iirc, the Match feature downloads a higher quality AAC version of your lower quality MP3s. If you select lossless, it downloads a DRMed version. Also, iirc, the downloads are watermarked with your user details in the tags but I'm less sure of that as I last looked at it years ago.
Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
141–150 of 178 posts
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pa…
I can’t speak to the problems you alluded to since the system works well for me, but my pushback on the superiority claim is really just that I don’t think a ton of people have this problem. I think the average person is fine with the streaming services.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN users love apple though. Something which will never cease to mystify me. You would think relatively tech savvy people, programmers and computer super-users would utterly detest apple with a burning passion.
Why should I detest things that usually serve their intended purpose really well? I actually like macOS on my MacBook Pro, I don’t have to tinker with it to keep it working like my Linux desktop. I’ve been frustrated with iOS but I originally switched because I was tired of my phone being randomly off or otherwise having some unexpected behavior causing it to be unreliable. I can understand why other people prefer Wi…
I'll explain my POV. Getting Linux setup the way u want is work, but at least you can set it up the way you want. With macOS for example there are plenty of things that should be trivial do to on a computer that are made impossible or extremely difficult because the bean counters at apple want it that way. That type of thing is just an affront to me.
Another way of putting it would be macos is designed to do what apple wants the user to do, not what the user wants to do with their own machine. The only thing holding back Linux is the a amount of money and development being put into it, real technical issues. The people developing Linux are doing everything they can to empower their users and let them do as much as possible with their own machines. The developers at apple are intentionally hobbling their machines so they align better with the corps agendas.
I could probably survive and do my job on apple. But its the principle of it. These corps are just so slimy and unethical. I would feel dirty, and the artificial restrictions would constantly piss me off. An honest error or bug is much more palatable.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#144Earlier 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.
Your experience matches mine. Quite frustrating.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#145No post body was provided.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#146Earlier 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.
I think there was a bug in an early release of the matching feature that replaced the files, but it hasn't done that in ages (unless it's become buggy again).
Years ago I let it match all my content, backed up my original files, deleted them from disk, then let iTunes pull down the higher quality matched versions.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a different experience, on export my files were all in the original encoding. The value of Google Play Music was that you could upload files. I have also never had any files replaced. I have enjoyed self hosted solutions since YouTube Music broke the smart Playlist and integration for uploaded files with steaming files.
When GPM launched, there was definitely no deduplication in place. Even if two users uploaded the same file, there would be two copies — more if you count replication and RS-encoding. It was so because... somebody ordered so. Perhaps things changed later, but I'm skeptical, because the "somebodies" never change. Also, as recently as a couple of years ago, I noticed broken metadata/cover art in my library that I actua…
I know for a fact that YTM still has poor metadata support, the only way to fix it is to reupload the entire file. That's a huge reason why I moved to a self hosted solution. I know there were multiple cases where the metadata was wrong and two separate versions of a song were tagged as the same track. But I never lost any data. I would recommend doing a takeout and exporting all the songs if possible.
I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side, otherwise even a 100,000 song cap would be too much data to host for free. Google doesn't play ads on uploaded tracks. Google stores not-transcoded music files and has since "Google Music". When GPM first came out, it was a storage locker and felt more like direct competition to Grooveshark than iTunes.
Record companies seem to have a very tight not just on the songs, but also the metadata surrounding them. No service really offers the "radio mode" or suggested tracks for local playback, from what I found. I'd happily give a company playback metadata if in return I got that feature back. I wonder if Pandora has patents for certain parts of music recommendation algorithms. Spotify and YTM can rely heavily on user-generated music connections, but maybe that is why it can't work for local/uploaded files.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are Dark Patterns the fault of the user or the company ?
> 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.
[deleted]
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#149It'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…
Vinyl isn't making a comeback because of mastering or fidelity issues. It's making a comeback because people like the ritual of putting a disc on a platter and having to focus on listening to it. It's a different form of engagement with the music than the endless, pre-curated stream of singles that are the default way of using streaming services.
For audiophiles (and the record snobs who end up being tastemakers) it’s both.
Re: Apple Music deletes your original songs and replaces them with DRM'd versions
#150Earlier 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…
Not even thinking about whether the rip is bit perfect there's no expectation Apple even keeps serving up the version of the master you originally bought and want to keep. It's not even about the rip, it's that they might swap in a rip taken from a different version of the recording.
Many albums get remastered.. most of these cloud services will just drop in the new version and the old one is gone. IIRC Apple might be pretty good about this, but you still don't want to surrender control.
In any case there have been many albums where the remaster has worse audio quality than the original. If you bought the original you might really want to hang onto that version.
The most egregious form of that kind of thing is things like movies like Star Wars where the later editions are different edits of the movie. If you wanted the original you wouldn't be happy your copy was swapped out with the new edit.
In the case of music this is often just remasters having a lot more dynamic range compression and heavily boosted levels, but that can still be very objectionable.