Now that's even worse than forcing Bono on you. Alway keep a back up.
lol or just torrent the entire discography.
Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
131–140 of 178 posts
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#132It's funny people are still learning this, but I guess some are younger. I have hundreds of CDs I started buying about 1992 or 1993 and did a big project at one point making MP3s and early on in the iTunes/iPod era they found their way into iTunes. I started playing around with MP3 Layer 2 and then Layer 3 around 1995-1996, but at that time it was still prohibitive to try and store your whole collection as hard drive…
I also have a few LPs but no turntable. Which one do you have, if I mays ask?
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is exactly how bureaucracies fail, by being unable to handle the exceptional states. 80% of the effort should be spent on how to handle the thing the automatic system didn’t.
Agree entirely. The bureaucratic tendency, though, is to see those edge cases as inconvenient inefficiencies that are just easier to ignore.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#134Earlier 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…
Isn't his backup his CDs and vinyl? I get the reason for maintaining another backup but your friend seems to be reasonably fine using Apple Music.
No, because they degrade.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#135Y'alls with iPhones should checkout foobar2000 (it's actually multi-platform and the best music player); but, notably, directly related to the article:
The iPhone foobar2000 version allows you, through its internal FTP server, to upload media in its native format (mp3,flac and many others) directly to the app. This means no more transcoding for iTunes, and all tags/filenames are retained. It also means your phone can act as a backup of your library.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Deduplicating backup software has existed for ages, they would only have a backup of each distinct file, so when A.mp3 is "silently changed" the backup software now has "A.mp3 (before)" and "A.mp3 (after)" etc. Look into borg, restic etc if interested. If you saw in your backup software that a shitload of files changed you would both be alerted of the "silent change" as well as able to revert it.
Okay, but you're now moving away from "How could people not know to make backups???" to "This problem could in principle be avoided by people who use specific types of backup software and maintain complete snapshots going back at least five years". Still a good idea, certainly, but it feels like we've moved well out of "holy shit" territory. (Also, isn't Apple's own built-in Time Machine exactly the sort of backup th…
I agree with you on the ease of use front. Someone should make a company to do all this shit in the background but not get rid of the "your computer" part. Offer a NAS or a Pi derivative and some companion software that wraps restic/Borg/whatever and handles all the hard parts for you.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Ma…
I have iTunes Match, but 1) it isn't free, 2) it doesn't seem to do what I want - and often mis-matches, and 3) it doesn't seem to play well with Apple Music songs. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to maintain a hybrid library that includes your (owned/library) songs as well as Apple Music (rented/streamed) songs and lets them coexist peacefully and easily sync and stream across devices.
I don't understand the part about why my suggestion wouldn't be a better system for cloud syncing and streaming a local Music (formerly iTunes) library, if you have one, across devices, which is the original context of this discussion. It would seem to solve the OP and PP issues. Pure streaming is clearly a different use case, as users only need to sync playlists and metadata and won't run into those problems in the first place.
The part I do understand is that Apple doesn't seem to care as much about local music libraries anymore, probably because they don't create recurring subscription revenue. And because Steve Jobs turned out to be wrong about people wanting to own rather than rent/stream music and video: renting/streaming is just too darned convenient, and manual curation is such a pain that most people don't want to deal with it - while automatic curation is buggy and often doesn't do what you want.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#138I remember even John Gruber (!) was complaining about something like this back in 2015. That matching functionality is something so brittle and suspicious that of course has to be avoided.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don’t change your files. iTunes / Apple Music match your with their catalog and basically flip a flag that says this song is in your library. If a song is in your library you can download the file on other devices, same as if you purchased the song from them. If I download the song from iTunes via Match it’s a DRM-ed version because they don’t upload files that match the music catalog so there’s no original to d…
I can guarantee you that they either currently do change your files, or did at some point in the past. My entire catalogue of music imported from physical CDs was switched to different files, with different metadata and all (overriding my manual classification), and sometimes replacing uncensored versions with radio-safe versions, etc, sometime after 2010. This caused me to stop buying music altogether.
if you import files in iTunes they get converted to aac
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are Dark Patterns the fault of the user or the company But you - and supposedly the other people downvoting me - don’t seem to realize that absolutely nothing has happened to the user’s original files. They simply misunderstood how to sync files to their other devices.
The user was led to expect that their data would be in Apple Music. At that point, it would be completely reasonable for them to delete all copies of the files themselves in the understanding that Apple Music would actually absorb and retain the content it claimed to have imported.
Ah, but the User would be wrong, because the MPAA and RIAA outsource copyright enforcement to everyone else. So business-wise, you have to assume that anything you "try to import" will be looked at as tainted, lest it put the company on the pedestal of "accomplice to copyright infringement".
You must consider every service provider a hostile entity. No exceptions.