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Apple Stole My Music

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Re: Apple Stole My Music

#131

Post by dTal »

gp7 wrote: post #45

wavs having "more samples" is a new one to me. Neat.

It's... a misleading statement. Usually technically incorrect. Possibly technically correct in this instance. But philosophically true for the purposes of the article.

WAVs support sampling rates up to 192khz, whereas mp3 only supports up to 48khz. However, you're unlikely to come across anything higher than 48khz anyway unless you specifically look for it, or record it yourself (as the author did).

Sampling rate has (basically) no effect on audio quality beyond the highest frequency the file can contain - you can drop the sampling rate right the way down to 8khz and it'll just sound a bit muffled but otherwise fine. The primary reason to prefer WAV files over MP3 is that encoding something to MP3 irreversibly mangles it, and the author would be justified in being extremely pissed off that Apple decided to unilaterally do this and delete the originals. It would be like deleting someone's RAW photos and providing Facebook-sized jpegs as replacement, or deleting their home movies and offering back gifs of them. Apple have committed a cardinal sin here, the seriousness of which can't really be overstated.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#133

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

givinguflac wrote: post #80
funkyy wrote: post #75

I am surprised at people trying to rationale Apples wrongdoing by pointing at Google and bringing some crazy examples. There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, b…

God forbid there is a bug in software! This article is crap, maybe he ran into an issue but I've helped over a dozen people get setup on Apple Music and not once has there been file deletion. I am very skeptical that theoretical phone rep said any of these things either. Obviously there is a bug that needs fixing, but this is definitely not a platform wide attempt to delete anyone's data.

A few years ago, after a couple of weeks of ripping my CD collection to FLAC, I decided to import it into iTunes.

What happened next was an epic fail exactly like the article describes - iTunes trashed my collection, "organised" the files in it in ways that were buggy and just plain wrong, and turned two weeks of part time effort into completely wasted time.

This was before iCloud, and fortunately I keep my own music on a separate disk, so it didn't try to trash that too.

In a sense I was lucky. Two wasted weeks is a learning experience. Two years would have been heartbreaking.

Two decades? I. Can't. Even.

Since then I haven't allowed iTunes anywhere near my FLAC collection. I've also warned anyone with a music collection to never, ever to allow iTunes anywhere near it.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#134

Post by preetbhinder »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #114

Proprietary software working against the interests of the user is not really surprising. What does surprises is how visible and immediate the effects are. Seriously, just use free software.

While free software is good, the real problem is not being in control of your data and trusting the cloud blindly.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#135

Post by chimeracoder »

carlmcqueen wrote: post #110
acdha wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One major flaw: Dropbox on iOS rotates the image data and resets the EXIF orientation header when it finds a rotated file. If you've ever used a different sync path you'll end up with a bunch of duplicate images with different hashes.

I have a lot of duplicate images from dropbox but I'd never known why until now. It just required me to get an additional app not by dropbox that evaluates images and deletes duplicates which took me a long time to find a good one as terrifying as that process is.

Which one did you use? I have had the same problem.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#136

Post by trvz »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #119
rossng wrote: post #74

Every time I am asked to set up someone's Apple device, I find it incredibly difficult to: * Get it synced properly * Determine what is stored in iCloud/on-device * Ensure that device contents are actually backed-up, unless done manually * Set up simple things like email accounts Just a month or two ago, I was helping someone whose iTunes music wouldn't sync to their iPhone. It turned out that, when they signed up to…

My iPhone currently has two apps that somehow failed to install, and I can't delete them or open them. I tried rebooting the phone, signing in and out of the Apple store, all to no avail.

Also try force rebooting your device by pressing the home and sleep buttons simultaneously for several seconds.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#137

Post by mapt »

speeder wrote: post #94
hudo wrote: post #15

Similar what happened to me years ago - i got new iphone, installed itunes, it synced all local files. Few weeks later, i de-synced the phone or something like that, and all my local files were gone! Still not sure how or why, there were no warnings or anything. From that day, i stay as far as possible from iTunes and similar "smart music sync" apps. Spotify doesn't see my local music collection, and vice versa. All…

I had an iPod that I won in a contest ( I don't think Apple hardware is ever worth its price, wouldn't buy one ). My sister borrows my iPod, plugs on her Windoes machine that had iTunes, and it offers to sync, and she clicks "ok" on autopilot. ITunes couldn't recognize the iPod, since it was mine, not hers, and decide thr best course of action is wipe it clean...

My mother has an iPod she bought to listen to music. She interfaces through Itunes, and doesn't know what a file is. She's bought maybe 250 tracks from Itunes, out of a 2500 track library. She is not especially emotionally stable.

We finally bought her a new computer.

She plugged it in to charge it. The iPod wiped itself clean. She had not even installed Itunes on the new PC yet. It took us a solid day and a half to get through her traumatic reaction and get the music back on with the new Itunes install through a thumb drive, using Windows Explorer and a new 'import library' pass to bypass Itunes' asinine UX decisions.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#139

Post by don_draper »

buro9 wrote: post #24

It's worth noting that Google Photos actually does something similar... the photos are "backed up" even in their "original" form... but I don't believe it's possible to actually restore (download all) from Google Photos. I thankfully have a local backup of the photos I took, but when a phrase like "backup" is used, it is implicit and understood that there is a "restore" mechanism. Google Photos lacks a "restore" mech…

Any UI that is not honest with users is a bad thing. I use this service and I know that my original is no longer there when I allow Google to delete my local files but maybe i'm the exception. I will add that it depends on your perspective as to how you see this. You can look at how easy Google makes it to take photos on your phone and then have them all backed up and available with a click of a button. And in addition you can look at how hard it used to be to do anything like that (my grandparents never had photos when they lived in Italy because the town they lived in didn't have any photographers). If you see it through that lens then it's awesome.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#140

Post by topdownjimmy »

Terretta wrote: post #36

Apple iTunes Match (and Apple Music) subscriber, with 23,000 hand ripped songs, only about 18,000 able to exact match by Apple, 5,000 are less common versions. Also have enabled iCloud Music Library. Note these are three different services, and iCloud Music Library has been the most likely culprit for monkeying with your music, not Apple Music. The combo of all three has deleted or auto-replaced exactly zero of my cu…

I had the same thought: Is this an "Apple Music problem" or an "iTunes Match problem"? The article is fuzzy on the details as far as I can tell.
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