Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Thirty four characters live here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
These two videos are an excellent introduction to audio signal theory.
Highly recommended to all readers enjoying this thread.
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)
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.