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Apple Stole My Music

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Re: Apple Stole My Music

#261
post #151
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…

I got my parents an iPad mini recently and some of the contacts on my mom's phone sync and some of them don't. I am a developer and love tinkering with computers but for the love of me not figure out how to fix this.

I recently spent a good chunk of a day troubleshooting the problem "when certain people message my account on Apple Mail, I get the message twice."

Confirmed that it wasn't user error, and was common, never made got another inch of headway. My eventual diagnosis was "at least you're getting the message!"

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#262
post #45

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

Wav is (normally, unless already corrupted) an uncompressed, lossless, audio format. The OP's statement was a little off, but the premise is correct.

Mp3 is lossy. Many audiophiles and audio engineers argue that Mp3 actually sounds better (the compression gives the drums a "crunch" not normally present), but the point is you can go from WAV to Mp3, but you can't go back the other way around. Apple is irrevocably damaging some of his files.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#263
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…

is this related to Apple Music use? I have never encountered this problem with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod. I have music on each and separate settings for all four devices and never once has it asked to delete, let alone with a popup.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#264
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…

>Yet everyone tells me that their Apple devices 'just work'. I don't have the same experience - I find their behaviour to be utterly opaque and non-deterministic. Am I alone? Apple devices haven't "just worked" in over a decade. It's a testament to apples marketing that people still think this.

I think we need to make some distinctions here. My Macs and iPhones have proven incredibly durable, reliable, and flexible.

It's the syncing services, specifically, that Apple is screwing up. They never figured this stuff out, even under Steve Jobs.

> Fortune magazine reported that during the summer of 2008, after MobileMe had launched to mostly negative reviews, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to a meeting in the Town Hall auditorium at 4 Infinite Loop. After asking them "what MobileMe is supposed to do", when someone answered, Jobs reportedly shot back, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#265
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…

I recommend Android for anyone in a position to change. I plug my Android phone into my Linux laptop. The phone's filesystem is mounted. I move, copy, delete whatever music and photos I want. Dead simple and rational. I put Flickr on the phone. Photos I take with the phone are automatically backed up to Flickr, and I can see them from anywhere.

I make Android and iOS apps.

But only because people want me to and pay for it... I wouldn't inflict the trauma that is using these on anyone.

I had problems with every single Android I owned, here is the current one:

1. Super slow, even after reformatting everything and reinstalling, it is not even a cheap phone.

2. Terrible interfaces overall, specially as they keep removing physical buttons, and apps started to shove important buttons (like "menu") in random places.

3. The interface thread seemly is prone to freezing, for example yesterday I wanted to use youtube, and the interface froze, and then suddenly opened a video I didn't wanted, and started playing full blast volume and waking people up, and I couldn't figure how to close the damn video, and then suddenly it crashed.

4. This all applies to the actual phone parts... more than once I had to quickly dial someone for some emergency reason (not life or death, but still emergency), and the phone app decide to be slow, or crash, or reboot, and so on.

5. Had the phone app crash on me while I was actually talking to someone.

And this is just my personal phone, in other phones I had one that I had to reinstall and the phone antenna stopped working after the reinstall (it needed a custom antenna driver, that I had to track down on internet and install...), random reboots, slow, extremely fast draining of the battery, specially if you made some mistake like leave a GPS-enabled app running, nevermind the fact that the OS itself is so crap, that every manufacturer ship the phone with several third party apps to fix OS problems (memory managers and defragmenters, app killers, temporary file cleaners, and so on...)

iPhone has another set of problems, but still is problematic. I personally would never buy one (my current client I am testing his iOS code on a device he provided to me...)

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#266

> "Amber relayed to me that she’s had to suffer through many calls from people who cancelled their Apple Music subscription after the free, three-month trial, only to discover that all of their own music files had been deleted and there was no way to get them back." The Apple Music three month trial had a positive affect on my listening habits. I tried it, hoping to discover new music. But the UX was a slog. No easy…

The problem with Spotify is 25% of their library has that horrible UMG watermark on it. It makes any UMG music before 2013 unlistenable. Apparently, UMG fixed the problem on their side but Spotify don't give enough of a damn about quality to redownload the UMG library.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#267
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Dropbox app has a camera roll auto-upload feature. It's reliable, full-resolution image file backup and works for iOS and Android. iCloud Photos is the worst: Last time I tried to download all my iCloud Photos/Videos (~1000) from the website it turned out to be impossible: You can download a few, but after 200 or so you just get server errors. And it always chokes on videos, stopping before having finished downlo…

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.

n.b. if anyone at Dropbox sees this or others want to reference it, here's the ticket: https://dropbox.zendesk.com/requests/3750448

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#268
post #92
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. iTunes is probably the worst piece of widely used software out there. It's just a UX nightmare, hard to grasp how to do things, almost impossible to grasp what the consequences of doing things are.

^ 100% agree, it is literally the worst UX design ever!

I'm currently using the 3 month free trial and every time I use it i have to tell myself "it's free money, just 1 more month until I switch back to spotify".

For example, the playlists I create on my laptop don't sync whatsoever with my phone. I spent a little time trying to research how to sync them and just said screw it.

On what planet does a user not want their playlists automatically synced between devices, let alone making that the default option?

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#269
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…

It "just works" if you fully buy into the ecosystem. i.e. all content stored in iCloud nothing synced via cable etc. I happen to do this since i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months and it's just easier to pick up a new one, sign in and let it set itself up exactly as the old one. But anything that deviates from this workflow, you tend to run into problems.

> i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months

umm... what?

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