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Apple Stole My Music

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Re: Apple Stole My Music

#251

Post by emodendroket »

davidhariri wrote: post #21

I believe there's a setting when you initialize your library that allows iTunes to manage your library. If this is turned on, when you drag a file into iTunes, Apple copies the file into its own local storage so you have two copies of it. If you delete a file in iTunes it will delete it's local copy. Usually digital collectors will have this turned off if they're using iTunes since they like to organize and name thei…

What if I want iTunes to manage the structure/location of my music, but without modifying the files themselves? That's what I thought "Manage my library" was supposed to do.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#252

Post by Bartweiss »

gglitch wrote: post #229
mtreis86 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only just started using a mac/iphone after many years of only using Linux and Android, and my impression is that although they'd object to the language, yes, that's pretty precisely their business model, and its an insane success. I'm not saying most people actually are stupid, but I'm saying that probably the set of people who either (a) are not stupid and want their computer to do something different than what iT…

Although (b) is small, it does tend to produce truly vocal enemies enemies of the company.

I had the joy of buying a product that Apple swears doesn't exist ("Our records say we never made a machine with that serial number, so I'm not allowed to put you into the support system.") Three dead logic boards later, I'm done with the company altogether.

I'd like to think that with market penetration nearly complete, Apple will start to face consequences for this. They're depending on beating competitors and pushing upgrades now (instead of selling to new buyers), so lost customers are a bigger threat. I'm not holding my breath, though, it's just too rare.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#253

Post by zo7 »

mjw_byrne wrote: post #233

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 f…

Yeah you can't really be patronizing to people who prefer Apple products when you're contrasting a consumer tech company with a genocidal fascist regime.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#254

Post by Bartweiss »

badloginagain wrote: post #245
rossng wrote: 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've always been a Windows/Linux guy, and I never understood the Apple "Just works" motto, because my experience has been largely the same as the issues you've laid out. iTunes has always been the worst user experience, both for myself and setting it up for the less technically inclined. I've been a firm "no-Apple" camper because Apple products doesn't give you the control if you need it . For an obsessive music fan,…

In my experience, Apple is the living embodiment of The Hitchhiker's Guide's "things that cannot possibly go wrong".

> The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

They might be slightly more reliable in their most standard use case, but you're doomed at the smallest hiccup.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#255

Post by danielweber »

delinka wrote: post #8
onion2k wrote: post #5

I can't think of a single reason why Apple would want to delete the files from the user's computer apart from an intent to lock the user in to the service by making it tremendously hard to leave. That's the black hole of UI dark patterns.

"I can't think of a single reason why Apple would want to delete the files from the user's computer..." Well, to save precious local storage space of course. Apple's just being helpful here. But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong - "I know! Let's save the user some space by serving all their music from the cloud!" The moment that file deletion came up in the design, the option to opt-in should have been…

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=...

I often find myself saying, “I bet somebody got a really nice bonus for that feature.”

“That feature” is something aggressively user-hostile . . .

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#256

Post by wlesieutre »

falcolas wrote: post #190
simonster wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But other people have posted here and said they enabled Apple Music and their music was not deleted, so clearly this doesn't happen under all circumstances, and this wouldn't be the first time a technical support representative was wrong. This is a pretty extraordinary claim and I'm not really willing to believe everyone loses all their local music when they turn on Apple Music without more data to confirm.

Another point of data in favor of "they deleted my music" here. And when they did it, they were only matching on the file metadata, so the album they removed was truly lost, since I got some weird techno album in its place. Thankfully, it's one I can recover from a CD, when I find it again.

Thanks for the confirmation. I've been weighing my options between Apple Music and Spotify Premium and that makes up my mind. iTunes is enough of a pain in the ass without worrying about whether it'll delete my music collection.

The 3-month premium promotion that Spotify is running doesn't hurt either.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#257

Post by mjw_byrne »

zo7 wrote: post #253
mjw_byrne wrote: post #233

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 f…

Yeah you can't really be patronizing to people who prefer Apple products when you're contrasting a consumer tech company with a genocidal fascist regime.

Sarcasm

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#258

Post by snowwrestler »

I like a lot of what Apple does. I love their computers and phones. I've posted here numerous times about that.

But I have not turned on Apple Music, or iCloud Photos, for this very reason. Cloud syncing services are a DISASTER for Apple.

I recently bought my wife an iPhone SE, and upgraded some older computers to El Cap--fresh install + migrate files so I could get a clean start. But turning on the cloud services, and configuring them to do what I expect, was so complicated and scary that I just gave up. I'm syncing Safari bookmarks and Notes, and that's it.

And even the Notes are a mess. I'm stuck with separate local and iCloud folders of notes, because I simply don't trust Apple to not screw up or delete my local notes in the course of trying to sync them.

Rule #1, #2, #3 of cloud syncing should be "do no harm." DropBox has largely figured this out. Apple has not.

It's funny to think back to when Steve Jobs said that DropBox is a feature, not a business. Well, it's a feature I use and happily pay for, and it's a feature that Apple has yet to figure out.

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#259

Post by wlesieutre »

preetbhinder wrote: post #148
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I stopped using anything from the i* suite after my first Mac when I learned that it messed up my folder structure. All my carefully organised music and photos were imported into an opaque database that gave me no visibility into how things were stored.

This part at least has been a configurable option as long as I can remember. http://www.usbdacs.com/Macintosh/files/page5_5.jpg

Re: Apple Stole My Music

#260

Post by Karunamon »

preetbhinder wrote: post #148
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I stopped using anything from the i* suite after my first Mac when I learned that it messed up my folder structure. All my carefully organised music and photos were imported into an opaque database that gave me no visibility into how things were stored.

Did something change? Because the iTunes internal organization for music at least is quite easy to understand.

From the library folder:

    Music/Artist/Album/Track# Title.ext
If your files aren't tagged correctly (which is distressingly common), then the auto organization will make a pig's breakfast of your library.

A common example: "Artist" and "Album Artist" are two different ID3 fields - if you have an album with an Album Artist but a blank Artist, iTunes will catalog it as "Unknown Artist" when the consolidation happens.

This is slightly annoying to fix, but the mass tag editor in iTunes works well.

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