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Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

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Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#101

Post by BuildTheRobots »

kevinfiol wrote: post #91
extr0pian wrote: post #13

I had my entire music collection stored on Google Play Music for a time, at one point being my only backup. When I tried to export my music collection, I discovered that not only were the file names and folder structures completely messed up, but I would sometimes get lower bitrate version of the songs or songs with "clean" lyrics - which I know for a fact wasn't what I had originally uploaded. I refuse to use music…

Hey, I can agree with that! I still keep an MP3/FLAC collection I've been building since 2005-ish (when I was a teen). A lot of music has come and gone, but one thing that hasn't changed is that I still use foobar2000[1] on my personal computer to access my collection. Last year, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM for cheap + an old SSD I had laying around, installed OpenMediaVault[2] on it, connected it to my…

FYI to anyone else currently using Plex but annoyed with its inability to stream music nicely, there's a separate app called PlexAmp (android and iOS) which works much better.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#102

Post by swayvil »

endigma wrote: post #74
blowski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network strea…

I wish a company like synology who operates in this space would drive marketing hard to try and get through this barrier. We're at a point in the world now where billions of people rely on google/apple/microsoft/whatever to do their jobs, and bring that reliance home with them and store their treasured photos or music or videos on these services that could ban them without recourse without a second thought. Reminds m…

When you have a machine-learning thingy to do your managing for you it's a golden miracle.

But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially.

So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#103

Post by justinator »

brndiinoo "Not to be lost in the shuffle of comments, this users seems useful:

If you turn off Sync Library in the Apple Music settings then plug into iTunes and sync there again then all that data will come back.

Sync library is basically asking them to do exactly what you described so it is more available across all devices without having to use iTunes

If you end your subscription then it does delete that data that was being streamed like created playlists which is main complaint of missing music

They don't revoke your rights to those songs or make you buy them again. You just need to sync it to iTunes again. Everyone gets confused on that process

Source: used to work for Apple Support"

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#104

Post by blowski »

FabHK wrote: post #73
blowski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend is in his 60s who is not very technical, but is very into music. He has 1000s of (purchased) CDs and vinyl. He has ripped a lot of it onto a local hard drive. I can see how he might think Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files. It seems a failing of modern technology that he needs to understand backup in the sense of bits on a magnetic disk is different to being able to access the files as a network strea…

Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not re…

The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices.

As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits.

But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog rock band - it goes wrong more frequently. It can't find the original album, but finds one the algorithm it thinks is close enough, but is actually a studio recording of a tribute band.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#105

Post by [deleted] »

blowski wrote: post #104
FabHK wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would he be able to, or want to, distinguish his particular rip of an album from Apple's rip of an album? If he doesn't, then for all practical purpose Apple Music _is_ a backup of those files, IIUC. The ones that Apple recognizes will be "replaced" by Apple's rip (on synced devices and/or, if he ever deletes the original file, on the original device), often in higher quality, btw, and the ones that Apple does not re…

The naive mental model of how this works is that Apple is taking the files he ripped onto his hard drive, storing them in the cloud, and then streaming them over the internet to his other devices. As you say, this is effectively what happens most of the time. The quality and consistency is so high that nobody's going to notice a few flipped bits. But for a niche album - a semi-official bootleg of an obscure 70s prog…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#106

Post by dagmx »

mikece wrote: post #2

In the case cited in the Reddit link, having files you legitimately own DRMed, replaced, or deleted seems like a pretty clear illegal act. I think the argument could be made that Apple could be charged with something worse than ransomware (since that merely encrypts your files and doesn't change, delete, or prevent them from being used as before once they are unencrypted).

In this case, the user is mistaken. It didn’t replace their local files.

They synced the files to a different machine, and the service as stated, gives you what it considers de-duplicated files.

It’s not a music backup service, and it’s very clear about that. It’s an “upload your own stuff, and we’ll only host what’s not already in our library”

Granted it does overly aggressively match songs sometimes, but it still doesn’t delete your content.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#108

Post by acdha »

musicale wrote: post #72
smcl wrote: post #53

Other problems include: - deleting songs which were on my computer, but which didn't exist in apple's catalogue waaaay back when I originally signed up. That's long gone, but it still bothered me. - letting me add and listen to albums for months/years, then suddenly marking one or more songs in that album as "not available" (Life Aquatic soundtrack has this, for me) - relisting albums somehow, sometimes while leaving…

> do so in a way that I could listen to it on the go without having to carry an MP3 player Unfortunately (as OP noted) syncing through Apple Music streaming means that you get the Apple Music interpretation of your library rather than your actual library. A (mostly vastly) superior system for users would be if they gave you a terabyte of cloud storage for free and allowed you to upload and stream your actual music li…

> A (mostly vastly) superior system for users would be if they gave you a terabyte of cloud storage for free and allowed you to upload and stream your actual music library. Didn't Google's cloud music player used to work this way? The main user down side is that uploading your library for the first time takes forever. And from the service provider perspective it wastes a lot of storage and is costly.

That's iTunes Match: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

It works really well for the parts of your collection which aren't available on streaming services — for example, I have some obscure records, soundboard recordings which the artist released on their website but didn't put on a label, etc. It's much better on precision than the described Apple Music feature — it either matched entirely or uploaded but I've never found it to have mis-identified a track.

I would disagree with the “mostly vastly superior” label, however, since it's really only better for [generally us older] people who have a ton of existing music — someone who only uses streaming services or sites like YouTube won't have much saved locally and may never have owned a CD.

It does that optimization which you're describing, as well. MP3.com was sued because licensing but Apple has both existing business agreements and a lot more lawyers. When you look at tracks it'll show the status as an exact match or an upload — in my case, it matched basically everything I got off of eMusic back in the day but many of the independent tracks which bands had released and some CDs had to be uploaded.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#109

Post by falsenapkin »

My favorite Apple Music oddity: I imported an album for which I have the MP3s from Bandcamp, however on the streaming side the album is in some sort of limbo where the service is aware of it but it's not available in my country. As a result, I can't listen to the album despite possessing the files. On my phone I can't even find the album easily and if I do I get a not authorized message.

Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions

#110

Post by blowski »

swayvil wrote: post #102
endigma wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish a company like synology who operates in this space would drive marketing hard to try and get through this barrier. We're at a point in the world now where billions of people rely on google/apple/microsoft/whatever to do their jobs, and bring that reliance home with them and store their treasured photos or music or videos on these services that could ban them without recourse without a second thought. Reminds m…

When you have a machine-learning thingy to do your managing for you it's a golden miracle. But every exception that you acknowledge and address degrades that miraculous functioning. Exponentially. So there's a strong incentive to let 99% accuracy be good enough. And to let the exception-cases go completely to oblivion.

Edge cases aren't frequent enough to have a competitive edge of not having them. Too bad for you when you're the edge case.

Backing people's files up for them on my USB storage makes me feel like the aircon repairman in the Terry Gilliam film, Brazil.

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