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Apple Stole My Music

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Re: Apple Stole My Music

#231

Post by m_fayer »

mtreis86 wrote: post #147
pjsg wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because at a conceptual level, a "general purpose computer" is far from an ideal device for rent extraction.

If your user is stupid, they won't be able to manage a general purpose computer but will instead require a well-controlled computing appliance that will dutifully collect all the rents its creators can get away with.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#233

Post by mjw_byrne »

I've been telling people for a long time to avoid Apple because it's an organisation which has demonstrated a pattern of contempt - to its customers, to its competitors, to the developers who use its app store and to the courts. The replies I get are so depressingly apathetic: "but the iPhone is nice"; "I like how simple it is to use"; "the design is so pretty". How can people be so easily charmed into bending over for out-of-control megalomaniacs? Maybe the secret to Hitler's popularity was the uniforms, which were admittedly really snazzy (Godwin's law, I know, I know...)

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#235

Post by Bartweiss »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #133
givinguflac wrote: post #80

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…

My first attempt at syncing an old iPod to a new machine saw a similar outcome. Aside from the slow and unsuccessful "auto-transfer" attempt between the devices, iTunes promptly decided to rearrange and relabel everything I had.

For a live music fan, that's a disaster. Many thousands of live performances pulled out of their identifying folders because they had similar metadata. A significant number of labelled, sorted tracks pushed to "unknown artist". Random, inaccurate assignments of album covers.

Suffice to say, it was easier to uninstall iTunes and restore from a hard backup. One of the perks of smartphones is that I can get music onto my device without even considering iTunes, and I can't imagine giving it another shot.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#236

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #133
givinguflac wrote: post #80

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…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#237

Post by Kadin »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #174

This is exactly why I've held onto all my CDs, and why I continue to buy the majority of my music in a physical format. I once had Apple ... iTunes match? iCloud? I can't even remember what it was called ... decide that an Eminem album I had was too racy and serve me a censored, unlistenable version instead. And the complexity involved in keeping any kind of sizeable music library in check using iTunes is overwhelmin…

MediaMonkey and Fidelia are the two products that seem to be tossed around most frequently as iTunes alternatives, and which seem to be reasonably close to feature-parity (at least, as music players; they obviously don't do all the garbage that Apple has stuffed into iTunes related to the iPhone). If you want to basically get back to what iTunes was originally ("rip, mix, burn" plus a good music player and organizer), those are probably the best bets.

Personally, I've been slowly moving to having my main music collection on a home server, and then distributing it out to clients via Plex. I'm not 100% pleased with the web interface compared to iTunes' thick-client interface, but as iTunes' UI has gotten worse over time and Plex's has gotten better, they're starting to approach each other in terms of usability.

The main complaint I have with Plex right now is that there's not an option to specify the quality of the streamed music. It will do realtime transcoding (so you can store lossless CD rips on the server), but the destination format is hardcoded based on the client (I think web clients get 256 kb/s MP3, Android gets something else, etc.). There's an open feature request to let the user select it as a preference, and allow different codec/bitrate combinations based on whether the client is on the LAN, on WAN, or on mobile.

Plex is, IMO, the best game in town for approximating the functionality of a proprietary ecosystem (play all your stuff on all your devices anywhere) but without the lock-in. You do need to be a reasonably intelligent person to set it up, though.

EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that MediaMonkey no longer works on recent versions of Mac OS X, but that Swinsian (http://swinsian.com/) is the new hotness anyway. Can't vouch for it, but it looks good.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#238

Post by zeveb »

leephillips wrote: post #219
bittercynic wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has gotten worse over time as well. It used to be you could mount your phone's storage as a mass storage device, but now (as far as I can tell) MTP is the only option.

Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this? After I figured out where the filesystem was mounted (a bit of a pain), I could use it like a normal mount, as if it were an external USB drive.

> Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this?

For the longest time MTP & Linux was terribly painful, verging on unusable, while mass storage worked perfectly. It bit when I upgraded my Nexus phone and discovered I couldn't get to the files stored on it.

Fortunately, all seems to work well now.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#239

Post by jonconley »

I've had this same thing happen.

Not only do I have countless files gone, if you let the subscription lapse... You don't get your music back and it wasn't there when I renewed.

Also, the cellular providers have to love how much of my own music I'm downloading over their costly data services.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#240

Post by drbawb »

iTunes is the driving reason behind why I got rid of my iDevices.

First of all using iTunes for Windows has a way of making its users feel like something of an afterthought.

Secondly I was always scared to sync my devices. Is this the day it tries to undo my jailbreak? Is this the day that deleting a playlist actually removes all the songs from my device? Is this the day that it removes an app I depend on because Apple decided to kick it out of the app store?

Somewhat relatedly I never felt comfortable plugging my iPhone into my secondary computer. The whole process of authorization and syncing is just horribly opaque.

It's some of the most opaque software I've ever had the displeasure of using. How they managed to fuck up a file copy[1] so badly is beyond me.

Android isn't without it's own faults, but at least it feels like it's own independent device, with its own copy of my library. I don't want a complicated sync mechanism: I want to put this new album onto my phone.

[1]: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_dop

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