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Apple Stole My Music

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141–150 of 472 posts

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#141
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…

Google drive has a switch in the options to expose a "Google Photos" folder, which contains the original versions of all your uploaded google photos. You can then download these photos with any google drive client. The photos you download have identical MD5 sums to the photos you uploaded - they're completely untouched.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#143
I sympathize with OP and I generally really hate Apple's direction when it comes to software and user experience ever since OS X Lion.

However, OP shouldn't claim that Apple 'stole' his music files. He signed up for a paid service and he should have checked how the service will affect his computer. We as users are responsible to know what software we're running on our machines and what it does to our data. I understand that a standard TOS agreement is ridiculously long and impractical to read, and I guess that's how we are trained to be lazy about protecting the integrity of our systems and our data, but that does not give OP the right to blame Apple for delivering exactly what they promised. I hate Apple but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim Apple stole OP's music.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#144
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…

Some people in this post are assuming that this is something iTunes does to everyone intentionally. Other people are saying this is not something iTunes has ever done to them. I'm not sure it's worth debating whether this practice is ethical or not unless we know whether iTunes will actually delete your MP3s under normal circumstances. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that iTunes is too hard to use.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#145
post #141
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…

Google drive has a switch in the options to expose a "Google Photos" folder, which contains the original versions of all your uploaded google photos. You can then download these photos with any google drive client. The photos you download have identical MD5 sums to the photos you uploaded - they're completely untouched.

The Drive client can download them, yes. You can also use Google Takeout and download all of the original files as well.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#147
post #84
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…

No -- you aren't alone. Whenever I connect my daughter's iPhone to iTunes (say to add more music) we take our lives in our hands. You get scary popups that ask you a question and provides two options -- neither of which is what you want. I don't know whether this is deliberate on the part of Apple to discourage the use of iTunes, or whether they really think that it works well and is intuitive. For anybody from Apple…

Itunes is the worst.

It can, without asking, delete the music from your device or your folders, reorganize your folders, rename your songs and reset their id3 tags.

The mentality of "our users are stupid, just do everything for them" seems pervasive throughout apple's products.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I stopped using anything from the i* suite after my first Mac when I learned that it messed up my folder structure. All my carefully organised music and photos were imported into an opaque database that gave me no visibility into how things were stored.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I owned my first MacBook 3 years ago. To me, the MacBook "just work" as much as any new Windows laptops I came across. So I'm clueless as to where did the phrase "just work" came from. Maybe Windows has improved over the years, or maybe a lot of things are done of the web now, the OS doesn't really matter as long as there is a browser.

You should try Windows 10, I've been Apple free for a while now. I'll never go back to OS X.

I don't know if I'm alone, but I find Windows 10 horrible. It consistently freezes on me for several seconds at a time (and usually when I'm doing something important), it takes longer to fully boot (background services seem to take way longer to start), it uses an incredible amount of CPU and disk in the background for no reason, the new Control Panel is impossible to sort through, and the overall UI/UX is a step backwards (IMO)--and all that without mentioning the privacy concerns. I'm really kicking myself for upgrading, because I thought Windows 7 was a really great OS. I ended up switching to Linux Mint, and have been very happy with it overall.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#150
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…

This is exactly why I use OneDrive to backup my photos along with the google photos thing. I've tried explaining my logic to several people but usual replies are "but I can still see them on the website!". "But you won't have the image files anymore." "But I can open the website and see the pics, right?" At this point I just sigh and give up. Oh there's a download all button too, but it does NOT return the original f…

> Oh there's a download all button too, but it does NOT return the original files.

It does return the original files.

Here are two files, one that got backed up off my phone by google photos, which I then downloaded from google drive, and one that I copied directly off my phone via USB:

   $ md5sum IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR*
    4bcb38a2e3869b4c769301c1664f5846  IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR (1).jpg
    4bcb38a2e3869b4c769301c1664f5846  IMG_20160504_160057648_HDR.jpg
The files are identical.
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