifty.

Re:122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a c++ software dev, interested in writing this. I already play my files through libvlc and surely the rest could be solved quite easily with a multi-threaded filesystem scanner decoupled from the UI/listening thread.

Trade you the work for that TB collection :)

Re:122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I only had 122GB of music, I think I'd cry. Lame, what did he do, pay for it all?

He's a composer, a chunk of it was original and lossless.

Re:122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try foobar2000, it's minimalist with a low memory footprint and doesn't bog down with large collections in my experience.

Re:122GB music collection?

[bigfinger76]

I set up an NFS share and use Moode (Rune Audio is another fork) on a Raspberry Pi. This has solved my home audio streaming issues. It will take awhile to load a library that big, but it's a one-time thing.

Re:122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

moc? (http://moc.daper.net/)

Re:122GB music collection?

[HornWumpus]

What it needs is a really efficient indexing system, client code written by someone with experience using moby datasets and a decent UI to navigate the hierarchy. All the packages I've used so far are miserable, caching nothing and constantly rescanning the server. Understandable for low RAM devices, but nothing is really 'low RAM' these days.

I've considered writing it myself, but figure it has to be a common enough problem. It's worth asking if anybody found a good solution.

Where are you? I'm in N Cal, Sacramento area. It's a good day to copy it at USB3 portable drive speeds. I can just make the copy and swap you for a blank drive.

Re: 122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plex as server. Then plex client on Roku or smart tv chrome cast ....

Re:122GB music collection?

[TheGratefulNet]

mpd.

lots of cclients to pick from.

Re:122GB music collection?

[Lehk228]

my collection is only 215 gigs, but foobar2000 can search and sort it practically instantaneously, and i see no reason to expect it to choke on 5-25x as much data.

Re:122GB music collection?

[HornWumpus]

Offtopic?

Perhaps.

Finding a good music player is exactly 'On topic' when discussing iTunes IMHO.

Re:122GB music collection?

[PopeRatzo]

I set up an NFS share and use Moode (Rune Audio is another fork) on a Raspberry Pi. This has solved my home audio streaming issues. It will take awhile to load a library that big, but it's a one-time thing.

You just gave me an idea.

Re:122GB music collection?

[occasional_dabbler]

+1 for Foobar2000. I have 167GB of music and Foobar is pretty much instant. You could also set up a mini-server using Daphile which lets you control playback over a web interface or Logitech client. Both have options for bit-perfect playback. Nice toys.

Re:122GB music collection?

[jazzmans]

speaking as I have an over 4 TB music collection,(luckily, I've kept every cd I ever bought, except a few stinkers, and ripped them as original .wav file using EAC or CDparanoia) audacious does a good job of playing everything I throw at it, except some of my very first .wav's I ripped or composed back in the early 90's, before MP3 was out.

Of course, back then I only had a 10 Meg hard drive, so I could only rip 5-10 second pieces of music from Cd's... but it's still funny as hell when Joe Walsh's intro to Meadows pops up inverted (I ripped the first 10 seconds where he does his vocal theatrics, then reversed it)..

now, if you want to include mp4/mkv video files, then you'll need to go to VLC, it seems to handle my 24 TB film collection being served as UPnP via mediatomb just fine.

just because xx size is overkill to you, doesn't mean someone else doesn't have a valid reason why they need it.

p.s. I also rsync (always using append) my entire collection over to two different backup servers on a weekly basis... to lose everything I've ever done on computer from music, to film, to documents, to photos, to .... would be catastrophic.

p.p.s. fuck Itunes. Never used it, even when I had an Ipod, it was always a bloated piece of crap. It sure was a PITA to hack the Ipod to install an os that allowed me to drag and drop music files on it, instead of that Itunes bullshit filesystem (those who know, know, those who don't, just ignore this)

Re:122GB music collection?

[Anonymous Coward]

10MB hard drive when you had CD drive? I don't think so

Re:122GB music collection?

[Samizdata]

What it needs is a really efficient indexing system, client code written by someone with experience using moby datasets and a decent UI to navigate the hierarchy. All the packages I've used so far are miserable, caching nothing and constantly rescanning the server. Understandable for low RAM devices, but nothing is really 'low RAM' these days.

I've considered writing it myself, but figure it has to be a common enough problem. It's worth asking if anybody found a good solution.

Where are you? I'm in N Cal, Sacramento area. It's a good day to copy it at USB3 portable drive speeds. I can just make the copy and swap you for a blank drive.

But I really don't like Moby. I only have a couple of his songs...

iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[zenlessyank]

If you didn't rip the music with Apple software then when you install iTunes it scans your computer for music it didn't rip and will delete it. I've seen this happen on clients machines after having to reinstall iTunes. Now this has been a while back (3 years or so), so I don't know if it still has that 'feature' but that is what it sounds like.

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[Anonymous Coward]

I received an iPod as a Christmas gift 5 years ago and iTunes is a horrendously shitty piece of software, but I've never had a problem with it randomly deleting anything.

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[sribe]

If you didn't rip the music with Apple software then when you install iTunes it scans your computer for music it didn't rip and will delete it.

Oh, bullshit. There has never been any such "feature" in iTunes. We're dealing with bugs here, not DRM conspiracies.

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[zenlessyank]

Not bullshit. I've seen it happen with my own eyes. Was nothing random about it. The software TOLD the user it was deleting it and why. And the why is because it said the files were not legitimate and had to be removed or else iTunes wasn't going to install. Believe what you want. I'm too old to lie. Can't remember them anymore so found it pointless. Too old to care what folks think about what I say.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[topham]

iTunes has never done what you've said, it is a blatant lie.

You can have it scan directories and it will move files, but it has never identified files as "illegitimate" and deleted them.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[sumdumass]

http://www.cnet.com/forums/dis...

http://9to5mac.com/2014/12/03/...

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/0...

It appears they have in several iterations over the years. The GP is likely conflating several instances but i cannot find fault with it. I am somewhat concerned about your strict denial without even a simple Google search that brought up the links i posted and more.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[GyroDragona]

From what I read from those links you posted was music being deleted from the apple devices them self (iPod) when music was put on them through other software or that was using a hacked version of apple's DRM. I actually remember that Real Networks had figured out a way to put a hacked version of apple's DRM on music purchased from them in order to keep their music protected while still being compatible with apple's devices. Apple was able to detect this. But from what I recall and what those links say, it did not hut through the computer and delete them. It would remove them from the device or inform the user of the music with invalid DRM and ask them to restore the device. I have never seen or heard of iTunes simply deleting MP3s or any other audio (or even video) format for simply not having been ripped by it.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[AmiMoJo]

Not exactly, but many years ago it did used to delete files off your iPod if you don't have them in your library. Don't know if they ever fixed that, but iTunes certainly did delete stuff without warning or even notification in the past.

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[MillionthMonkey]

This seems like neither a bug nor a DRM conspiracy, just a typical iTunes misfeature. Some dumb manager at Apple had a little scrum with four other guys who hadn't slept in a week.

"We paid a lot of cash for these streaming licenses and we're barely using them! Why should our customers have their hard drives clogged with music files they can just stream from here? It just makes them run out of disk space trying to install the next version of iTunes, which means we get complaints from our product support team! Now fix it, and if it's not done by sunrise I'll cut your balls off."

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[NotAPK]

The classic case for things going wrong was when you plugged your iPod into someone else's computer.

It could go wrong in a few different ways. Either iTunes would sync to the iPod and accept the *iPod* as the master copy, thus deleting all of that person's music from their computer. Or it would go the other way, and wipe the iPod and sync up the song (or whatever else) was selected from that person's computer.

There was basically no way to just mix and match files (like every other portable player) without using 3rd party software.

I thought this was common knowledge, among my friends at the time it was well known to *never* plug your iPod into someone else's computer or bad things would happen...

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[AmiMoJo]

I could never quite comprehend the shear insanity of designing your software to delete the user's files with no warning or confirmation. I think it's unique, even among Apple apps that love to manage your stuff for you.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[MillionthMonkey]

Apple has too many managers who suck at product design. They're also spooked that iTunes for Windows is the only Apple program that gets installed on PCs, so they try to cram as much crap as possible into it.

Don't these people ever go home and realize that everyone in their family is bewildered by iTunes? "Hey, I just updated my iTunes and the UI is all different- how do I play music now?" "I don' know, I'll ask so-and-so on Monday."

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[BasilBrush]

The software TOLD the user it was deleting it and why. And the why is because it said the files were not legitimate and had to be removed or else iTunes wasn't going to install.

Complete lie. Fuck off.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[BasilBrush]

Either iTunes would sync to the iPod and accept the *iPod* as the master copy, thus deleting all of that person's music from their computer.

Bullshit. iPod was the hub. The iPad was the copy of all or part of the music on that hub. If you changed the computer an iPod was synced to, then it would reflect the music on the new computer. But no music would be deleted off the old computer, nor the new one. That was not how it works.

Re:iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[zenlessyank]

Um. Fuck Off all over your apple shaped face I will. Lick the dill, apple shill.

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[Rosyna]

iTunes never accepted the iPod as a master copy. In fact, one of the main complains about iTunes is there's no way to copy songs off a device. iTunes only copy files to devices (although they eventually added the ability to copy only purchased songs off a device).

Re: iTunes Deletes Unverified Music.

[BlackPignouf]

A friend of mine wiped a part of my music collection 10 years ago, when he wanted to copy some mp3s from his ipod to my computer. He installed ITunes and selected "synchronize". Well, it synchronized the Ipod and my computer just fine, deleting all my mp3s that weren't on his Ipod. I had backups and original CDs, but I really couldn't believe how shitty the Ipod/Itunes design was.

Since when does Apple fix bugs

[SmaryJerry]

Blatantly obvious and sometimes severely annoying bugs go on for years and years and years in apple products and on the apple forums without any fixes. They don't care about reliability because bug fixes can't be sold by marketing.

Re:Since when does Apple fix bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

So far I've seen windows xp, windows vista, windows 7 and windows 8 all occasionally be unable to load the user profile. I wonder if they fixed it in windows 10?
So that is atleast 3 full os versions this bug has managed to persist through.

Apple seems to change how things are done arbitrarily on ios so instead of fixing bug X they rewrite the whole implementation so you get a whole new set of bugs.

Re:Since when does Apple fix bugs

[605dave]

You know I used to defend Apple against these accusations. I've been using their products since the 80s. But ever iOS took off and Ive took over OS X, stability seems to have taken a back seat to the shiny new interface and integration between the two.

Right now I am still having issues with Time Machine that have been around for years. And that's their backup solution! You know, the one that's supposed to make sure you're safe? Oh, and good luck finding support for Time Machine on their website. Want a laugh? Go to their Communities page.

https://discussions.apple.com/...

Let's see on the main page there is a section for iLife, which they stopped making years ago. But let's just look at the Mac OS and System software group for Time Machine. Hum, not there. But you can get help on Front Row, another app they stopped making years ago (side note, why is Photos in here?). Well lets check the Applications group. Appleworks, iChat, and iCal. All apps Apple stopped making.

I could go on, but look around that page. Try to find a place to get support on Time Machine. How long has it been since they updated it? It takes 4 clicks to get there from apple.com. Has no one noticed? Oh, and don't get me started on Final Cut Pro X...

Seriously incompetent

[sunderland56]

They're really claiming that they don't know why this is happening?

Note to iTunes software engineers: grep through your code and find all calls to delete(). Investigate the code in those areas. If you can't add some basic debug code - or if you're unsure of what "grep" is - maybe you should consider a move to management.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[sir-gold]

This assumes that there is a single person with access to all the source code. It wouldn't surprise me if the various parts of iTunes were written by independent teams with no access to each others code, intended to prevent an employee from stealing the source code and selling it to a competitor.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

You meant unlink() right?

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely removeItemAtPath(_ path: String)

Re:Seriously incompetent

[angel'o'sphere]

Erm, do you develop software?
Soirce code is hold in a source code management system/versioning system.
Onviously for single apps all developers have access to all code. Everything else is not realy imaginable.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[gnasher719]

This assumes that there is a single person with access to all the source code. It wouldn't surprise me if the various parts of iTunes were written by independent teams with no access to each others code, intended to prevent an employee from stealing the source code and selling it to a competitor.

God, I thought nobody could be so clueless about software development, and about copyright law.

If you were an Apple employee and tried to sell the iTunes source code lets say to Microsoft, they would call their lawyer, who would call Apple's lawyers and the police, and you would go into the history books as one of the most stupid criminals ever.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it's not deleting the files? (Which should be trivial to determine with any number of tools, including ones Microsoft provides with sysinternals)

What if it's triggering a bug in another library or call? What if it's corruption instead of deletion?

I've seen all sorts of crazy things. I've seen a piece of software work just fine by itself, but when used with a particular AV suite files would start vanishing. (AV suite would quarantine everything said software touched)

Re:Seriously incompetent

[gnasher719]

You meant unlink() right?

Probably FSDelete :-(. Although it should rely be removeItemAtURL:

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, do you develop big software for big corps? Compartmentalizing source code and having an automated build process is very likely for a company so closed up as Apple is. Do you think Windows developers have access to all of it? Even if all an app's code is in one repository, there could be ACLs guarding access to certain folders. Even fuckin Subversion supports this.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[sjames]

You've never linked against a library where you had only headers and a binary?

Re:Seriously incompetent

[ArchieBunker]

That would explain a lot, especially the Windows build.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[NicBenjamin]

Erm, do you develop software?
Soirce code is hold in a source code management system/versioning system.
Onviously for single apps all developers have access to all code. Everything else is not realy imaginable.

Given the complex frankenstein-style monstrosity that is iTunes, I would not be surprised to find out that there are a couple different teams and that the iTunes store guys simply do not spend time looking at the video playback code.

There'd definitely be an engineer who could bring it all together, and search the entire codebase, tho.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think MS would be the buyer and not a company in a different legal regime like maybe baidu or yandex? It isn't jus about cloning itunes, there is a lot of value in knowing the internals in order to exploit it for ancillary purposes be it malware or just inter-operating in ways that Apple would not approve of.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very easy to imagine (and setup) the versioning system so that different users only had access to fractions of the whole system. The why is back to business strategy, as described above.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you were an Apple employee and tried to sell the iTunes source code lets say to Microsoft, they would call their lawyer, who would call Apple's lawyers and the police, and you would go into the history books as one of the most stupid criminals ever.

And if you were a Chinese hacker who got into that single account which has access to the entirety of the iTunes source code... nothing bad would happen to you. You might even get a bonus, or promoted.

Not everybody plays by the rules.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Onviously for single apps all developers have access to all code. Everything else is not realy imaginable.

You can't imagine using a closed-source library? The entire world isn't open source. Plus, iTunes came out in 2001 so it was even harder then to find open source libraries.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[MrL0G1C]

Indeed, I read the title as, Apple admits it is totally incompetent at software programming. This'll probably get modded down by apple fanboys.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never linked against a library where you had only headers and a binary?

This is an in-house app. A major one, for Apple. The only pieces that might be closed source are third-party codecs (and even that is doubtful). For the rest, it's far more likely than not that everyone developing iTunes pieces has read access to all code, to pull updated dependencies and such. However, building the beast for debug is probably not a hobby to be indulged manually and automated debug builds don't have the fastest turn-around for bug hunting.

OTOH, even for a closed source binary, finding all calls to unlink() is trivial and the development team would have debug-instrumented binaries available.

I would think you never developed software yourself, but judging from your uid perhaps a simpler explanation is that you're simply getting old?

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that this got modded +5 on Slashdot is a clear sign people here have no clue what the fuck they're talking about anymore. Anyone who has ever worked on any complex software is aware that unusual sets of rare circumstances can result in unforeseen behavior and the solution is rarely as easy as "grep for problem."

I've no doubt iTunes devs know exactly where all the file-deletion calls are, and all of them are legitimately necessary. The question is, what secondary functions call those, and what tertiary functions call those secondary functions, etc. on down the rabbit hole; what assertions and double-checks are used to ensure only the appropriate files are removed; what is the entire set of circumstances that results in a delete when there shouldn't be one? The answer absolutely is not going to be found right at the site of the delete call.

To hazard a guess: iTunes has various methods by which it caches music downloaded from a user's online library, or from Apple Music. These files might be stored locally permanently (the user can specifically request to locally cache stuff so it's available w/o internet access or if they want to make permanent copies of items in their online library) or temporarily (when the user simply chooses to play a song or playlist from the cloud). There are also local files that may exist in the user's online library, but are the user's actual original source files. So some of these items iTunes can (and should) safely delete under various circumstances, while others should not - if I had to bet, some unusual set of circumstances results in iTunes incorrectly seeing files that should be permanent as temporary, resulting in their deletion. Control-F "delete" doesn't do shit to help find the source of that sort of problem.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[angel'o'sphere]

I did ... in the stone age of software development, or rather in the copper age when we used windows.
Before windows and after windows I usually have all sources. I work mainly with Java anyway in our times ...

Re:Seriously incompetent

[sjames]

No, I just know enough to realize that it's not so unlikely for one team to not know what the other is doing, sufficient flexibility of thought to consider the possibility of a paranoid management, and the reading ability to know that the claim I was refuting was that only someone who hasn't programmed would think it is possible for one team to not be able to see what the other team wrote.

Are you claiming you haven't even linked against libraries from a proprietary compiler before?

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet there are people stupid enough to try it.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[BasilBrush]

Sure. But not for software written by the company I work for.

I can believe that different departments at Apple don't get access to new software that hasn't been announced yet. Apple likes their secrets. But long established software like iTunes, no chance. Of course developers on the iTunes team have access to all the source for the app.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they should be looking for a bunch of new iNull(&personalizedMemoryMapIndex) calls.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

can result in unforeseen behavior and the solution is rarely as easy as "grep for problem."

It is not "grep for problem" it is "grep for code that calls a variation of delete file". Generally a good way to start, unless you are doing raw syscalls with magic numbers to deliberately make your code harder to debug.

if I had to bet, some unusual set of circumstances results in iTunes incorrectly seeing files that should be permanent as temporary, resulting in their deletion. Control-F "delete" doesn't do shit to help find the source of that sort of problem.

Right, however most modern IDEs will give you a tree of calling methods, so starting with the deleteTemporary() function you can check which of its callers is feeding it faulty input ( or in absence of an IDE use grep to find out ).
 

Re: Seriously incompetent

[Rosyna]

And that's exactly what Apple will be doing. Since Apple cannot reproduce the issue, and has no real idea if it ever occurs, is a user error, or is a bug, they basically have one option:

Go through all the code that uses FSDeleteObject(), FSUnlinkObject(), and unlink() (The function calls iTunes actually makes) and either replace them with calls to FSMoveObject() or fortify the code with additional error checking they can't confirm will help.

The issue is, under no circumstances is iTunes supposed to delete music files. Even when explicitly telling iTunes to delete files, the code uses FSFindFolder() and FSMoveObject() to move the files to the trash instead of outright deleting it. And for huge collections of files, like with 122GB, deleting items from the trash is not fast since Mac OS X uses assloads of error checking and notification sending to make sure none of the files are in use or lack the appropriate permissions (it doesn't simply unlink() files). This means the user will see a trash dialog counting up and then down the number of files to delete.

Even if there is a rare deletion bug, it's extremely likely most of the reports of iTunes deleting music are false. Even when songs "disappear from the iTunes library" (like if you modify a playlist on one device and have playlist syncing on through iTunes in the Cloud, iTunes Match, or Apple Music), the song files remain on disk.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[kbg]

I am a software developer and I can tell you the Apple developers are morons. You find out where the delete calls are and work your way up from there and map out all the possible scenarios involving delete calls. If they can't do that then obviously the software was written by amateurs and is just a total mess or the current developers are moron.

Now if this was a small software shop with little cash to go around then this would maybe be understandable but we are talking Apple here. They should be able to write their lines of code with NASA precisions and QA.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Gazzonyx]

How about this scenario; the delete is triggered by events and events can fire other events. Such things can quickly become a huge tree of possible calls where you first have to figure out which listeners are even registering themselves and then figure out if you have a bug in the listener registration before you can even proceed to finding the bug in the callback / trigger / event handler / etc. I've seen uglier call trees and I'm guessing by the top level interface of iTunes that the underlying code can only be a mess.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to tell you, but you're wrong. Different teams working on different sections have access to certain areas, but not others. In any company, it's not remotely unheard of for someone working on project Fruitcake to have access to the nuts but not the cherries and expect someone else to tie it all together (and know what they're doing when they do it).

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Even ignoring the fact that "work your way backward" results in exponential growth at each step and can quickly become infeasible to manually analyze, the point of my post was that THERE ISNT NECESSARILY A PROBLEM ANYWHERE IN THAT CALL STACK. It is possible ALL the calls that trigger the deletion are legitimate. The problem may be elsewhere, in the code that flags which files are temporary and which are permanent. That is somewhere in the download/caching code and is not directly linked to any deletion code at all (hell, the two events may be separated by months of real time depending on when each gets triggered). Or it could be any number of other causally interrelated but not immediately connected set of circumstances. The fact that you can't conceive of this, even after I described it in my post, indicates you are a "moron developer" yourself.

Sometimes bugs are a total bitch to hunt down. The ones that manifest extremely rarely are typically the hardest.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[rtb61]

Far more likely, that's no bug, that's a purposeful feature. Apple's blunder, not taking into account content creators and the difference between that and empty content consumers. Why so few complaints, Apple were counting on questionable down loaders not complaining, not taking into content creators who would complain loudly and emphatically, now that's a bug at Apple management. So apple are in fact wholly and totally guilty of extremely empathic copyright infringement actually and actively stealing content.

Apple's other big mistake, not taking into account that quite a few people only enjoy very specific mixes, that have memories associated with them and regardless of the claimed better mixes, they actually hate those 'improved mixes' as it disrupts the emotions associated with those memories and the very specific mixes, the bring them about. Seriously Apple you are fucking with peoples memories and the emotions associated with those memories, not a good idea.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[sg_oneill]

And if you were a Chinese hacker who got into that single account which has access to the entirety of the iTunes source code... nothing bad would happen to you. You might even get a bonus, or promoted.

I had a chinese developer once try to sell me the code for a competitors software he had worked on. I phoned the competitor. Next day the coder was raided by the police in bejing.

I try not to think about the poor bastards life after that. Justice can be brutal over there.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[MrL0G1C]

It'd p*** me off if Apple deleted my tunes many of which are indeed favoured mixes, but of course I have backups which don't need any DRM licensing rubbish. /I don't use itunes, it sounds awful.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[tom229]

How in the hell are you modded so high? If they can't reproduce the issue, how can they debug it? Furthermore, you think they're just failing to find that line someone put in by accident? if (rand()%3==0) delete(random_song();) . Fuck! There it is! This is obviously some very obscure syncing bug, or quite possibly something even stranger. I hate Apple with a passion and will look for any excuse to flame them, but even I can't get on board with this.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[lucm]

Anyone who has ever worked on any complex software is aware that unusual sets of rare circumstances can result in unforeseen behavior and the solution is rarely as easy as "grep for problem."

We're not talking about a large ERP system that interacts with banking API, warehousing software, antiquated mainframe transactions and cryptic EDI formats delivered via a proprietary VAN.

We\re talking about a fucking desktop media player that has 3 possible sources for media files (Apple Store, cd drive and the computer filesystem) and is 100% under control of Apple. There are apps more complex than that maintained by single developers or small teams who don't have access to billions of dollars to do QA.

Fuck Apple.
 

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

...intended to prevent an employee from stealing the source code and selling it to a competitor.

Err, we're talking iTunes here....who'd want to buy any of that cruft?

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not talking about a large ERP system that interacts with banking API, warehousing software, antiquated mainframe transactions and cryptic EDI formats delivered via a proprietary VAN.

We\re talking about a fucking desktop media player...

iTunes hasn't been a "desktop media player" for over a decade. Sure, it plays music and movies, but it's also a library (Database), a store (internet browser), a device manager (to include mounting, disk/memory management & reformatting, and device OS management), a tag editor, a cd/dvd authoring suite, online radio streaming, etc. The install file is actually five or six different programs, one of which is a networking protocol.

iTunes is more like a whole OS running in a VM than a desktop media player.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[lucm]

iTunes hasn't been a "desktop media player" for over a decade. Sure, it plays music and movies, but it's also a library (Database), a store (internet browser), a device manager (to include mounting, disk/memory management & reformatting, and device OS management), a tag editor, a cd/dvd authoring suite, online radio streaming, etc. The install file is actually five or six different programs, one of which is a networking protocol.

iTunes is more like a whole OS running in a VM than a desktop media player.

Cool I have one of those terrific "whole OS running in a VM" things too on my computer. It's a file browser, a software development platform, a configuration file tweaking utility, a temporary clipboard storage extension, a movie subtitles editor, a formatted data sanitizer, and it can be used to write theatre plays and rap lyrics as well! It's called notepad.exe

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if there are parts of iTunes where the source code was lost years ago, and they are now just blindly linking to a 5-10-15 year old object module...

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you claiming you haven't even linked against libraries from a proprietary compiler before?

Mate, you don't know when to stop, do you :-) the compiler - LLVM - is open source and guess who is the major contributor for the OSX port? And while it's highly unlikely that anyone apart from the compiler dev team builds its libraries from source, for the far far out case of a /. argument requiring it the source is available.

I really have to wonder, why are you clutching at straws with such irrelevant questions? The deletion is specific enough (music files from the library) that it's highly likely something in the iTunes codebase is responsible for it. A much simpler explanation would be that hunting hard-to-reproduce bugs in a monstrosity the size of iTunes is a long process that ties up some of the best resources and narrow-minded managers would have one of it if they can help it.

And as a parting hint - next time, if you want to argue about a similar topic, do not focus too narrowly access (or lack thereof) to another team's code, it's what someone who hasn't programmed, ever or for a geological age, would do. Modern revision control systems have evolved a lot, and a coder would give you a confused look then (hopefully) go *ah, an old guy.* Think instead of interactions between different teams' code and how devilish it it to debug them in an exceedingly large project.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[sjames]

Slow down and read the thread again *CAREFULLY* this time. I was clearly speaking of the general case . That is, the possibility that any software team anywhere working on anything might not be able to see all of the source that eventually makes up the program they're producing. So unless the only compiler in existence is LLVM, you're talking irrelevant nonsense.

In spite of that, I am willing to consider that you simply made an error that just happens to make you look like a braying ass. Thus, I am prepared to accept your apology.

I am well versed in several modern revision control systems. It's irrelevant to the question of linking against a library. Only a very inexperienced programmer wouldn't understand that. If I develop a library in my own repo that you have no access to, then toss the lib and header over the wall to you, you will have no way to see the source.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[Anonymous Coward]

There are three fundamental reasons you have no idea what you're talking about:

1) iTunes isn't a gigantic application with a ton of complexity and if they can't figure out the code in an application like that then it's time to rewrite the portions of it that deal with handling files anyway. If you've let it reach the point where you can no longer tell what's going on with simple tasks then it's time to fix that problem. Your technical debt has reached a left where drastic action should already have been taken some time ago.

2) You shouldn't even need to manually step back through the code from all calls to the delete function in most cases, it should be a case of producing a debug building and providing that to a customer (typically with an NDA and something to sweeten the deal like $100 iTunes credit or whatever) who does have a problem. This build should provide a full log of the stack, methods called, parameters passed showing exactly the path the code took to go wrong.

3) Stepping back through the code following all paths where such a method is called is rarely the chore you're pretending it is, especially in an application like iTunes. Realistically you're going to step back through the calls from delete and reach either the application entry point, or a method that is only called as a result of user action pretty quickly. Any developer above junior level should be capable of doing this kind of audit. There are even talls that build graphs of the call order to a specific method for you making it so easy to see how many paths there are, and how complex they are. It wont take long to eliminate those that most definitely aren't responsible and then properly audit those that might be to find the one that is.

The fact Apple with all it's billions is apparently unable to do anything of these things means the GP is absolute right, the engineers they have working on iTunes are massively incompetent, worse than developers at even your basic barely surviving company that pays it's developers only average salaries. There is no scenario where the iTunes devs get to get away with anything other than being called incompetent with this story.

Don't assume that just because you're an amateur/junior developer with no experience in working on applications like this and debugging them that everyone else is at this level. You wont get far as a programmer if you think you know everything when you clearly know very little. This sort of problem is being dealt with on a daily basis by various different companies all across the globe, the idea that Apple can't deal with it, but should also not be called incompetent is absolutely laughable with all the resources they have available.

Re:Seriously incompetent

[MrL0G1C]

Tut, my post was in no way a troll, everything I said is true and honest, the troll mod should be abandoned because people abuse it more often than they use it correctly it seems to me.

If someone deleted my tunes, should I not be annoyed? DRM is horrible, I never put up with DRM on my music or video. People that use itunes say it is bloated badly designed software so why shouldn't I say that it sounds awful?

FIRE TIM COOK

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE! FIRE TIM!!

He's done less than any of the other CEO's.

I know it's not politically correct but this guy's bad news.

Apple's lost their mojo thanks to him.

Re:FIRE TIM COOK

[Anonymous Coward]

The fuck? What does political correctness have to do with calling Cook a bad CEO?

Re:FIRE TIM COOK

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's gay, and some could cry homophobia if he was accused of being crap at his job.

Re:FIRE TIM COOK

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Because if we can label enough things as PC we can fulfill our claim that there's much PC.

Re:FIRE TIM COOK

[Anonymous Coward]

Because if we can label enough things as PC we can fulfill our claim that there's much PC.

Slashdot thought it was to un politically correct just to suggest we fire tim cook they deleted the original comment.
See?

Re:FIRE TIM COOK

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The original comment is still there.

Timmy's Plan For Apple Inc. Future

[Anonymous Coward]

Timmy does not like music, any music. He also hates iTunes (that competes with Apple Music -- he like Apple Music because you give him money to use it), iPod (hates it), iMac (hates it) and Macs (hates them because they compete against iPhone and are so, old).

Timmy's two-year plan is to kill off iTunes, iPods, and all Macs.

Really it is true, Google it.

Re:Timmy's Plan For Apple Inc. Future

[Anonymous Coward]

Timmy does not like music, any music. He also hates iTunes (that competes with Apple Music -- he like Apple Music because you give him money to use it), iPod (hates it), iMac (hates it) and Macs (hates them because they compete against iPhone and are so, old).

Timmy's two-year plan is to kill off iTunes, iPods, and all Macs.

Really it is true, Google it.

I'll Google no such thing. You're the one making these claims, the onus is on you to support your arguments.

Re:Timmy's Plan For Apple Inc. Future

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

I hear the Apple employees are told to write crap code too. Don't worry about bugs or glitches, just keep bloating the codebase.

"122GB of music"

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's start measuring our book collections in cubic meters.

Re:"122GB of music"

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Let's start measuring our book collections in cubic meters.

Or board feet per fortnight. Or maybe thickness versus color scale.

Re:"122GB of music"

[HornWumpus]

No. 'Library of Congress' remains the standard unit for book collections.

Cue the Abble fanbois in 3...2...1...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just owning all the Abble products isn't enough to make one completely ghey; you have to actually use them as intended. Even if tyhey DID jackoff wearing the iWatch, it wouldn't give them their pulse correctly since Abble has such a closed ecosystem, its not like GNU is gonna help them. HOWEVER Abble users switching to teh lunis is *proof* that homosexuality is a *choice* and IT CAN BE CURED The one time I went to the Abble store at the mall, the resident ghey Socialst came up to me in his Speedos and offered me a tiny cup of Froot Loops; he explained that sadly, they had to cut back on the portion size because they were running out of money. I politely turned them down because I wasn't sure what they were glazed with. And his iWatch had the wrong time.

There's no money..

[h8sg8s]

.. in people 'owning' their own music. This wouldn't be the first time Apple 'impaired' a function to drive consumer behavior in their favor.

Re: There's no money..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. A multi multi multi billion dollar company wants to write code to deliberately delete your music. Idiot

"cannot find," said iTunes.

[jclaer]

Then iTunes sent me to look for my music. I suppose I am guilty of skipping a few of the many iTunes version updates.

standard corporate bullshit answer #3

[citizenr]

Just like they didnt know why 'some of users laptops GPU died' for almost 4 years before admitting fault and reluctantly being forced to a recall.

"Small number of cases"

[JaneTheIgnorantSlut]

Weasel words. When I worked in support, if something failed 100% of the time we officially described the problem as "under some circumstances...".

122 GB of music for a composer is not that much

[Mass Overkiller]

I routinely have 250gb of music files and projects on my working laptop. As a musician I keep that much music. My iTunes library is about 10gb though. So it's not totally uncalled for that someone would have a huge amount of music if they are a composer.

Apple admitted ?!?!

[meerling]

Apple admitted there is a problem, and that "some" users were affected.
When you take into account Apples tendency to pretend there are never any issues, and silence everyone who tries to talk about them, and when they finally do say anything they downplay it to the extreme, this immediately makes me think it's a HUGE problem they can't suppress simply because they admitted it happens and there were actual users that got nailed.

(Is that an award length run on sentence, or does it not even qualify?)

Personally I banned itunes from my machines back when they started taking over other things and installing unwanted shovelware on the box without even asking permission. There are plenty of alternatives, even if they don't access the itunes store.

Re:Apple admitted ?!?!

[guruevi]

ITunes installing shovelware? You must have been using some seriously compromised sources. Apple simply admitted they have had some complaints but can't reproduce the issue. This is equally as likely a bug in the underlying hardware or operating system than an iTunes bug or maybe even user incompetence (corrupt library files doesn't mean the data actually disappears).

Holding it Wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know what the real cause will be.

I thought I was going crazy

[etinin]

I have been noticing some random iTunes tracks disappearing, much to my annoyance when I want to listen a specific album. Well, as a savy user, I kept thinking it was my fault, that I somehow made some mistake when importing the tracks. Apple owes some kind of apology and compensation to those users affected. Especially since it's going to be very hard to identify which specific tracks iTunes has deleted.

Incompetent?

[HiThere]

If they really don't know, then they've got to be incompetent. It's not enough to say what they are incompetent at, but at least at quality control.

Of course, they could be lying about not knowing, or the spokesman could be kept intentionally ignorant.

i've been there....

[resfilter]

i've never really used apple products, but my wife does the macbook iphone thing. we've had two experiences with it randomly deleting her shit.

first time (this was about a year ago, not sure what itunes version):

she got a new iphone, all was well. we wiped the old iphone. one day she dug up her old iphone, and decided to start using it to play music in her car. plugged it into the macbook.

itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files.

plugged her new phone in, it acted as if it had never seen it before, and asked if she'd like to sync. it then deleted all of the music on her new phone as well.

second time:

she'd been using iphoto to organize all of her pictures (many thousands of them)

fired up iphoto one morning, and all of her shit was gone, it was like she'd never used iphoto in the first place.

no sign of the monolithic 'iphoto store' file, or anything. no original pictures. gone.

there are two things my wife loves, pictures and music, and it systematically fucked her entire collection without warning. unfortunately many of these items had not been backed up. these are just my observations, i don't know why it would do these things, and i don't care. i no longer trust that peice of shit operating system or any of its devices, and i use incremental backups of her entire laptop using rsync now (not time machine, i don't trust it either)

Re: i've been there....

[Rosyna]

itunes asked if she'd like to sync with the new device. she said yes. it deleted all of the music on her computer, including physical files

This did not occur. iTunes does not permit an iOS device to become the "master device" for songs. It will only copy songs to the iOS device (except for purchased songs, which it copies to the existing iTunes library). It's actually a very common complaint that iTunes won't copy all songs off an iOS device.

Re:i've been there....

[tom229]

Did iTunes also break your shift key?

Re:i've been there....

[Anonymous Coward]

iTunes audio fingerprinted the music and discovered that it was a copyrighted song. It could not find a corresponding license on the machine.

Apple takes the reputation of its customers very seriously. Clearly there had been some kind of terrible mistake. In order to protect you from being considered an intternet copyright scofflaw iTunes removed the unlicensed song.

Now say "Thank Jobs" ten times and swear upon the holy fruit that you will be more careful in future.

Apple wants to help.

Apple is good.

Re:i've been there....

[MrKrillls]

And all this is why I'm averse to allowing any application to maintain a "helpful" data-base of my images or to obtain any control of my file system. I go with all manual backups to multiple physical locations under my control. No backup to the cloud. Especially no automated backups with syncing. There are too many stories out there of syncs that go the wrong way and delete everything local to match an erroneously empty directory in the cloud. As far as Apple goes, and I'm very far from a fan, I'd guess, but not bet, that they are making a good faith effort to sort this one out. But as others have noted, complexity is a bitch, and it will bite you. They have a lot to lose on this one after the bad press from their phone bricking incidents. I strongly suggested my girlfriend get rid of all connections to the Apple itunes and i-this and i-that systems on her computer to avoid this kind of disaster. This was after a related kind of screwup where a different automated convenience system kept making duplicates of her photos on her computer. Different supplier whos name I cannot recall. We got rid of that and cleaned up the mess. It was hours of stupid numbing work getting rid of sometimes dozens of needless dupes. I suspect she may have enabled some setting or oked something wrong, but the result was a lot of work for me. I have become very careful of "helpful" automation.

Re: i've been there....

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad you couldn't have use one of the several open-source duplicate-file-finding utilities to assist you in the aftermath.

Re:i've been there....

[Zanadou]

Probably not. Welcome to the new phenomena of what I call "lazy caps": all lower case-often with an occasional word written with a capital letter just to prove that their keyboard is indeed working.

And not, it's not mobile device text entry: if anything, those thing auto-capitalize the beginning of sentences, at least. No, it's the I-can-touch-type-faster-then-I-think-stream-of-conscious-keyboard-diarrhoea-using-my-pinky-fingers-slows-me-down-fuck-I-gotta-do-this-quickly-someone-is-WRONG-on-the-internet folks. I'm noticing it a lot more in the last year or so-even more so here at Slashdot.

(Yeah, I typed this all out with two fingers. ;) )

Glad I never trusted it

[dejitaru]

When itunes became a thing I was already an avid fan of winamp. I used it to manage all of my music and edit tags as needed. I think I tried itunes once because, well why not, but something about it scared me. Either all the software it was installing on top of it or I was too afraid of it screwing up all my id3tags. Though I never expected it to actually delete your music. Considering the number of unreleased and white labels, I could see it screwing up all my music.

Plex

[hedley]

Switched to plex and never looked back. Works streamed to your cell, and then on to a bt stereo in the car also. Joy. Ripping though, I still use itunes, and then move the media to the plex server.

H.

it happened to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iPad and an ipod . It happened to the ipod that's limited detail. Was on a win7 machine. Right after an iTunes update.

TOLD YA

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said it a million times. "Cloud" is just a new buzzword for a very old idea of storing your data on other people's servers, under THEIR control.

You have no idea what they are doing with the data, no idea if they are really backing it up until you need it and find out for yourself, or if they are encrypting it, etc. etc.

If you have an Internet connection, your own Server, and your own technical skills in house, then you already have everything you need to establish your own "cloud". NEVER trust a 3rd party with your data.

lets see

[Anonymous Coward]

composer, no backups, using apple stuff...

reading between the lines he is probably a guy who participates in risky homosexual behaviours, probably lives around san francisco, probably wont be installing gentoo anytime soon

i say nothing of value is lost

Happened to me

[lucm]

I had about 62GB in my music library. iTunes (which i only use to sync music on my iPod) deleted everything except the 10GB or so that was purchased on Apple store. .

I had a huge vinyl/cd collection to start with; when I liked an artist I used to buy the entire discography. So I grew my digital library and saw it as my own private Spotify. Put it on random and it's like a commercial-free radio that will never play Kanye West or Celine Dion.

I have a backup on Glacier and could re-rip stuff if I really wanted, but I probably won't. It's easier to use Google Play Music and it makes my whole iTunes/iPod setup obsolete. Live and learn.

Also: fuck Apple.

iTunes deleted years of podcasts on me...

[valley]

Several years back, I made the mistake of checking the option on my iPhone to "sync subscriptions" for podcasts. I later deleted a podcast from my phone, as I was all caught up with it and needed the screen real estate to make looking for other podcasts easier. When I next synced with iTunes, it deleted all past episodes I had stored on my Mac -- years worth of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. No warning, no recycle bin. Gone. And I wasn't backing up audio files via Time Machine because of their size. Hundreds of files gone. I posted on the Apple forums about what a huge hole this was (seriously, deleting hundreds of user files without warning with no undo is a major UX/UI failing). Never any response from Apple. I'm still angry about it. Even if I were to download all those files again (and since they're no longer in the iTunes feed, I would literally have to grab each one from the website, one by one, and then import them into iTunes, which would probably take days of clicking...), I would still have lost the metadata (play dates, counts). Plus there would be considerable bandwidth for both the Escape Pod site and me, in this age of looming data caps...

Then don't trust it to Apple!

[hucker75]

How stupid do you have to be to store your data on someone else's system? The cloud is a stupid idea. Store your files on YOUR property, then YOU can make sure it's safe and backed up.

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, Apple, there can't be that many places in iTunes that call File.Delete().

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Apple deleted ALL my music ~35,000 songs/playlists

[Anonymous Coward]

I lost ALL my music when my Cloud account was renewed (I had automatic renewal). When you go to the Apple "support" site and enter your issue, there is NO information or the information is from 5+ years ago. If you enter this issue or anything else similar, it is never posted on their "support" site. So there may be thousands+ of people who have this problem. iTunes/Apple does NOT let you post it. Yes, unbelievably, Apple deletes posts that say bad things about them. All I can say is Apple SUX. Don't do Apple.