“A blog post has been making the rounds since Thursday, saying that Apple Stole My Music. James Pinkstone, writing on his company’s blog, tells a tale of losing 122GB of music files because of Apple Music,” Kirk McElhearn writes for Macworld. “Plenty of websites are trumpeting this story, saying that Apple Music is the big bad wolf.”
“Neither Apple Music nor iCloud Music Library deletes music files,” McElhearn writes. “This simply doesn’t happen.”
“Something deleted his music files—including music he composed — and it’s hard to figure out what was responsible,” McElhearn writes. “But it wasn’t Apple Music, and Apple certainly did not ‘steal’ his music.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Once again, the bottom line: Backup, backup, backup (as Pinkstone did).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Maybe if the guy smoked a little less pot he wouldn’t have mistaken the delete key for the enter key.
I’m having terrible problems with iTunes at the moment. I keep finding the database massively corrupted. A song doesn’t play and when you look at the file it’s pointing to it’s a folder. I also get apps showing up in music, or songs that you click on and they play a movie. I have no idea what content I’ve actually lost or not.
It’s your porn collection that’s corrupting your files.
I understand the desire to make software that “covers all the bases”, but as with Time Machine, it gets so complicated internally with all the different options people have, that Time Machine volumes do get corrupted in many different ways.
I don’t know how music gets mashed up, but with multiple places that music gets stored and accessed, I can understand that it is no longer “simple.”
Simple systems work more reliably. Reliability in the end is one of the things Apple users really expect from their Macs & iOS. Apple should not forget it.
I would like to believe MDN’s take that “No, Apple Music doesn’t delete your music files.” Unfortunately, that is not the case. MDN is wrong. It appears that Apple does indeed delete your music files. See:
http://www.superiornewspaper.com/apple-music-feature-request-dont-remove-local-music-without-explicit-permission-9-to-5-mac/
This is for all you ficktards that voted me down.
Apple Confirms Music Deletion Glitch, Says Fix Incoming in Future iTunes Update
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/05/13/apple-confirms-music-deletion-fix-coming/
Some of you are pathetically blind to Apple’s screw-ups.
After I signed up for Apple Music, it scanned my library, uploaded anything it didn’t recognize. I then deleted my local library and recovered 100GB OS storage.
I do have a backup of my music, but I am happy that I don’t have to worry about it filling my storage.
That makes sense to me, especially since so many new devices don’t have huge hard drives anymore. I’m really enjoying Apple Music, as I can download an entire album and just delete it if it doesn’t meet my expectations.
This is a stupid article.
fta – “… Something deleted his music files—including music he composed—and it’s hard to figure out what was responsible. But it wasn’t Apple Music …”
Ok – this claim is made, but no proof is given. Please provide some proof or evidence that the Apple rep’s claim that “The software is functioning as intended…” is actually false. Apple said that the application deletes your music. Why am I supposed to trust McElhearn instead?
fta – “… iCloud Music Library may change tags and artwork… but it neither changes nor deletes any files in your iTunes library… “
How can it change tags, but not change files? And why is it changing tags anyways? Or artwork?
I don’t use Apple Music because I don’t trust it, but I have had iTunes change the artwork on huge chunks of my music. Why? I want the artwork that I scanned & uploaded, not what iTunes wants me to use. Why does Apple think it knows better than I do? And it is this sort of arrogance that makes me not trust Apple Music. I’ll let it go through a few more iterations before I trust it with my music.
The Apple Rep was either misinformed or misquoted. From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204962: “When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added. ”
So it is not Intended or Expected behavior for it to automatically delete your content.
Read the article. Not convinced.
As Novad says, further down, “We know that a normal behavior is to delete files from non-primary devices (for example an iPhone) in some cases while data is still safely stored on the MacBook at home. Why couldn’t there be a rare case where the primary device is accidently identified as a secondary device and have its data deleted???”
You can trust Apple Music with your stuff – I’m not taking the chance. It needs to go through a few more iterations first.
I have to wonder if maybe he has his music collection backed up to a faulty cloud service. I had a hell of a time last month with Box when the stupid service deleted masses of files from my main Mac. What triggered it was installing a new drive in my server and moving over the previous boot drive’s files then blessing it as the new boot system. That give Box a total conniption fit. The very kind but tech illiterate support staff at Box were worthless in solving the problem. I had a lovely backup to restore everything and enough wits and patience to work around Box’s blundering, restoring sanity once again.
Therefore, I can imagine the possibility of a messed up cloud backup service wreaking havoc on his tune collection. The lesson to have both local and off-site backups, not merely one or the other. We’re still in the Dark Age of Computing where bad coding is the standard.
User error/negligence can’t be understimated though. Most of the people I know STILL don’t have a single backup of their files other than iCloud, forget about regularly backed up external drives on and off-site.
I recently found that iTunes had ‘forgotten’ all of my music and playlists. I don’t think it was an Apple Music issue, but it’s the sort of thing that could have been blamed on all sorts of things.
The cure was to simply select the most recent iTunes Library.itl file from the ‘Previous iTunes Library’ and everything was instantly restored to how it was before.
Did Apple purposely delete music stored locally? Probably not but why doesn’t anybody here admit the possibility of a bug???
I’ve made a little research and there’s really an impressive quantity of people complaining about this exact problem (And not on anti-Apple sites). Everybody here on MDN has as only answer that it’s a user problem.
Just look here for example:
http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/debate-rages-over-whether-apple-music-automatically-deletes-users-owned-music-collections.1971399/
The article itself is completely useless… It says nothing, but take a look at the +200 comments.
We know that a normal behavior is to delete files from non-primary devices (for example an iPhone) in some cases while data is still safely stored on the MacBook at home. Why couldn’t there be a rare case where the primary device is accidently identified as a secondary device and have its data deleted???
“It just works” is long gone.
““It just works” is long gone.”
Sadly, this is very, very true.
And as you point out, it is known that data is removed from non-primary devices – couldn’t Apple Music make a mistake, and remove data from the primary device. Of course it can. Applications can screw up. I’m not trusting Apple Music with my stuff until it has gone through a few more iterations.
I’ve had so many problems over the year with music purchase from Apple becoming “Not Authorized” to play on my devices with no changes made on my part. Apple always fixed the issue, but why do I want to spend time to address it as a consumer. That’s I switched 100% to Amazon music and I’ve been very happy.
This is all I know.
Bought the SE iPhone on Day One.
Backed up all my files to Yosemite.
True tale: The only music synced to my new iPhone was music bought from iTunes.
Hundreds of ripped CDS, including album cover artwork — poof! MIA. Lost. Gone …
WFT Apple!!!
That would be WTF. 😕