I am surprised at people trying to rationale Apples wrongdoing by pointing at Google and bringing some crazy examples.
There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, but rather are willing to go huge lengths to please music industry.
Only because you eating in the restaurant it doesn't mean waiter can run to your house and smash all of your food in the fridge reasoning "from now on you are covered".
Remember the U2 fiasco, when Apple decided to break into your computer and push their new album through iTunes? It seems like whenever Apple decides to take control of your files, shit happens.
Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.
I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.
While the U2 fiasco was a bad move, I don't think that "break into your computer" is a fair characterization of what they did. They added it to your available downloads and, depending on your sync settings, it was downloaded to devices.
I'm not a huge fan of having my media managed by the companies I buy hardware from, but when I found a user's manual document on my Kindle I didn't consider it 'getting hacked' by them.
A more appropriate analogy than a user guide would be finding Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter on your kindle one day, because Amazon did a deal and decided you should have it, or perhaps having your copy of 1984 erased because of copyright violations. ++ungood.
A user manual is expected on a new device, having media on your device added and deleted by a corporation on their whim is not so pleasant, mostly because it makes their view of your true relation to them apparent.
Fair enough. "break into your computer" does sound like getting hacked by them, which wasn't technically true, at least from what I know. Thanks for pointing that out.
Apple fundamentally does not understand software. A shame, as the software, really, was their original special sauce with the Mac 128k and beyond.
Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.
I worked with a Google engineer once and he offered me advice as I was considering buying a new phone, namely the HTC One: "Phone manufacturers know how to make hardware. Google knows how to make software. When you marry the two with both knowing their place in the world, things work out. When one tries to make what the other does, you get crappy stuff on top of your system. Stick to vanilla Android, man."
Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.
Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).
Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)
At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.
El Crapitan has so many problems it's ridiculous. They broke not only all kinds of Open Source software with their overly paranoid system protection, but also a bunch of hardware by messing up the USB drivers. There are now tons of musical instruments, Arduinos, and other USB devices that don't work with El Crapitan. Apple's response was: ... there was no response.
Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.
My HTC One has gotten dreadfully slower since release from Android releases. I don't think it's exclusive to iPhones - in fact I think android phones are more prone to it.
I guess I'm also lucky to have the latest 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5 running smoothly. Yes, it did get a bit slower after some updates, enough for me to notice it, but considering it shipped with 4.4, I'm still pretty happy with it.
But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.
If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”
Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?
It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.
I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.
Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?
Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.
> I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because they didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design.
I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.
I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.
A/B testing data is only as good as the samples provided. They may have done wonderful A/B testing, but that the alternative designs were just so bad that the current design version made it through ;)
If they did, they'd quit shortly after learning that, if they wanted to move around inside Apple, like to a different group, they have to interview and be evaluated just like an outsider. Apple is so secretive, people cannot even change groups.
One of the worst widely distributed and used pieces of software. There are many, many, crappies, buggier, pieces of software out there; it's just that nobody has to use them.
And it wants you to be a consumer badly.
The case described here, is of a producer/artist loosing unique works due to a consumer software rationale, that assumes that all in the reach of the software is not yours and thereby at whims of the license givers/maintainers.
Also Apple only begrudgingly supports Enterprise customers with their iDevices. It seems like it should be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to make a dent with their mobile platform but they decided to focus on the consumer market as well.
Defense in depth is a good thing as well. In my case, the first line of defense would be ZFS snapshots on my homebuilt NAS. If malware scrozzles my NAS, a rollback to the last snapshot can be a quick way to fix it.
Other systems get backed up to the NAS, and the NAS drives are periodically backed up onto a second ZFS pool that is normally kept physically offline.
I've survived for 48 years eating too much steak, drinking too much beer, and exercising too little. In your opinion, does this give us useful information that tells us that I should keep doing these things, because obviously, I will live forever?
Some people in this post are assuming that this is something iTunes does to everyone intentionally. Other people are saying this is not something iTunes has ever done to them. I'm not sure it's worth debating whether this practice is ethical or not unless we know whether iTunes will actually delete your MP3s under normal circumstances. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that iTunes is too hard to use.
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.
All ethics of the deletion aside, matching on metadata is a weird, crappy approach (and that itself is pretty consistent with my other experiences with iTunes).
It shouldn't be hard to imagine that metadata will have collisions, and include something like a hash of the actual data.
I don't know if it's intentional filling in for songs they couldn't license or metadata matching gone wrong, but occasionally on Spotify a song on an old album is replaced with an inferior remix from a newer album.
Intentionally or not, history (what songs actually were on an album) gets edited unless you manage music files yourself.
(The Apple behavior described in the article is way worse than what Spotify does, of course.)
ITunes will rename albums and artists and songs and give the wrong album or cover or strip the album cover because they don't sell it, Apple doesn't care about your collection, they want to curate it their way for their benefit.
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.
Go try Google Music. You get non-destructive music sync (10,000 songs or something?) and a massive library. Plus, the curated stations are all the old Songza content that was pretty awesome. $10/mo
And you get Youtube without ads for the same price.
Their curated playlists are seriously top-notch. I've found so many new bands through the Blogged 50 and Gorilla vs. Bear playlists.
Plus, Google Play Music's UI blows the others out of the water. My favorite part is the "Play Next" and "Add to Queue" choices for unobtrusively adding songs to what's currently playing. Something that iTunes actually used to have, but then they removed it for no reason.
Sort of ironically, the older iTunes Match system did audio fingerprinting, but Apple Music does not. I have gotten some very weird new metadata occasionally since the switch.
For the record, I've never lost any music, and I'm not entirely sure how that's possible short of a catastrophic iTunes bug[1] -- I'm not disputing anyone's stories, but even "post-Cloud" I've never seen iTunes delete files without me actually clicking on delete somewhere. Despite what the blogger was told by the rep, I'm pretty sure that's not how Apple Music is supposed to work. You enable it on a "primary" Mac, it matches tracks to the iTunes Store library, and then it uploads tracks that aren't in that library to iCloud. The files in your original library will be left alone unless you delete the original files.
[1]: Not that "catastrophic iTunes bug" sounds unlikely. I've heard friend-of-a-friend stories about deletion bugs in the recent past.
Even if they do audio fingerprinting the match is simplistic. I have a large collection of different versions of songs, and Shazam identifies them all as the studio version.
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
>When iTunes Match adds these songs to your iCloud Music Library, iTunes Match doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside on iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
>When Apple Music adds these matched songs to your iCloud Music Library, Apple Music doesn’t change or alter your original music files that reside in iTunes for Mac or PC or on your iOS devices from which they were added.
I've never seen that happen. iTunes loads the data/metadata about the songs and attempts to match them to their database of songs. Then if you were to sign in on a different computer with iTunes Match enabled, it would download the songs that it matched from the original computer as a 256kb AAC.
This is part of a push from Apple to move users' data from devices to the cloud. They're doing the same thing with photos (optimised storage deletes local copies), videos, and documents on iCloud.
The advantage for users is that your data is available everywhere you have an apple device and Internet. The disadvantage is a corporation manages and controls increasing amounts if your life, private and public, and leaving them for another becomes unthinkable, and of course the corporation chooses what information it is appropriate for you to rent access to.
It literally only does this if you very explicitly tell it to. They're mad because their computer did exactly what they told it to. This is a simple case of user error, followed by a user lashing out over their own mistakes.
It's like being mad at Linux for letting you 'rm -rf ~/Music' it simply did exactly what you told it to.
I use iTunes Match across a myriad of devices and it is a wonderful service. It's sad to see a frustrated end user spreading such FUD.
I'm not sure if that's the link you intended to post but I see nothing in that comment rationalizing Apple's actions, in fact it seems to share the opinion of the original article.
Yeah, buro9's comment is the only one that seems to fit, but I don't read the comment as supportive of Apple at all, quite the contrary, it reads to me damning of Google.
This is almost certainly not apple acting alone. There will have been lengthy contract negotiations (and probably a lot of pressure from the major labels). The auto-overwriting metadata issue is probably apple alone though, they've long been very exacting about the metadata of music in itunes. They already throw their weight around in the supply chain by demanding that metadata is correct or they won't accept music, which they can do because they control so much of the market. I'm not surprised they're expanding that to user's devices (presumably for matching purposes for igenius). The industry sucks, so many middlemen with so much power :(
God forbid there is a bug in software! This article is crap, maybe he ran into an issue but I've helped over a dozen people get setup on Apple Music and not once has there been file deletion. I am very skeptical that theoretical phone rep said any of these things either. Obviously there is a bug that needs fixing, but this is definitely not a platform wide attempt to delete anyone's data.
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 on a separate disk, so it didn't try to trash that too.
In a sense I was lucky. Two wasted weeks is a learning experience. Two years would have been heartbreaking.
Two decades? I. Can't. Even.
Since then I haven't allowed iTunes anywhere near my FLAC collection. I've also warned anyone with a music collection to never, ever to allow iTunes anywhere near it.
My first attempt at syncing an old iPod to a new machine saw a similar outcome. Aside from the slow and unsuccessful "auto-transfer" attempt between the devices, iTunes promptly decided to rearrange and relabel everything I had.
For a live music fan, that's a disaster. Many thousands of live performances pulled out of their identifying folders because they had similar metadata. A significant number of labelled, sorted tracks pushed to "unknown artist". Random, inaccurate assignments of album covers.
Suffice to say, it was easier to uninstall iTunes and restore from a hard backup. One of the perks of smartphones is that I can get music onto my device without even considering iTunes, and I can't imagine giving it another shot.
There used to be an alternative iPhone management tool created by some of the same developers who were jailbreaking iOS. Certain features only worked with jailbroken phones - but you could still manage your music library even on unmodified devices.
It's been a few years and I'm not sure if its still in development. I believe it was called iFunbox? On mobile now and don't have the opportunity to search for more info - I will edit this later.
I have an iPhone and don't use the standard Music app. I use Plex or CloudBeats to access and store music/audiobooks locally on my device. All of this music is stored on my Windows machine that acts as a server. It is accessed via Plex or Dropbox. I have no trouble accessing the files on my MacBook either. However, all of the music/audio is in a folder hierarchy and backed up. I don't touch iTunes.
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.
A complaint I've heard before is that this works fine for most modern music, but the Artist/Album/Track layout doesn't apply to a lot of classical collections.
In which case you can just turn off the folder organization, but there's not an easy way to undo it once iTunes has gone and dicked it up.
"A complaint I've heard before is that this works fine for most modern music, but the Artist/Album/Track layout doesn't apply to a lot of classical collections."
More importantly, and more generally: what if my music organization format predates OSX/iOS/iTunes and I am not interested in altering it for todays fad ?
This is not apple-specific, either - many devices and services (audi MMI, Sonos, etc.) assume certain naming and organizational practices - and work very awkwardly with any other layout.
Granted, my Sonos system has never deleted anything or reorganized directories ... but my music is mounted read-only just in case.
"Today's fad" has been the iTunes standard since the application existed.
Also, take your pick. If the files aren't organized to a consistent standard, that means a database has to be stored somewhere with that info so the app can do its job. In iTunes' case, that's an XML file.
"Also, take your pick. If the files aren't organized to a consistent standard"
Actually, that's not true - one alternative to an organizational structure or a database is to actually name the files verbosely, which is what I decided on in 1996 when I ripped my first CD:
Artist Name - Album Name - ## - Track Name - time.wav
For instance:
Ferry, Bryan - Taxi - 03 - Answer Me - 2m46s.wav
This file can now be dropped into place anywhere without losing information, requires no DB and gives you full "metadata" for wav files that don't actually contain metadata.
You just described the reason for the existence of ID3. But, if you insist on using files that don't have a metadata standard, the only way to organize them is in the database of the library application. Which generally won't be portable to other applications.
Your proposal to store track info in with verbose naming isn't very robust and doesn't solve even the most basic problems that a simple metadata scheme does.
For one, even in your specific limited case of Bryan Ferry's album _Taxi_ there are 5 different versions of the album from 5 different countries[0].
Furthermore, your verbose naming proposal is not only unequipped to handle something as basic as alternate versions and international releases, it has no affordances for providing basic information such as year of release, publisher, and composer, let alone information about bitrates and compression schemes.
Even were we to restrict our attention to just the metadata your scheme does encode, your proposal would fail when cataloging an entry where the band/album/track name contains a hyphen surrounding by whitespace. There are also some albums which have more than 99 tracks (archival records, for example, which are distributed in multi-CD collections).
My response may seem a bit like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer but, having worked in a library and taken classes in information science, it's crucial to illustrate why hastily-conceived proposals to replace metadata with file naming conventions should never be taken seriously. In fact, I believe they should only be taken jokingly!
Metadata schemes are so important to information and library science that, in my opinion, any proposal to replace metadata schemes with "verbose naming" should be shown to be untenable unless the goal is to index fewer than 100 files in a restricted-access repository (and maybe even then).
From the standpoint of a librarian or digital archivist, you may as well have proposed storing the binary data in the file name, too, essentially eliminating the file name which itself is a piece of metadata.
> Your proposal to store track info in with verbose naming isn't very robust and doesn't solve even the most basic problems that a simple metadata scheme does.
But that's how anyone who is serious about collecting digital music has been ordering it since ages. Sure, I never considered putting track length in the filename as :) (but I can see why), and if I can help it I have them tagged correctly too. But the file/folder structure is how I keep it organised.
There may be better ways to go about this, but it at least needs to be an actual improvement. iTunes is not.
Currently I'm experimenting with a command line tool called 'beets', which from reading its docs, definitely has a philosophy that aligns with mine. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out how to tell it where to get the metadata from, it defaults to MusicBrainz which seems to have quite a few inaccuracies in their data (spelling of "Kung-Fu", hyphenated or with spaces I don't care really but if you use both spellings on the same album, one of them is wrong). It's got plugins for discogs and figure-out-from-pathname so that's good, but then it still uses MusicBrainz too. All in all it's a bit fiddly, but I can't really imagine a way to do it better, if you want have accuracy, keep control, some assistance with automatic tagging, but without messing up weird edge-cases like the classical albums and bootleg recordings mentioned above (for which 'beets' tries real hard to do the right thing, that being what you decide it to be).
There is an option now to not let iTunes organize files. This way, you can still add songs to iTunes' database but iTunes will reference the original media files in their original location.
Yeah, the "Keep my iTunes Folder Organized" option (under "Advanced") is not your friend. It frustrates me that it is on by default. I guess that's fine for casual users, but if you care at all about your music, turn it off.
Really? Just because you have helped over a dozen people it means that this issue doesn't exist? Did you bother to check every local file on the person's drive that you were helping? If you didn't know about the potential issue how would you know to check. The author isn't saying its intentional hs's saying this is a side-effect of this model. Incidentally this is not the first type questionable practice from Apple Music. See this:
The article you linked to appears to describe something totally different. It says that if you delete your music from your computer, then re-downloading the music through Apple Music will give you DRMed files. But it also says:
> If you haven’t deleted your own copies of your music, then there’s nothing to worry about. If you download onto other devices from Apple Music, those devices will get the DRM versions, but you’ll still have your DRM-free originals.
> Either way, if you’ve used iTunes Match as a convenient way to free up space on your Mac by deleting your own copy of any of your music, don’t cancel your subscription in favor of Apple Music if you want to keep that music DRM free.
Given the reference to freeing up space, it seems like he is talking about the original music files within iTunes and not a backup.
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 Apple Music, iTunes had silently flipped on a setting that prevents this. Working out what on earth was happening took me almost an hour.
Yet everyone tells me that their Apple devices 'just work'. I don't have the same experience - I find their behaviour to be utterly opaque and non-deterministic. Am I alone?
No -- you aren't alone. Whenever I connect my daughter's iPhone to iTunes (say to add more music) we take our lives in our hands. You get scary popups that ask you a question and provides two options -- neither of which is what you want.
I don't know whether this is deliberate on the part of Apple to discourage the use of iTunes, or whether they really think that it works well and is intuitive. For anybody from Apple reading this -- iTunes is not intuitive. It is horrible.
"You get scary popups that ask you a question and provides two options -- neither of which is what you want."
This! One is something like "delete all the music from my iPod" and the other is "delete all the music from my hard drive". How on earth has this situation been allowed to develop?
I'd forgotten all about that question! It's like Apple never considered the possibility that you might connect an iPod and a hard drive with different files and want to keep the union of them.
Similarly, the default setting where Apply tries to copy all of your content to a new iPod when you plug it in, in alphabetical order. I have 300Gb of music, you should know that won't succeed.
Thats just it, they done want to let you keep both files as a way to try and combat piracy (Multiple people syncing all the files theyve bought separately). Its really frustrating, and they will never allow it to happen.
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 iTunes automatically does, or (b) somehow, whether by ignorance or villainy, get screwed by a situation like the one in the post, barely register in Apple's statistics. I'm (a). The author is (b). We're edge cases. The moral flavor of Apple's business model will continue to not matter while people keep shoveling over the dollars.
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.
"our users are stupid, just do everything for them"
Oh, it's worse than that: "we know better than you regardless of your intelligence. trust us: this new UI is better for you; this new media file manager is better for you; this new gesture is better for you" - forget all the work you've done, forget all that time acclimatizing to the last set of UI and gesture changes ...
The whole "user is stupid" attitude was basically stated to me by a big name Gnome developer a year or so ago.
And his like seem to have their fingers in more and more of what lives above the Linux kernel (and are likely chomping at the bit to do the same to the kernel itself once Linus is out of the way).
That's because at a conceptual level, a "general purpose computer" is far from an ideal device for rent extraction.
If your user is stupid, they won't be able to manage a general purpose computer but will instead require a well-controlled computing appliance that will dutifully collect all the rents its creators can get away with.
Talk about scary! I managed to unintentionally delete all photos in my aunt's iPad. All I wanted to do was disable iCloud backups. And I am a postdoc in a CS department.
is this related to Apple Music use? I have never encountered this problem with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod. I have music on each and separate settings for all four devices and never once has it asked to delete, let alone with a popup.
I swear iTunes used to work great. When I got my first iPod it did the syncing correctly and played music, and those were about the only jobs it had. It has since bloated more and more, I don't even open it anymore, it's awful on both windows and osx
^ 100% agree, it is literally the worst UX design ever!
I'm currently using the 3 month free trial and every time I use it i have to tell myself "it's free money, just 1 more month until I switch back to spotify".
For example, the playlists I create on my laptop don't sync whatsoever with my phone. I spent a little time trying to research how to sync them and just said screw it.
On what planet does a user not want their playlists automatically synced between devices, let alone making that the default option?
Did you ever use Lotus Notes? I agree that iTunes is poorly designed but you can't just toss out "worst UX design ever!" without old Lotus Notes users taking exception.
I'm only 22 years old so no, I haven't had the misfortune of using Lotus Notes. Let me correct myself than, "It is the worst UX I've ever experienced in the 22 years in which I have lived".
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, fine-tune control over how the product interacts with your library is critical.
I am not surprised at all by the disaster mentioned in the article- it validates the paranoia I've always harboured against Apple products.
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.
>Yet everyone tells me that their Apple devices 'just work'. I don't have the same experience - I find their behaviour to be utterly opaque and non-deterministic. Am I alone?
Apple devices haven't "just worked" in over a decade. It's a testament to apples marketing that people still think this.
That's a bit of a stretch. The early iPhones 'just worked'. My Mac used to 'just work'. All was groovy in my Apple life as 'recent' as ~2011.
I wouldn't say my Mac 'just works' anymore, nor my iPhone for that matter. And this is commented on a lot by a lot of prominent Apple bloggers, to the point that it does get responded to by Apple SVPs (see Marco Arment and Phil Schiller)
EDIT: that said, my mum gave up the PC when she got an iPad 2, and was even happier when she got a hand-me-down iPhone 4S. She finds both slow now, but still won't go near the PC anymore. For her, the Apples still 'just work'.
I think we need to make some distinctions here. My Macs and iPhones have proven incredibly durable, reliable, and flexible.
It's the syncing services, specifically, that Apple is screwing up. They never figured this stuff out, even under Steve Jobs.
> Fortune magazine reported that during the summer of 2008, after MobileMe had launched to mostly negative reviews, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to a meeting in the Town Hall auditorium at 4 Infinite Loop. After asking them "what MobileMe is supposed to do", when someone answered, Jobs reportedly shot back, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
I recommend Android for anyone in a position to change.
I plug my Android phone into my Linux laptop. The phone's filesystem is mounted. I move, copy, delete whatever music and photos I want. Dead simple and rational.
I put Flickr on the phone. Photos I take with the phone are automatically backed up to Flickr, and I can see them from anywhere.
But only because people want me to and pay for it... I wouldn't inflict the trauma that is using these on anyone.
I had problems with every single Android I owned, here is the current one:
1. Super slow, even after reformatting everything and reinstalling, it is not even a cheap phone.
2. Terrible interfaces overall, specially as they keep removing physical buttons, and apps started to shove important buttons (like "menu") in random places.
3. The interface thread seemly is prone to freezing, for example yesterday I wanted to use youtube, and the interface froze, and then suddenly opened a video I didn't wanted, and started playing full blast volume and waking people up, and I couldn't figure how to close the damn video, and then suddenly it crashed.
4. This all applies to the actual phone parts... more than once I had to quickly dial someone for some emergency reason (not life or death, but still emergency), and the phone app decide to be slow, or crash, or reboot, and so on.
5. Had the phone app crash on me while I was actually talking to someone.
And this is just my personal phone, in other phones I had one that I had to reinstall and the phone antenna stopped working after the reinstall (it needed a custom antenna driver, that I had to track down on internet and install...), random reboots, slow, extremely fast draining of the battery, specially if you made some mistake like leave a GPS-enabled app running, nevermind the fact that the OS itself is so crap, that every manufacturer ship the phone with several third party apps to fix OS problems (memory managers and defragmenters, app killers, temporary file cleaners, and so on...)
iPhone has another set of problems, but still is problematic. I personally would never buy one (my current client I am testing his iOS code on a device he provided to me...)
The Android ecosystem us chock full of phones at various price points and quality levels, and questionable "value add" software added by OEMS and carriers.
I have been very happy with Nexus phones (going back to Nexus S), and have never experienced any of those issues.
We also have 3 Motorola G phones - which for the money (<200) are really hard to beat. Motorola seems to have not attempted to mess with the stock O/S all that much..
This has gotten worse over time as well. It used to be you could mount your phone's storage as a mass storage device, but now (as far as I can tell) MTP is the only option.
Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this? After I figured out where the filesystem was mounted (a bit of a pain), I could use it like a normal mount, as if it were an external USB drive.
First off, file access is mediated via software on the Android side. What you are seeing is a database representation of the device FS. And this database can be incorrect (people have in the past deleted folders they thought were empty only to lose files) or used to implement DRM.
> Yes, it's MTP with my current phone and linux installation. Is there a problem with this?
For the longest time MTP & Linux was terribly painful, verging on unusable, while mass storage worked perfectly. It bit when I upgraded my Nexus phone and discovered I couldn't get to the files stored on it.
The reason for implementing MTP instead of mass storage was clear, because you couldn't / wouldn't be able to access the files from the phone while the computer was accessing them. So I understand why they went in that direction.
But oh my goodness! MTP support on Linux was terrible for a while, and even on Windows it wasn't fast and reliable. It was easier at the time to just use a service like Dropbox to transfer files to/from the phone, than to use USB.
I have had a similar experience - finding out what is really going on with my iDevices always ends up being a giant time-suck. Things do seem to "just work" as long as you don't go looking too far - which, I imagine, is what most people do. I don't think this is unique to Apple necessarily, just more pronounced due to the "just works" mentality.
I remember reading "In the beginning was the Command Line" and the description of Apple products being hermetically sealed boxes sticks to me to this day. Even though the author said that the essay was obsolete within a year or so of release (due to Apple and OSX), it proves that even over 17(?) years in technology, some things never change. Almost every other ecosystem doesn't obsessively hide every adjustment knob and switch and force you into submitting to their way of doing things like Apple's does.
I got my parents an iPad mini recently and some of the contacts on my mom's phone sync and some of them don't. I am a developer and love tinkering with computers but for the love of me not figure out how to fix this.
I recently spent a good chunk of a day troubleshooting the problem "when certain people message my account on Apple Mail, I get the message twice."
Confirmed that it wasn't user error, and was common, never made got another inch of headway. My eventual diagnosis was "at least you're getting the message!"
Yeah I got my daughter a new Mac and synced it up to the iCloud so she could iMessage from the desktop and she got an odd (incomplete) set of contacts that don't seem to match any other device.
These are my main qualms with software these days: Logic went out of the window. Back in the days a good deal of software had great, albeit complex menus. The typical non-techy hated these interfaces because they didn't get results immediately and by not having an interest in technology most ruled out the idea of putting in some effort to learn the piece of software at hand. (no pain, no gain - duh!)
Next, companies "figured out" that usability is soo important and that it needs to get fixed because customers were having trouble. This was generally a wrong conclusion. Getting rid of complex menus doesn't necessarily increase usability. It irritates power users to no end and doesn't help casual users when they run into special cases. Heck, even the power users can't help the casual user anymore!
Every not completely trivial app(lication) should offer at least additionally a "complex" mode that offers a good old menu bar where deterministic, to some degree "atomic" functions (if you pardon the faulty analogy) are offered, grouped in a logically consistent way.
Yeah I had the exact same issue with syncing externally purchased music whilst using apple music, I honestly could not believe apple has delivered software that behaves in such a user hostile manner. It hurts their reputation and convinced me to give up on some music.
Not so much devices (rarely come into contact with them), but this is what finally pushed me away from iTunes - https://i.imgur.com/JUIXKTd.jpg
For various reasons, I have multiple Apple IDs with iTunes content linked to them (old account, new account, various region changes over the years etc.). At some point, Apple decided that you could only download past purchases with _one_ Apple ID per computer per ninety days, effectively locking me out of the content unless I had a local copy[1] and was using a pre-authorised PC (for context, this was after Apple had done the "It's all in the cloud; just stream it" push for movies etc.).
I ended up getting around it by firing up a bunch of virtual machines (one per Apple ID), downloading everything I end, striping off the DRM, and then never using iTunes again for anything other than music (and even then I favour CDs first and other download sources second).
I'd certainly been a long time coming (2010ish iTunes handled my large-ish media library fine, and the UI was fine. By 2014ish, every release was feeling slower and slower, and the UI felt more and more like the iOS interfaced backported to PC), but that was the final straw. Currently moving over to foobar2000 for music (technically I could just point it at my music folders and be done, but I'm taking the opportunity to make sure everything is tagged properly).
[1] Which of course I keep on my NAS, but a) I'm not always on my local network and b) I'm not always 100% diligence about making sure a copy ends up there.
> I ended up getting around it by firing up a bunch of virtual machines (one per Apple ID), downloading everything I end, striping off the DRM, and then never using iTunes again for anything other than music (and even then I favour CDs first and other download sources second).
This is ingenious and also hilarious if it weren't so damn tragic.
I owned my first MacBook 3 years ago. To me, the MacBook "just work" as much as any new Windows laptops I came across. So I'm clueless as to where did the phrase "just work" came from. Maybe Windows has improved over the years, or maybe a lot of things are done of the web now, the OS doesn't really matter as long as there is a browser.
'Just works' comes from the days of XP and before, where every doodad you plugged into your computer required its own driver disk on Windows. Even if something came with it's own drivers in that era, you'd get an installer wizard that you'd have to navigate through.
I don't know if I'm alone, but I find Windows 10 horrible. It consistently freezes on me for several seconds at a time (and usually when I'm doing something important), it takes longer to fully boot (background services seem to take way longer to start), it uses an incredible amount of CPU and disk in the background for no reason, the new Control Panel is impossible to sort through, and the overall UI/UX is a step backwards (IMO)--and all that without mentioning the privacy concerns. I'm really kicking myself for upgrading, because I thought Windows 7 was a really great OS. I ended up switching to Linux Mint, and have been very happy with it overall.
I can't comment on Win10 per se, because I haven't seen a compelling set of features that would cause me to upgrade my Win7 machine.
Win7 is essentially what WinXP was a few years ago; it's not perfect, but it's familiar and it gets the job done and it stays out of the way (most of the time). As a user, Microsoft has to offer me something significant if they want me to spend time learning something new, and I've not yet seen it.
I run win10 at home since beta and also admin multiple windows machines at work. None have that issue. I would say with utmost certainty that something else is amiss. All of my machines run faster and smoother on win10.
Oh, I'm not saying the freezing is a general Windows 10 issue; I'll fully admit that there might be something wrong with my install. But it's just frustrating that it started happening on a fresh install of Windows 10 (not an upgrade) before I even installed anything abnormal. And there are others reporting the exact same issue as me, so I know I'm not the only one. We're talking about operating systems that "just work", and for me, Windows 10 didn't.
Weird, Windows 10/8/8.1 have incredibly fast boot times compared to 7, especially if you're on a SSD. The Control Panel is the same as 7 was, the "Settings Panel" is what is new...but it has a search feature. Sounds like to me, maybe you barely tried it; also the "privacy concerns" have been disproven countless times.
It boots quickly, but the background services take longer to start. There are a couple programs (AutoHotkey scripts and the like) that I run on startup, and those take significantly longer to start after boot than on Windows 7. And you're right about the control panel, but the new settings I've found to be extremely difficult to navigate; I even have a hard time searching for some of them. (Of course this is something that you get used to over time, but we're talking about things that "just work", and that's not one of them IMO.)
Re: Privacy: Maybe not directly a privacy concern, but one of my biggest issues with Windows 10 (and 8) is how many things are now out of your control. For instance, you can't disable automatic updates or the built-in antivirus for more than a short while. Given that, it's easy to imagine Microsoft pushing out a privacy-invading setting that you have to manually opt out of, which you won't do until you know about it.
I wouldn't say I barely tried it; I've had it installed since December and used it full-time for about a month before dual-booting Linux (and I still use it for gaming). Maybe I wouldn't be so frustrated with it if it didn't regularly freeze for several seconds at a time, because that's really the biggest issue I have with it (and I know I'm not the only one), but I'd say I gave it a pretty fair shot. Aside from losing access to a couple programs (which is why I dual-boot), I'm happy with Linux Mint.
Except that the Win8/10 fast boot time is a cheat; it's basically just hibernate mode. If you do a "restart" instead of a "shutdown" it will go through the full boot process, and that (on the Win10 boxes I've seen) is little or no faster than it was on 7.
I'm running 10 on a 3.5 year old i7 at home, and a brand new i7 at work.
I haven't had any significant problems with freezing and boot times.
I am a little biased as I'm doing C# MVC so I'm using Visual Studio, I think it's all pretty great.
You do have to get used to the new control panel, but all of the old panels are still there for you to use (I am nearly 100% sure), but it's not really _that_ bad. You get used to it.
I run Android on my phone so I'm pretty sure that overall I have no real privacy from any agency that really want to get in to my business... oh well.
It "just works" if you fully buy into the ecosystem. i.e. all content stored in iCloud nothing synced via cable etc.
I happen to do this since i tend to need a new iPhone every 2-4 months and it's just easier to pick up a new one, sign in and let it set itself up exactly as the old one.
But anything that deviates from this workflow, you tend to run into problems.
My iPhone currently has two apps that somehow failed to install, and I can't delete them or open them. I tried rebooting the phone, signing in and out of the Apple store, all to no avail.
Yet, people still buy it. They agree to pay for a product, at a bug price, and ask for people around them to do Apple's work to setup it up for them, but for free.
And they find that very natural. Normal.
Like they found normal 20 years ago we had to help them with their MS product they paid, but for free.
At first I thought the tone of the article was a bit hyperbolic, but upon reading further, no, this totally fits with the emotions that I'd probably feel upon such a situation. Shock, then horror, then anger. Then solution minded...then when hitting a wall...
>When giving the above warning, however, even in my most Orwellian paranoia I never could have dreamed that the content holders, like Apple, would also reach into your computer and take away what you already owned.
It just feels dirty, and, as my Software Developer Uncle probably would've called it, "Playing outside the sandbox." I mean, sure, as the article notes, the TOS gives Apple a lot of consent, but "Loss or Damage" via incidental use vs. outright deletion via intentional coding feels...different. Maybe legally they're not...
I do remember ranting at the top of my lungs after an online jam software installed an update and crashed my Win7 PC laptop so hard it had to rebuild via a command prompt screen. By then, I already had CD backups, a USB HD 500GB full of projects, and it was a cold reminder. The laptop restored fine, but whoa, not fun. Not what I signed up for in the agreement, risk-wise, I felt, so I've essentially stopped using that software.
...and I'll close by reminding myself I'm perfectly reasonable with my Win laptop setup, not running iTunes (Winamp), and backing up to a local cloud or other media (another USB HD coming soon). Life happens, accidents happen...but there's some funky software out there.
Heck of a story, and one I will point to gladly when discussing paths for audio DAW hardware/software platforms.
Corporations have spent decades conditioning their users to accept all ToSs and EULAs, using a combination of forbidding the software outright (often with no ability to get a refund) and applying scary language that they have limited the abuse of only as much as they thought would escape the public's notice. Now that their investment has been completed, they want their returns.
My solution to this (and to issues like this outside of software) is extreme but it will fix the problem. When one side creates a contract of any sort (ToS, EULA, phone contract, home buying contract) which primary purpose is to be signed by numerous other individuals who have little to no ability to alter the contract, the other parties are allowed to use lack of understanding to break the entire contract unless the creator can show beyond reasonable doubt (I would use clear and convincing, but that would be abused) that the signer did understand the entirety of the contract.
It would break contract law as we know it, but it would force simple, easy to understand contracts and it would penalize any robo signing practices. (Personal story: last time I went to a phone company, they gave the contract to read on a small device where I could only read 2 lines at a time and where part of the display was broken. I wasn't allowed a print out of the contract until after I signed. I walked away and have to this day not gotten a smartphone because of the downright evil practices of cell phone companies).
Oh I can totally agree with you on a lot of those points - the balance of power has shifted to the point of even taking away legal recourse, a la "BINDING ARBITRATION" which I'm skeptical of, re: conflict of interest.
I've honestly kicked around a legal-ese type write-up of 'Personal Terms of Service' type disclaimers - subject to change at any time - essentially stating that by taking payment for a service there is a negotiating platform to reconcile conflicting claims. As in, I claim that I should never be subject to an early termination fee if I'm personally unstatisfied with the service, and the service provider says they alone are allowed to waive the fee. Well then, that's a conflict of terms, and by taking my money for a service, they implied they would allow my ToS to usurp theirs (e.g. it's written in my ToS that accepting money creates a binding agreement for such a thing), etc, etc.
I thought it was an exercise in basically being selfish, but the more times examples like this surface, the more it actually starts to sound reasonable. That's...pretty wild to me. I mean, I have a lot of respect for contracts and see them as the ties that hold a lot of commerce together, so they've got real, practical use that should be encouraged. But when it comes to "wiggle room" that sounds a bit like gamesmanship to tilt the power, then I also think fighting back is a natural result, childish as it might seem at first.
Apple iTunes Match (and Apple Music) subscriber, with 23,000 hand ripped songs, only about 18,000 able to exact match by Apple, 5,000 are less common versions.
Also have enabled iCloud Music Library. Note these are three different services, and iCloud Music Library has been the most likely culprit for monkeying with your music, not Apple Music.
The combo of all three has deleted or auto-replaced exactly zero of my custom rips. I can use a series of steps (smart playlist to find matched songs, then manually delete that set) to shift to using Apple's high quality unprotected version, or not.
I wonder if the key to everything working as you imagine is the Match subscriptions:
If using Match, then after matching, manually deleting local, then re-downloading, you end up with a very high quality file without DRM that will continue to work fine and be portable, even after you cancel.
I'm not sure what happens if using only Apple Music without Match.
The linked article sounds a lot like the iCloud Music Library beta problems in July 2015:
I believe the trick is declining when iTunes first asks whether you would like it to keep your music collection organized, or disabling the option in the preferences.
There are two default options that should be changed for safety when configuring iTunes:
- enable error correction when importing from CDs (importing options in Preferences)
- disable "keep music collection organized" (or something to that effect, located somewhere in the prefs)
Me too. I really like iTunes match and it seems to work well. For those that are unfamiliar, it makes all your music on your main machine available from the cloud for a small yearly payment (25$?). It does this by matching your music to its own library and uploading the stuff it doesn't have.
One of the strange things is I have 2 mp3 rips from CD with skips. When I play over the internet with iTunes match the files still skip. These are common songs, so whatever they are doing to determine if that song is in their library is working (I guess).
My only complaint is sometimes it breaks up my albums if it decides that songs are by different artists. (Bob Marley, vs Bob Marley and the Wailers)
I can say for 100% certain that the combination of iTunes Match and Apple Music completely botched about 600 songs in my library.
I restored a backup, turned off Match and Apple Music and obtained a refund. Suffice to say it was the first week of Apple Music but still, it was pretty appalling that my carefully tagged library and artwork were overwritten with zero warning.
Apple do tend to release things a little half baked sometimes - especially when it pertains to cloud services - sadly the customer's data is the casualty which is a shame since it reflects a very cavalier attitude to user data.
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 added. Unless someone at Apple did indeed intend lock-in ...
The funny thing is: Disk space is only worth more than bandwidth in a few select 1st-world countries. I've been traveling in rural areas of South America for about 18 months now and regularly I had to turn off my MacBook because its automatic update "features" were consuming all of the available bandwidth, making it impossible for anybody to actually work.
> I had to turn off my MacBook because its automatic update "features" were consuming all of the available bandwidth
Which automatic update features, by the way? While I definitely don't like or defend such features, all the ones that I know about can be turned off—which gives a more useable result than having to turn off the whole computer! Maybe my Mac is silently doing some behind-the-scenes updating that I haven't noticed hitting my data, though.
(Windows 10 is the real pig here, though. Bye-bye, option to download only on request! Bye-bye, this month's data allowance before I realised that it was downloading what turned out to be a huge update! I did eventually discover how to designate a connection as 'metred', a nice feature that I wish Mac OS had.)
This isn't about a lack of expandable storage (all Macs have at least one USB port, some come with SD card slots), but rather that a lot of Macs come with very small SSDs.
I can totally see how this might have seemed like a good idea. Shame it's just... not.
I was kinda assuming the iphone here. Didn't think the app on a desktop OS would show that behavior. Is this true? Do people really run out of space on laptops and desktops due to photos?
I just checked the apple website and it seems you're right. 3 out of the 5 available Macbook pro variants have <= 256GB storage.
> I had just explained to Amber that 122 GB of music files were missing from my laptop
This is very much about a laptop rather than a phone. And yep, I'm also suffering from this. I've got a 2010 MacBook Air with 256GB storage. I'm down to 10GB free space and struggling to decide how to cope with the now 160GB Photos library.
On what devices is that really a good tradeoff? On mobile, sure (at least, on mobile devices like Apple's that don't have SD cards), but on a regular computer? I find it very hard to imagine that most people are more constrained by storage than bandwidth. Internet access just isn't that good. I can barely stream music over WiFi in many public places (coffee shops, airports, etc.).
If that's really the rationale, I think they're either optimizing for a use case that I find personally very atypical, or they didn't do their research.
>But seriously, sounds like a "good idea" gone wrong
Don't contribute to stupidity what can adequately be explained by malice, especially when dealing with a massive company who hires quite intelligent individuals.
Lock-in was intended, and then some smart people found not just a way to sell it, but make it look more acceptable even if they were called out on it.
My phone has very limited local storage, so I can't keep photos on it. Fortunately, ownCloud implements this "good idea" basically right. I have "instant upload on WiFi" turned on for photos and videos. It uploads them to my ownCloud server, and then moves them from the system photos directory to its own directory if successful. It doesn't delete them from there, but I know that if something's in the ownCloud directory on my phone, it's backed up and available online, so I can clear it out periodically.
I imagine their thinking (as flawed as it is) is that it frees up local disk space for the user. If you've got a base level MacBook Air with just a 128GB SSD, maybe it seems beneficial to have a 40GB iTunes library stored entirely in the cloud on demand, and suddenly have 30% disk space freed up.
Apple have a similar philosophy with Photos, where the photos on your device are just low resolution versions, with the original hi-resolution versions kept on iCloud, if you choose the Optimize Device Storage setting. [1]
Not a philosophy I agree with. I like to keep my data local so I can use it offline. It's one reason I bought a 2012 MBP - I could get 1TB of storage cheaply, and I can upgrade it to a 1TB SSD myself for half the price of what Apple charges (Apple charges $800 for a 1TB SSD in Australia).
People shouldn't buy a computer with only 128 GB nowadays and have to use the network as storage. Ok, they want to sync across devices, still having at least one of them with a large storage makes sense.
You're not taking into account the fact that you can't easily replace the hard drive in a Mac laptop, nor the fact that Apple charges a huge markup on storage. I went with a 128 GB drive in my macbook to save money, and because I didn't want to use it as a mass-media storage device (I have a desktop for that).
I'd seriously been considering a Macbook, for home use, mainly due to the iPhoto app, since on Windows there is only Google Picasa, and they've killed it.
If there anyway to turn off that syncing and keep files locally only? Your comments have made me rethink my upcoming purchase!
Yes, that is absolutely possible. In fact, it is the default option, you explicitly need to enable both "iCloud Photo Library" (which activates your photos being stored on iCloud) and "Optimize Mac Storage" (which deletes the full-resolution photos from your Mac).
This is exactly how it should be, and how apparently it is not for Apple Music. At least this is true for today, who knows whether what is optional today might become the only option tomorrow...
ar0 is correct, it's now the default option. (I think at the beginning of the Photos beta it was the opposite.) To be super sure, you might want to double check your settings, Macworld has a how to guide here:
i once accidentally enabled it on my phone and now, even though i have a reported 2300 songs on my phone.. as soon as i lose signal i have no music.. itunes wont even open up to a playlist in airplane mode.. made even better that it "syncs" my music when i plug in and reports the storage usage in GB.. its just not accessible...
apple's pushing of everyone into the cloud has me switching to Android in a couple of months when I move. I'm done with their shit.
I uploaded all of my music to Google Play and deleted it off of my computer. When I get a new computer I only really need my google credentials and then between google drive and google play music I'm up to speed. I install a few packages and I'm at home. I have no need to keep my music there.
Thus there certainly is a reason to do this. Its how photos work on iphones and androids as well. You take pictures, they are put on the cloud, space can be freed up. Its not a malicious workflow
That's not how photos work on any of my Androids. The original files are on the phone, and if I need to make space I can move them to a computer via USB (or dropbox, email, etc.).
You must have the Google photos sync option (or something like that) enabled.
It's worth noting that Google Photos actually does something similar... the photos are "backed up" even in their "original" form... but I don't believe it's possible to actually restore (download all) from Google Photos.
I thankfully have a local backup of the photos I took, but when a phrase like "backup" is used, it is implicit and understood that there is a "restore" mechanism.
Google Photos lacks a "restore" mechanism, and it sounds like the same is true of Apple Music.
Google Play Music also does the matching/mismatching thing.
An uploaded Ladytron - Gravity the Seducer was replaced by a remix album but remains tagged as if it's the original. This is probably due to them not having the original, and this was a 90% match based on tags... but 90% is not good enough. I worked in the music industry and have so many demo tapes, master cuts that were not subject to post-production, etc. I want the version I have, and not some approximate guess at something similar-ish.
There is an important difference. Google is transparent about what is going on.
When I set up Google Photos I was asked: Do you want to use Google's high quality or do you want to preserve the original photos and have them count against your storage quota?
After that, you should know what you're getting into. I certainly did.
Another way Google Photos is transparent is the app will actually let you know that many of the photos on your phone have been backed up to Photos. The app will ask if you would like those backed up photos to be removed from your phone. (And it'll ask you every time since it doesn't assume that if you said "yes" once then you mean "yes" every time.) So, there's no question about where your photos went when you can't find them.
But the difference, if you read the docs, is that everything below 16 megapixels is the same for high quality and original quality. The only photos that ever get downsampled are ones above 16 megapixels.
Google drive has a switch in the options to expose a "Google Photos" folder, which contains the original versions of all your uploaded google photos. You can then download these photos with any google drive client. The photos you download have identical MD5 sums to the photos you uploaded - they're completely untouched.
This is exactly why I use OneDrive to backup my photos along with the google photos thing. I've tried explaining my logic to several people but usual replies are "but I can still see them on the website!". "But you won't have the image files anymore." "But I can open the website and see the pics, right?" At this point I just sigh and give up. Oh there's a download all button too, but it does NOT return the original files. All the files are much smaller than the original images.
> Oh there's a download all button too, but it does NOT return the original files.
It does return the original files.
Here are two files, one that got backed up off my phone by google photos, which I then downloaded from google drive, and one that I copied directly off my phone via USB:
Perhaps it doesn't always return the original. There are a lot of variables - maybe smaller images or those already optimised or ... aren't recompressed/changed?
How big are your files? How many megapixels? I just see that the pictures in my phone are ~4-5 megabytes big and when I download them from google.com/photos, they are just a bit under a megabyte mostly.
There's an option to upload the pics at 'Original Size' or 'High Quality' (reduced). If you use the Original quality (which counts against your storage), you should see the same image.
OK yeah that does make sense. I had that on earlier but my google Drive quota ran out. So I switched to 'High Quality' (reduced). Maybe that's why I do not get the original pics.
OneDrive is horrible for backup because it doesn't keep any history of your files. Get a Ransomware on your computer, then watch in horror how your files are gone and how totally useless OneDrive can be.
This is why I prefer Dropbox. They keep 30-days worth of history so you can revert any file changes during that period. And I prefer to pay extra for the Extended History add-on, giving me 1 year worth of history. They aren't alone in doing this. SpiderOak also keeps the history of all changes from what I understand and they also do encryption. And Google Drive keeps history for 30 days, but they don't have an add-on. Note though that Google Photos can be downloaded by means of Google Drive ;-)
I did try OneDrive with a trial Office365 subscription, but I think at this point OneDrive is the worst option out of the mainstream ones. Besides the lack of version history, it also lacks a Linux client. One thing I do is to have a home machine that I keep turned on for having an extra backup, being synchronized with Dropbox. It also serves as a media box, but it's a Linux box, because Linux is the best option for servers, including home ones.
And it's not as cost effective as you'd think. If you look at Office alternatives and considering the OneDrive features you get, it's quite overpriced.
Check again because it does not have version history. It only does it for "Office documents". This has been one of the long requested features that's still unaddressed.
On Dropbox losing files, never had problems, but I believe you. All software is terrible.
I had once lost Dropbox files, but only because I deleted a folder on my local Dropbox folder and assumed it won't sync that 'deletion' to the cloud. My intention was to sync only some selected folders locally and let the rest be online. Also, I came to know about it later than 30 days as well - which is the time they keep backup of deleted stuff for.
The Dropbox app has a camera roll auto-upload feature. It's reliable, full-resolution image file backup and works for iOS and Android.
iCloud Photos is the worst: Last time I tried to download all my iCloud Photos/Videos (~1000) from the website it turned out to be impossible: You can download a few, but after 200 or so you just get server errors. And it always chokes on videos, stopping before having finished downloading the full file. There is no bulk export option like with Google Takeout.
Now I hear that this is not a problem if you have the Photos app on you Mac (it syncs), but I don't have a Mac.
One major flaw: Dropbox on iOS rotates the image data and resets the EXIF orientation header when it finds a rotated file. If you've ever used a different sync path you'll end up with a bunch of duplicate images with different hashes.
I have a lot of duplicate images from dropbox but I'd never known why until now. It just required me to get an additional app not by dropbox that evaluates images and deletes duplicates which took me a long time to find a good one as terrifying as that process is.
That link doesn't work for me, says request not found.
Can you clarify this a bit? I.e what does the Dropbox app do if you take a picture in portrait mode, and what does iOS do? Is the rotation info lost completely?
Yes: it rotates the pixel data and resets the EXIF Orientation header. That means that it looks identical even when displayed as expected with a viewer which doesn't honor the EXIF orientation.
It's a lossless rotation - you can actually use something like jpegtran to rotate it back and the pixel checksum in ImageMagick's identify will match – but it completely breaks any system which uses checksums to detect duplicates, of course. I noticed when I started testing Google Photos and had a ton of duplicate images.
> The Dropbox app has a camera roll auto-upload feature. It's reliable, full-resolution image file backup
I know. I used to use it. It worked perfectly. I switched to Onedrive primarily because my free 48GB Dropbox expired and I got 100GB Onedrive with my new phone.
Wait. I assume even OneDrive doesn't have free unlimited storage right? After a certain limit, you've to pay. Similarly, if you pay, you can store all the photos in their original size (not the smaller max 16MP versions of them - which are free & unlimited) in Google Photos as well, and download when you want.
I store my photographs in external Hard Disk as well as Google Photos - because of the amazing search and categorization features built into it.
I have 100 GB space free in my Onedrive which is enough. Also, my pictures sync directly to my laptop, unlike Google photos, which shows in the website and you have to manually download them later.
Also, I cannot see my photos in Google drive at all. I have to go to google.com/photos to see or download the backed up pics. This is what my drive looks like if I click on the Google photos button on the left sidebar: https://imgur.com/wh9ONt5
I keep my RAW images on OneDrive for backup and use Google Photos with the free version / high quality version. I find Google Photos's client really good as a gallery on Android, (OneDrive is really slow). So when I show people my photos I use Google Photos but the originals are on OneDrive.
The stock gallery app in my phone runs circles around the Google photos app in speed. Also, editing pics in Google photos app is a clunky, hit-or-miss affair.
On the phone, "freeup device storage" is an option that is prompted (and sounds like a wonderful idea)... whereby the phone copy is purged if the original file has already been "backed up" to Google.
...And which gives you a modal warning box that starts "Heads up! This will delete n original photos and videos from your device". And will only proceed if you click an all-caps confirmation button labelled "DELETE".[0]
That's hardly comparable to Apple deleting things automatically, silently, with neither warning nor confirmation.
Even with the warning, people assume that backup means they aren't losing anything, and can get back the original pics whenever they like. In fact, image data is being lost here. You can never get back your original photos, only highly compressed smaller sized JPGs that will look OK on a mobile screen.
There is an option when you turn on Google photo to backup "High Quality" (Unlimited) or "Original" (with limited capacity, I think it uses Google Drive capacity but am not sure)
I didn't read it as the GP justifying Apple's behaviour, he was just warning people that Google does something similar ("I thankfully have a local backup of the photos I took").
You see comments like "Y does something bad too" on a story about X very frequently. May not be meant as a justification, but I think they are often distracting from the actual topic. If you went through the Terms of Service of similar services, you can probably find countless upsetting examples. So what is the conclusion? Let's just take it as it is, because everyone is doing it or abandon all services instead?
I looked, whilst photos appears as a folder in drive, there is no option to "download all", and it would require me to load them into the browser view, select them, and then choose to download them.
For reference, I have 125GB of photos since 1994 in there... it would take a very long time to select them all.
Any UI that is not honest with users is a bad thing. I use this service and I know that my original is no longer there when I allow Google to delete my local files but maybe i'm the exception. I will add that it depends on your perspective as to how you see this. You can look at how easy Google makes it to take photos on your phone and then have them all backed up and available with a click of a button. And in addition you can look at how hard it used to be to do anything like that (my grandparents never had photos when they lived in Italy because the town they lived in didn't have any photographers). If you see it through that lens then it's awesome.
Thanks, I didn't know about google photo's no restore issue, I'm going to check! But I recall there's a setting somewhere in the app that lets you choose if you want to delete photos from your device or not after they're backed up, but maybe I'm wrong. I'll check this evening and let you know.
Similar what happened to me years ago - i got new iphone, installed itunes, it synced all local files. Few weeks later, i de-synced the phone or something like that, and all my local files were gone! Still not sure how or why, there were no warnings or anything. From that day, i stay as far as possible from iTunes and similar "smart music sync" apps. Spotify doesn't see my local music collection, and vice versa. All music streaming services and their apps are total crap, they try to lock you in and manage everything like you're an idiot.
That's one of the reasons I rarely plug my iPhone to the Mac. What does "sync" even mean? If I deleted a few songs from my phone, does "sync" means copying the deleted songs back to the phone? or delete those songs from the computer as well? or does it do nothing? I really hate that word.
My mother has an iPod she bought to listen to music. She interfaces through Itunes, and doesn't know what a file is. She's bought maybe 250 tracks from Itunes, out of a 2500 track library. She is not especially emotionally stable.
We finally bought her a new computer.
She plugged it in to charge it. The iPod wiped itself clean. She had not even installed Itunes on the new PC yet. It took us a solid day and a half to get through her traumatic reaction and get the music back on with the new Itunes install through a thumb drive, using Windows Explorer and a new 'import library' pass to bypass Itunes' asinine UX decisions.
Same here... although I used an iPhone for half a decade after, I always opted out of every single update or sync or feature that had to do with iTunes. That just scarred me and made me lose all trust. From there on out it was back to manual mode.
It might be worth filing a criminal complaint with the FBI, under the "exceeds authorized access" provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.[1] Apple's EULA [2] does not give them unlimited access to your computer. It just keeps you from suing them in civil court over it. You probably need a lawyer and a press agent. Someone really needs to take this to court.
See the Justice Department's CFAA guide [2], under "Intentionally Damaging by Knowing Transmission". Also read the section on "Exceeds authorized access", starting at page 11.
This guy was told that the software was operating as intended. That shows criminal intent. It eliminates the defense in the CFAA under "No action may be brought under this subsection for the negligent design or manufacture of computer hardware, computer software, or firmware." The CFAA has a civil suit provision: "Any person who suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of this section may maintain a civil action against the violator to obtain compensatory damages and injunctive relief or other equitable relief." That may override the EULA, but this needs legal advice.
iTunes is the driving reason behind why I got rid of my iDevices.
First of all using iTunes for Windows has a way of making its users feel like something of an afterthought.
Secondly I was always scared to sync my devices. Is this the day it tries to undo my jailbreak? Is this the day that deleting a playlist actually removes all the songs from my device? Is this the day that it removes an app I depend on because Apple decided to kick it out of the app store?
Somewhat relatedly I never felt comfortable plugging my iPhone into my secondary computer. The whole process of authorization and syncing is just horribly opaque.
It's some of the most opaque software I've ever had the displeasure of using. How they managed to fuck up a file copy[1] so badly is beyond me.
Android isn't without it's own faults, but at least it feels like it's own independent device, with its own copy of my library. I don't want a complicated sync mechanism: I want to put this new album onto my phone.
> "Amber relayed to me that she’s had to suffer through many calls from people who cancelled their Apple Music subscription after the free, three-month trial, only to discover that all of their own music files had been deleted and there was no way to get them back."
The Apple Music three month trial had a positive affect on my listening habits. I tried it, hoping to discover new music. But the UX was a slog. No easy pivot points on artists and songs. A DJ workflow vs listener workflow, which added complexity. No collaborative filtering.
So, I switched to Spotify. The "Discover Weekly" section that uses Echonest (I think) has surfaced new artists and songs to explore. Pivot points on songs, artists, and playlists are straightforward.
Have spent 100s of hours hours ripping and curating high 100s of CDs over the last 25 years. Barely touch em. At this point, if you'd ask me to choose between my old catalog and Spotify, I would choose the later. Heh, thanks to the Apple Music 3 month trial.
The problem with Spotify is 25% of their library has that horrible UMG watermark on it. It makes any UMG music before 2013 unlistenable. Apparently, UMG fixed the problem on their side but Spotify don't give enough of a damn about quality to redownload the UMG library.
As the post mentions, in most cases of mainstream media, we all agree to licensing our purchased media, not owning it, and so publishers and resellers assume that all media in our possession must be purchased, and so are under their control.
Of course this ignores user created media, or freebies, or gifts... but even for the purchased access, I always wonder about that forced (dare I say clickwrap?) licensing aspect. Why should I pay again for different format of same info (amazon format vs. epub)? Why should NYT force me to pay extra for tablet AND phone access to same content? Why should I pay extra for a digital copy of a movie that I already have on Bluray? And of course, why should I be forced to allow the publisher to control media on my drive?
We see this with books (printed books say that you have a license to read them, but not to redistribute in any way electronically without permission, even snippets or out of press books (the long running Google books issues) or Amazon revising kindle books on your device) and as the post mentions, we see it with music and movies/shows as well.
It's not as easy to distribute content these days as we may think; many book publishers tried direct to consumer ebook sales over the last few years and are pulling out of that game (the fact that o'reilly and tor worked so far is because they give flex and target techies). Libraries are shifting to emedia services like BiblioBoard and Hoopla which don't even let you download the content except in very restricted apps; instead, you read images online in a browser or stream only. The goal again is to enforce the licensing and get consumers out of the "own" mandate.
At the end of the day, content creators should have a say in how their content is consumed and sold, publishers have demanded a say, and resellers want to own the customer and their data. The current model is too adversarial; I hope we can come up with a way to reward content creators while still allowing a reasonable flexibility of consumption and appreciation.
PS: We seem ok when Netflix drops a movie because we understand we are renting access to their basket. I guess publishers want that too, only they want a higher per unit price with even more control. Sigh.
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 for out-of-control megalomaniacs? Maybe the secret to Hitler's popularity was the uniforms, which were admittedly really snazzy (Godwin's law, I know, I know...)
Don't pretend for a second that Microsoft's "Telemetry Services" (and forced telemetry updates to Windows 7 users who refused to upgrade) or even Ubuntu's search tracking for Amazon coffers is ANY different.
Or even worse, the malicious firmware code shipped with some Windows-based machines.
The entire industry is fraudulent to consumers - turning consumers into products themselves.
With this industry, you pick your poison.
Do you want your hand held every step of the way in owning a computer? Get Apple.....or alternatively use the UNIX environment it comes with instead.
Do you want all of your data tracked, shipped off and sold to a company like Commscore or Nielsen that builds a dossier on you that puts Lexis Nexis to shame? Get Windows or Chromebook.....or alternatively install a Linux distro like Debian or Mint. I wouldn't even touch Ubuntu.
I don't single Apple out (although this wasn't clear in my original comment) - there are plenty of other organisations and systems out there which are just as pernicious, and my stance is to simply not use them. Remember Sony and the rootkit stuff?
There are plenty of good alternatives out there. The price you pay for getting to use computer systems which don't betray you is the cost of learning to use Linux or BSD (these days, nothing like as painful as it used to be) and going without some "conveniences" like magical available-everywhere cloud-synced everything. In my book that's a tiny cost for the ability to keep proper control and ownership of my own shit.
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.
This is ridiculous, but that's what you get by trading ownership and privacy for convenience. I keep all my music in .mp3, movies in .avi and books in .pdf, which means I can access them on any computer, using any software and I don't need to worry that one day I may loose access to them. The world is going mad, I wonder when (or if) people will realise how much control over their stuff is in 3rd party hands, and it's just the beggining - we're now entering the era of IoT, autonomous cars and so on. Fuck all of that, I'll use "dumb" stuff as long as possible, even if sometimes it's less convenient - at least I don't feel like a sheep following trends while getting more and more dependant on corporations, whose only interest is to squeeze you as much as possible.
More importantly for me, no matter what happens to my devices I will have some form of backup. This is miles better than the default for people even 5 years ago. You have to try really hard to lose data now! Well, so long as you're not picky about the file size....
Granted Google has the keys to my kingdom. I have things like Backblaze but...
What would cause iTunes to actually delete the music? AFAIK, it doesn't have an "Optimize Storage" option like Photos does, and it's never deleted any files for me even when my disk is down to 0 bytes free.
Wow. It's hard to believe they were capable of fooling us this long. I mean, how can we rationalize after they saying they will keep our files and if we end business with them, good bye?
This should be unacceptable, things like this makes me sympathize a bit more with Stallman's hardcore philosophy about software.
All I can think of is my Wife's photography collection. She has terabytes of photos. Imagine the day "iPhoto" works like this (which is probably not too far off).
We have her do a manual backup periodically, but now I am going to automate that and make it robust. I am honestly afraid for the future of that data. This is just another part of why I am glad all of my own important data is on Linux machines that I have relatively strong control over, and backup automatically.
What a time to be alive! I can't wait until they can edit your memories out of your brain and store them on the cloud, you know for more capacity and safer recall.
Under the terms and conditions for these services, you typically grant the host the right to do whatever actions they need to in order to perform the service you ask of them. So you'd be unlikely to have a case on these grounds. I am not a lawyer.
A long time ago I started to use the iPhone music app. Then I quickly discovered that songs sent to the iPhone could not be sent back the other way. This was just the beginning of Apple's lock-in. I got out of it right then and there. Now I store my music on my own server and use one of the many third party music apps to play them.
If a service smells of lock-in, you can be sure things won't become better, they will become worse like the issues people get with Apple Music and iCloud. You care about your files? Then you manage them, don't trust some service you have no control over.
I had a non-English song on my Mac and iPhone prior to Apple Music subscription. Now, my iPhone has a very different non-English song altogether.
What seems to have happened is, Apple incorrectly matched the original song to another non-English song. Later, it deleted the original song on my iPhone and gave me the incorrectly-matched version.
So, let's be clear about one thing: This is officially NOT how the software is intended to function. According to Apple, original files are never deleted: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204962
I realize the blog post says an Apple rep told them otherwise, but if true, they were wrong.
Also, who says "the software is functioning as intended"? That's not the style of casual speech that Apple support reps are trained to use with real customers.
I have complaints about Apple Music, but it's never deleted any of my files, and frankly I don't see any setting that would say, in effect, "please delete songs from my original library when you feel like it in order to save space." Yes, I have unique files that iTunes failed to match and just uploaded. No, those files weren't deleted, either. I've encountered some fascinating problems with their matching algorithms but "I am destroying your music library because that's what my evil masters in Cupertino have instructed me to do because something something DRM! Ha ha ha!" just ain't one of them.
That's not the style of casual speech that Apple support reps are trained to use with real customers.
That seemed kind of off to me, too. The whole "Oh, yeah, it just deletes your stuff, stop bitching" attitude is...not my experience with Apple. But it sure does fit the the "let me confirm your worst fears about how terrible Apple is" narrative better.
And, yes, I'm sure I'll be accused of being an Apple apologist, but really it's just a certain level of weariness at this point. I hate iTunes, too. I have problems with iCloud. I think Apple Music may be built around an irreparably flawed paradigm (trying to maintain one unified library between music you've added to iTunes on your own, bought from the iTunes Store and added with Apple Music, rather than just maintaining "Local Library" and "Cloud Library" as separate entities). But I'm just not seeing the Grand Evil that's being ascribed throughout a lot of the comments here. In practice, my Apple products still actually work pretty well. I'm not interested in proselytizing to others, but I'm also not interested in constantly being told, in so many words, that Apple products only appeal to the stupid or the incompetent.
As someone who can't bear to let go of his 160gb iPod classic (but still hates iTunes with a burning passion), is there an alternative like Swinsian that will still sync my iPod?
I've been handcuffed to iTunes for years because of the iPod syncing mechanism but I'd love to switch.
I've actually toyed with the idea of getting one of these. Can you tell me a little more about it? IIRC the main thing holding me back was cost (~$200 for the player and ~$50 each for two 128gb MicroSD cards), but at some point in the relatively near future I'm going to outgrow the 160gb limit on the iPod classic and I may as well bite the bullet and shell out the ~$300.
Well, the usability is okay, menus' navigation is done with the wheel, while commands like Play\Pause, FF,RW etc are done with middle and rear buttons. The device came in with a plastic protection case.
Two outputs - headphones and Line out\COAX. Can be used as an external DAC with windows PC (maybe other devices too, never dug too into it).
Well, I'm using nPlayer for this. You can transfer music and video directly to app via wifi. Latest updates made music playing experience very satisfying (it is video player originally).
It is a known fact that Apple tries the same ideas more than once, sometimes years apart. If at first they fail, they will try again.
I recall an idea from the past where they wanted users to disclose to them all the user's non-itunes music in return for some perceived benefit. At the time I thought of this as a way for someone at some company to assess out how much CD-ripped, Napster-shared, or other indepedently-sourced music was still out there. Needless to day it didn't fly.
I have never in my life used itunes. I can tolerate most of today's "walled-gardens" but not one that seeks to place a surcharge on friends sharing music, which has always been the essence of how my music collection was built (pre-digital). I would give up music before I would sign on to letting Apple control my music collection.
If there were a robust, tiny command-line version of "itunes" that would run on any computer, I might reconsider. But that's not happening either. That's the true reason I have never used itunes. Strong distaste for the proprietary Apple-only graphical software.
> friends sharing music, which has always been the essence of how my music collection was built (pre-digital)
I remember how excited I used to be when friends and I would drive to an out-of-town show and stay with other friends who had big record collections. You always brought a box of fresh blank tapes; and that's the same thing they'd do when they came over your house.
Let me paraphrase it - if there's a dozen of streaming services, and one of them does misbehaves, it gives you a reason to pirate? That's a really poor excuse (or if that's a joke, then it's a poor one too).
It highlights a very serious issue, though - an increasing number of services use all kinds of crazy DRM that only result in great inconveniences for the paying user.
Compare that to the relative simplicity of having your music, books, etc. as a plain file, and you can see where the problem is: paying gets you less, rarely more.
I think you are generalizing "paying" to "subscribing to a streaming service" here, which I don't think is entirely fair.
You can still pay for your music the old-fashioned way, by buying songs on Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc., which will yield you DRM-free, plain MP3 / AAC files that you can use where and how you want to (unless, apparently, you entrust them to iTunes and enable iTunes Music...).
And while the book industry unfortunately hasn't quite followed the same path, there are still many great sources for books around that also provide you with DRM-free, high quality files (e.g. OReilly, Packt, lots of smaller publishers).
> You can still pay for your music the old-fashioned way, by buying songs on Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc., which will yield you DRM-free, plain MP3 / AAC files that you can use where and how you want to (unless, apparently, you entrust them to iTunes and enable iTunes Music...).
This is true now, but it wasn't always; it's a hard-fought right that should be appreciated rather than taken for granted. (Not to say that you are so taking it, but a superficial reading of your post might sound that way.)
Like? I feel that we've reached the stage where it's pretty easy to pay for digital music/streaming at this point. As far as saying that it's almost entirely easier than pirating music.
When you stream music/buy from iTunes you have to deal with drm, latency, shitty software that can't easily be customized, stream drops, data charges, needing to be on the internet.
When you pirate music it's the same as searching spotify, except you click download instead of play and you get files that work forever on any device. Storage smaller than your fingernail fits a straight month worth of music for $20 and works just as well if you're in the mountains as when you're on the train to work.
> 1. Spotify - doesn't allow you to buy premium (which is availble worldwide) if you have a non-US credit card.
if you live in a country where spotify is officially available[1], you can buy premium with your local card (i pay about ~7 usd/23 brl for a two people family plan).
It's not just one misbehaving streaming service, is that there is an incentive for streaming servicrs to do that (lock-in) and little danger they would face when doing this.
I am from Brazil, we have stores and street vendors that sell pirated stuff, frequently more expensive than the original... people buy it due to better service and ease of payment. (example: pirated freeware, that was fan translated, while the original is only in a language noone knows here.)
If I'm given the choice between a free proprietary, inflexible system like Apple Music, and paid DRM-free content that I own and can keep as long as I want (basically, paid pirated content), I'll choose the latter.
"through the Apple Music subscription [...] Apple now deletes files from its users [...] iTunes evaluated my massive collection of Mp3s and WAV files, scanned Apple’s database for what it considered matches, then removed the original files from my internal hard drive. REMOVED them. Deleted. If Apple Music saw a file it didn’t recognize—which came up often, since I’m a freelance composer and have many music files that I created myself—it would then download it to Apple’s database, delete it from my hard drive, and serve it back to me when I wanted to listen, just like it would with my other music files it had deleted."
This is awful and I'm glad I stayed away from the 3 month trial because I would hate for this to happen to me.
Also: I know of a few people who would love for this to happen because it would open up a lot of space in their hard drive which is almost completely full. "I subscribed to Apple Music and freed up 100 GB! Sweet!"
That being said there should definitely be a way to avoid this and I would personally prefer it to be opt-in than opt-out.
> iCloud Music Library is turned on automatically when you set up your Apple Music Subscription…When your Apple Music Subscription term ends, you will lose access to any songs stored in your iCloud Music Library.
That wording does not suggest to me "all of the music in iTunes will become part of your iCloud music library." You can't sue for damages, but you can sue them for lying or concealing information in the EULA
When I used iTunes Match they wouldn't delete your files unless you specifically asked for it... which seems to me like a more sensible default behavior, but I guess Apple is getting pretty aggressive about trying to change user expectations.
e: Although one very rich thing is when I wanted to cancel it was impossible to do without installing iTunes on my new computer until I contacted support to complain.
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.
Apple deleted my backups from icloud, my win7 laptop, and all copies made on flash drives. I had successfully backed up music not purchased on itunes for years but now Apple says, "Oops, sorry. Just use apple music" How can I restore my music? I'm not paying for apple music and my cds were stolen last year so I cannot reload.
I'm a long term Mac user (primary desktop/notebook since mid 90s), but I do feel Apple is cavalier about the Hippocratic oath of data ("First: do not lose or transform the user's source data").
Since my mac is basically a unix machine it's trivial for me to make sure this rule is followed, but it's not trivial for most people.
I don't see how they can say this is a feature - because it didn't happen to me. I have a huge amount of music that they wouldn't be able to match and they didn't delete any of it. Maybe this is because I'm also using iTunes Match. Your issue might be iCloud Music Library (not Apple Music).
I don’t understand why deletion would even be necessary in a case like this. Are people filling up their drives that quickly? If a “service” thinks that some data has become redundant, just move the original out of the way and tell the user where it went and what’s in that stash.
This is exactly why I've held onto all my CDs, and why I continue to buy the majority of my music in a physical format. I once had Apple ... iTunes match? iCloud? I can't even remember what it was called ... decide that an Eminem album I had was too racy and serve me a censored, unlistenable version instead. And the complexity involved in keeping any kind of sizeable music library in check using iTunes is overwhelming. I have two apple ids, some music on an external hard drive, some on an internal hard drive, some subset/superset/overlapping set of which is 'somewhere' in the cloud; it's a nightmare. Is there a sensible alternative to iTunes that will a) not do anything with 'the cloud' b) sync to my iPod?
MediaMonkey and Fidelia are the two products that seem to be tossed around most frequently as iTunes alternatives, and which seem to be reasonably close to feature-parity (at least, as music players; they obviously don't do all the garbage that Apple has stuffed into iTunes related to the iPhone). If you want to basically get back to what iTunes was originally ("rip, mix, burn" plus a good music player and organizer), those are probably the best bets.
Personally, I've been slowly moving to having my main music collection on a home server, and then distributing it out to clients via Plex. I'm not 100% pleased with the web interface compared to iTunes' thick-client interface, but as iTunes' UI has gotten worse over time and Plex's has gotten better, they're starting to approach each other in terms of usability.
The main complaint I have with Plex right now is that there's not an option to specify the quality of the streamed music. It will do realtime transcoding (so you can store lossless CD rips on the server), but the destination format is hardcoded based on the client (I think web clients get 256 kb/s MP3, Android gets something else, etc.). There's an open feature request to let the user select it as a preference, and allow different codec/bitrate combinations based on whether the client is on the LAN, on WAN, or on mobile.
Plex is, IMO, the best game in town for approximating the functionality of a proprietary ecosystem (play all your stuff on all your devices anywhere) but without the lock-in. You do need to be a reasonably intelligent person to set it up, though.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that MediaMonkey no longer works on recent versions of Mac OS X, but that Swinsian (http://swinsian.com/) is the new hotness anyway. Can't vouch for it, but it looks good.
I went all-in on Mac in 2001. Pretty unix and awesome hardware. I used iTunes as soon as it was available. As a matter of fact I'm actually looking at a 1st generation iPod on my desk right now (preparing it for eBay).
I have steered clear of this service from the beginning, partly because I'm old and want my own old library and partly because I am very aware that Apple can NOT do services of any kind, at all. They have botched everything they have ever tried to do online. .me, .mac, accounts (I have 3 and they cannot merge them).
I feel for this guy but, given their history, it's pretty much a slam-dunk that Apple would drop the ball if it's a service.
Stuff like this often makes me question using any DRM or platform-locked services, particularly steam. If valve decided to make a shady decision there is very little that its users could do about it.
That EULA probably wouldn't fly here in Australia. The argument would be "you can't say solely at the user's risk, as you position yourself as a premium quality brand - you're misleading consumers". IANAL, though.
This was the reason Apple had to extend warranties on their hardware here - it was pretty funny watching Apple try to argue to the government that they made non-premium stuff just like everyone else, and therefore didn't have to have the extended warranty. To which the government said, paraphrased, "cool story, bro".
While this is entirely unethical, it is an amazing business decision if they get away with it without any harm to their reputation. I wonder if they reputation risks were considered when they rolled out this "feature". It's a good example for Bruce Schneier to add to the next edition of "Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive".
Might this also be a problem with dealing with big a provider?
If this were a much smaller smaller company you might actually get to talk to someone who can do something i.e "let me see what files we uploaded from you... oh we'll send you a link...". With larger companies you usually talk to "explainers", or people whose job is to explain to you that you are screwed rather than explore solutions to your problem.
Once again we have criminal action covered by the CFAA completely ignored by the government because a large corporation is doing it. Serving malware knowingly? No problem. Overstepping your access and deleting files that aren't yours? No problem. But good fucking forbid an individual even types a wrong url and they're in jail. Double standard much?
I've had exactly one iDevice, an iPhone 3G, and the experience with iTunes turned me off to them forever.
What should be a relatively simple task, plugging in a drive-like device to my computer and moving files from one place to another is made needlessly complicated and restrictive by forcing it to slog through the tar pit that is iTunes. Never again.
Oh yeah. Never allow iTunes to manage your music (there's a checkbox.) In 2010 it wiped out the metadata from about 3000 songs and decided they were all united by unknown. I tried a few autotagging libraries but had to do at least half of it manually.
Sadly I haven't found a decent replacement for it.
Not an Apple user, but I never sync streaming services to my personal collections for fear of cross-contamination. I always set up a dedicated folder for the streaming service, and if necessary, copy my collection to that. Plus nightly full backups to a separate internal drive and Carbonite.
There's obviously some kind of bug here, and one that Apple should rightfully be lambasted over, but given that plenty of people, including me, have used Apple Music without anything local getting deleted, it's pretty obviously not intended behavior.
I unsubscribed from apple music when I found out about this and discovered iTunes would not allow me to sync music I bought from bandcamp onto my iDevices whilst using the iCloud support.
Does seem to be working times for apple, product wise they are making of decisions.
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 their files elsewhere and they don't want to have two copies of the file. If you manage the library yourself i'm 99% sure you would avoid any funny business, even with an Apple Music subscription. The interplay of Beats, Apple Music, iTunes Match, audiobooks and iTunes was definitely a blunder. In my opinion they should all be separate apps.
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.
Isn't this a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? It's intentionally exceeding authorized access to a computer and intentionally (not even recklessly) causing damage.
Is this a setting or something? I use iTunes Match and most certainly still have all my existing local copies. I know because I regularly back them up and they are certainly still there.
Proprietary software working against the interests of the user is not really surprising. What does surprises is how visible and immediate the effects are.
And how do you think you lost control of your data in the first place?
Free software would never have deleted your files without asking you. Or maybe once before it would be fixed as a critical defect in a matter of hours.
I'm agreeing with you. However, when you move your data into the cloud, even if the software is supposedly free, you have no ability to verify that. You also don't control when or how that critical defect is fixed.
It's... a misleading statement. Usually technically incorrect. Possibly technically correct in this instance. But philosophically true for the purposes of the article.
WAVs support sampling rates up to 192khz, whereas mp3 only supports up to 48khz. However, you're unlikely to come across anything higher than 48khz anyway unless you specifically look for it, or record it yourself (as the author did).
Sampling rate has (basically) no effect on audio quality beyond the highest frequency the file can contain - you can drop the sampling rate right the way down to 8khz and it'll just sound a bit muffled but otherwise fine. The primary reason to prefer WAV files over MP3 is that encoding something to MP3 irreversibly mangles it, and the author would be justified in being extremely pissed off that Apple decided to unilaterally do this and delete the originals. It would be like deleting someone's RAW photos and providing Facebook-sized jpegs as replacement, or deleting their home movies and offering back gifs of them. Apple have committed a cardinal sin here, the seriousness of which can't really be overstated.
Wav is (normally, unless already corrupted) an uncompressed, lossless, audio format. The OP's statement was a little off, but the premise is correct.
Mp3 is lossy. Many audiophiles and audio engineers argue that Mp3 actually sounds better (the compression gives the drums a "crunch" not normally present), but the point is you can go from WAV to Mp3, but you can't go back the other way around. Apple is irrevocably damaging some of his files.
> Many audiophiles and audio engineers argue that Mp3 actually sounds better (the compression gives the drums a "crunch" not normally present)
Quote please! Don't specifically mean it as a challenge to you, but as a musician, composer, and audio engineer (I'm not sure I identify as audiophile since that has baggage, but I know friends who do) I have never heard such a thing even mentioned and have a hard time believing there are serious engineers that think this.
The data reduction in the MP3 algorithm is designed around the frequency masking principles of human hearing[1] (EDIT: Spelling and citation), this technique can lose a lot of data with a small impact on perception when applied to harmonic sounds. Enharmonic sounds (e.g. is where the MP3 algorithm falls down); as I said, I've never heard any engineer say they think this sounds better.
Again, I don't say this to argue, I'd just be curious to know what these unicorn engineers have to say about this.
It could easily be true, if the wav is recorded at greater than 44.1kHz. However, the author probably meant to say "more data", as the wavs will have been (lossless) PCM.
I am a published music producer, and I would suggest pursuing legal action against apple if their policy has resulted in a person's self-created music files being copied and manipulated.
This is copyright infringement, and would be damaging to any artist - especially if the served self-created tracks are compressed significantly prior to their storage in apple's servers.
I know that my self-created music files represent years of my life, and for those files to be permanently damaged would be a huge blow.
Google Music is the cat's meow - and will locally sync all of your music down to your local folders. Seems like the best of both worlds - you get a secure backup, and the ability to have local copies
I did. And I know the article isn't about syncing - it's about Apple deciding they know best how to manage your digital media files. I'm just making a general comment.
The problem with "syncing" is if I delete a file on one device, what does sync semantics say should happen? It is ambiguous, which is why syncing is a stupid semantic. Copying files and deleting files is unambiguous.
Lie with dogs, you get fleas. I have zero sympathy for those who fall prey to closed ecosystem BS like this, including my own wife. People just don't listen.
I expressly disavowed family support for all Apple devices about 4 years ago. If my spouse has a problem with the iPhone, it goes straight to the Apple store without landing in my lap first. I'd rather be in the doghouse than use iTunes.
exactly! every time i read about someone having a problem with something, i always check to see if my friends have had the same problem. if not, then clearly the problem doesn't exist. pri.ck
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Ah. I saw they part about needing 30 hours to redownload his collection and thought this was his recovery strategy.
So it all factors down to "this software didn't do what I thought it would; had to restore from backup. Careful everyone" but was then radically over dramatized with "Apple stole all my music!!!"
Writing histrionic nonsense like this does not advance your cause. Apple did not "steal" your music any more than "rm -rf" or 300 million poorly manufactured Seagate drives did.
"Matches found, press OK to delete [list of files] from your computer and phone FOREVER" is what 99% of customers want.
Debate the quality of the match algorithm (it sucks), argue the proper UX for a pretty basic function (it also sucks), but knock off the Orwellian sky is falling stuff. Because that's obvious bullshit.
Apple has its own view of the culture, and has a pretty obvious way of mining it for profit. You ain't changing them. You can perhaps however nudge them if you're not a total asshole about it.
My real question is if you truly are a composer and making your own music why are you just storing it on your Mac? Wouldn't you want to have a NAS for that or some sort of other storage option? I would not rely on my Mac for storage of music I thought was very important. Including rare copies of songs or songs I created myself. I would have a different more reliable storage option.
However, that is really shady on Apple's part to make that mandatory, and should be looked into.
To be fair, they probably came up with that in a way to reduce the /other/ army of people coming to see in the 'genius' to restore the laptop they've never backuped EVER and have accidentally wiped, containing 10+ years of their digital life...
If it's the case, somebody at Apple is seriously incompetent.
- Copy files that don't belong to them without the owner's explicit permission: some people call that piracy. I believe individuals caught doing that with movies have been faced with some hefty fines.
I understand the purpose, but it needs to come with a big, massive, Allow Apple to pirate your data, trust us, it's for your own protection checkbox. Who knows, it might even initially be true.
- do you know of any good backup solution that forcefully deletes the files it's backing up? Do you think there might be a reason why not?
I find this entirely unacceptable behaviour from Apple, and I say this as someone who has been using OS X almost exclusively for 10+ years now.
Only to the user they got the audio themselves. Any proof they're redistributing random X users not tagged in their collection files to others?
In any case, the whole "piracy" angle is BS (not to mention it lacks intent and profit from explicit piracy).
What's at stake is plain bad program behavior -- deleting users files without explicit confirmation, making bad matches to different versions of songs, etc.
And it is irrelevant either way. That you are the sole owner of the rights of a piece of music does not grant Apple an automatic license to distribute it "just to you".
I'm smart like that. Or rather I have read in detail about how Apple Music works. Besides, the burden of proof is on those making that claim.
>That you are the sole owner of the rights of a piece of music does not grant Apple an automatic license to distribute it "just to you".
I call BS. That's exactly the same as Dropbox/Google Drive whatever making a copy of your files and distributing them just to you, and tons of other Cloud services handling your files besides.
At the moment you use Apple Music (which is a services for moving your music collection to the Cloud among other things) you are implicitly allowing Apple to upload and serve you your music files. Plus, you explicitly approved the whole process and granted that right when you clicked on the iTunes/Apple Music license agreement. Nothing different than what happens with thousands of other services.
The work was not merely backed up, but repackaged into a format that Apple is more comfortable selling in; .wav files were converted to AACs, and rare remixes were converted to the popular hit versions. The old stuff was then deleted from local storage without permission, which is intent to make these privately owned tracks an excludable good, not to mention theft.
A further problem arises when a user has a non-transferrable IP that Apple doesn't sell in his left pocket and some generic track that Apple sells in his right pocket, and Apple picks both pockets with the intention of becoming a redistributor. The user does not have permission to transfer, nor has he indicated to Apple that he's given permission, for Apple to acquire the proprietary IP and redistribute it. It is entirely plausible that this proprietary IP was never intended for sale, was a trade secret, was a nude tape, or was a classified recording.
There's all sorts of issues with Borg-style cloud IP assimilation under the "Fair Use Doctrine", and commercial usage of the IP for "backup" while simultaneously being a vendor of the IP (and competing products) make it unlikely that you could apply fair use credibly for something this expansive.
>On your original Mac, Apple Music will never delete songs without your knowledge. Your original library is scanned into iCloud, but your songs are yours, and Apple will not automatically delete them, or replace them with its own proprietary copies.
Seriously, how can that post get -3 karma; why the hate, I have a lot more sympathy for Mr Clueless without backups than this.
The user in question committed his data, his 'life' as he calls it, to a service that is made for mom+pop, without reading the EULA, and he complains?
The guy's a composer and keeps his masters into.... iTunes? Seriously?
He discovers /after the fact/ that his special recording he care so much about has been replaced? Hasn't he tried google, or perhaps do a bit of due diligence about it before committing 120GB of his precious data to a cloud provider?
... To a service that is /meant/ to be able to replace songs automatically? What's not clear about 'automatic'?
Now I don't mean apple is /right/ here, it's very likely done so that apple can sell machines with less flash, for more -or something like that- there's no doubt that there is a reason why they delete the data.. a reason that doesn't need to benefits the user ultimately.
However I don't have a lot of sympathy for that particular user; he comes as someone who should know better.
I'm a mac user since 1984, and I don't use Apple Music, iCloud, or any of these fancy subscription services. I'm also a musician, and a photographer, and it wouldn't cross my mind for a minute to just commit my stuff to a place that might decide the data is 'theirs' in their next update.
I sympathize with OP and I generally really hate Apple's direction when it comes to software and user experience ever since OS X Lion.
However, OP shouldn't claim that Apple 'stole' his music files. He signed up for a paid service and he should have checked how the service will affect his computer. We as users are responsible to know what software we're running on our machines and what it does to our data. I understand that a standard TOS agreement is ridiculously long and impractical to read, and I guess that's how we are trained to be lazy about protecting the integrity of our systems and our data, but that does not give OP the right to blame Apple for delivering exactly what they promised. I hate Apple but I don't think that it is intellectually honest to claim Apple stole OP's music.
Nobody on Earth reads the entire manual before starting up some software; it's the vendor's responsibility to not have insensible defaults like "delete my local versions of files without asking me"
True. We have reached this level because of our complacency, and not due to Apple inherently trying to be malicious towards people like OP. The vendors are responsible to have sensible defaults, but we can't buy their products, use their software, sign up for their services, and then complain about malice when the vendors are delivering exactly what we signed up for and agreed upon. I'm just trying to say that OP should focus his energy on being more self conscious about what he signs up for rather than claiming that Apple is stealing his data. He gave up ownership of the data the moment he agreed to the TOS. What Apple is doing is counterproductive and just illogical from a UX point of view (in my opinion) but they did not steal OP's data. The title is a bit clickbait-y in that sense.
Well, they took a copy of it, compressed and maybe in a different version (which is more or less what they advertise) but then also irretrievably deleted the original, which is what he's upset about. Maybe "steal" is the wrong word; it still seems outrageous.
Reading a TOS provides no indication of what a software will do, just what it might do. Most of clauses quoted by OP appear in almost every TOS out there. Online documentation provides no assurance of being complete and accurate either. Open source requires the ability to navigate a code repository.
It's a sad state of affairs but as a user, trust and reviews are the main factors available in the decision to run software or not.
I read the whole thing and all I hear is waaaahhh I don't keep proper backups of data I care about, nor do I learn about the service functions before signing up... This is ABSOLUTELY NOT the way it works, it's not a shady practice, I use it daily and have lost nothing. Sorry you ran into a bug but the is just Stupid. I would be shocked if the phone agent he spoke to is a real person.
There is no rationale in this - this is outright breaking your privacy and ownership rights. No terms and conditions can be above law. It doesn't matter what others do - Apple is doing those crazy things here and there trying to test the ground which indicates they are not pro privacy and pro user, but rather are willing to go huge lengths to please music industry.
Only because you eating in the restaurant it doesn't mean waiter can run to your house and smash all of your food in the fridge reasoning "from now on you are covered".