Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 178 posts

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

#61

Post by reaperducer »

endigma wrote: post #16

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care a…

holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important?

A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files.

Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and audit every change made on them hour by hour.

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

#62

Post by endigma »

ryandrake wrote: post #40
endigma wrote: post #16

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care a…

The “Bitcoin” people have that saying, cautioning people about wallet ownership and the danger of cloud wallets: “Not your keys, not your coins.” I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates. Not your drive, not your data? I don’t know, I’m…

Reminiscent of "the cloud is just someone else's computer", perhaps it can be extended to this situation with a few more words.

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

#63

Post by mpol »

ryandrake wrote: post #40
endigma wrote: post #16

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care a…

The “Bitcoin” people have that saying, cautioning people about wallet ownership and the danger of cloud wallets: “Not your keys, not your coins.” I think we need a clever saying to rattle off every time someone gets burned by relying 100% on a cloud service (either the software screws up user data or suspends their account, without recourse) without backups/alternates. Not your drive, not your data? I don’t know, I’m…

"If you don't have a backup, it wasn't important."

It is somewhat too tough, and I haven't yet said it to anyone in his/her face. In my mind I think it often.

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

#64

Post by DistractionRect »

blahyawnblah wrote: post #54
pimeys wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Backblaze B2 for my music backups. It costs a bit to restore the files from there, but just storing them is cheap enough for me to not care.

When did they start charging for restoration? Are you doing something other than just downloading it?

Since always. For clarity, they are using the commercial offering from backblaze, not backblaze's personal/home use product.

B2 is similar to s3, and B2 charges for api calls + egress. Ingress is free, and they have a generous free daily api calling limit that covers some of the core api

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

#65

Post by Hizonner »

null_object wrote: post #46
arnaudsm wrote: post #31

Earlier 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.

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.

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

#66

Post by endigma »

reaperducer wrote: post #61
endigma wrote: post #16

Not that it excuses any of this on Apple's part, but holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? Like seriously buy a NAS of any caliber from anywhere or an external HDD or use dropbox but don't put all your eggs in one basket people. I get that "shit happens" and all, but I don't understand how backups are not more prominently known in tech culture as mandatory for data you care a…

holy shit do people with like a ton of music not realize backups are important? A backup doesn't help when a service is silently changing your files. Once you realize a file isn't right, you look into it and discover that it was automatically replaced by the service three or four years ago. It is not reasonable to expect anyone - even a tech-literate person - to keep 300 hard drives around for a decade or more, and a…

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.

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

#67

Post by FabHK »

jrmg wrote: post #37
galad87 wrote: post #6

Apple Music includes the old iTunes Match features, so it matches your local library with the Apple Music library if you allow it to do so, and uploads only the songs it can't match. This process is not perfect so some songs might be matched to a different version. Anyway, even if I download a matches song it's DRM free on my Mac, and Apple Music won't automatically delete your local files. But I guess bugs happens,…

Apple Music includes the old iTunes Match features It does not - it’s a separate subscription, though you can use both at once. [Edit: maybe I’m wrong? See ensuing discussion below.]

It does. I used to have iTunes Match, subscribed to Apple Music, cancelled iTunes Match, and still enjoy its functionality (that my music (ie all the ripped CDs I have had for ages) is available on all my devices).

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

#68

Post by joelfried »

everyone wrote: post #30
ur-whale wrote: post #19

Quoted post unavailable.

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.

I, as a user, want the best user experience I can have.

Who else cares more about the user experience and provides a viable alternative? Google goes out of its way to buy and kill products, and even their core product is so bad that I'm often finding myself making fun of how absolutely awful their search results are.[1].

Could I make Android work for me? With time and effort, probably. I'm very short on both of those and now it's not just my personal method of interaction - it's my entire family. So I'm not going to.

Just working seamlessly and caring about UX are pretty gigantic. It's not that Apple is that great, it's that all of the alternatives -- like searches on the Amazon catalog these days -- result in a surfeit of garbage.

[1] The most recent one I have was my search with the following three terms, no quotes in this order: ssri neuron mechanism. The first hit was a link to a Google Books book titled "Textbook of Rare Sexual Medical Conditions". I got that result last week. I just searched again and was unable to find that result anywhere on the first page today. What happened then that isn't happening now? I couldn't tell you but my email is the only thing I rely on Google for anymore and I'm very seriously considering migrating away from it in 2023 just because I don't trust Google with that most important part of my digital identity any longer.

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

#69

Post by baby »

jrmg wrote: post #37
galad87 wrote: post #6

Apple Music includes the old iTunes Match features, so it matches your local library with the Apple Music library if you allow it to do so, and uploads only the songs it can't match. This process is not perfect so some songs might be matched to a different version. Anyway, even if I download a matches song it's DRM free on my Mac, and Apple Music won't automatically delete your local files. But I guess bugs happens,…

Apple Music includes the old iTunes Match features It does not - it’s a separate subscription, though you can use both at once. [Edit: maybe I’m wrong? See ensuing discussion below.]

^ this. I pay for both services

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

#70

Post by josephcsible »

blahyawnblah wrote: post #54
pimeys wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Backblaze B2 for my music backups. It costs a bit to restore the files from there, but just storing them is cheap enough for me to not care.

When did they start charging for restoration? Are you doing something other than just downloading it?

It looks like downloading is free with their personal backup service, but is $0.01/GB with their B2 cloud storage service.
Post reply on HN