Apple Music could accidentally delete your music

by Jeremy Mersereau

May 6, 2016

0

0

0

0

0

Email this article to a friend

A composer is furious about Apple deleting his music. But did they?

Nothing inspires more rage and panic in 2016 than the thought that some corporation might be deleting our personal data… if not the fact that they’re profiting from mining it for targeted advertising, strangely.

Earlier this week, an unfortunate individual who goes by James Pinkstone detailed his troubles with Apple Music on the Vellum Atlanta blog, claiming that the streaming service permanently deleted 122 gigabytes of music from his music library without his permission. Even more surprisingly, when Pinkstone contacted Apple support to inquire about his missing files, he was allegedly told that the service was “functioning as intended” and that Apple Music compares and removes files that don’t conform to Apple’s own internal database of music.

Understandably upset, Pinkstone wrote the blog piece, which excoriates Apple for overstepping its boundaries and noted that since he’s a freelance composer, many of the files in his library don’t correspond to any material within Apple’s database:

“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.”

Now, before you break out some low-tech options like pitchforks and torches and head down on the WiFi-equipped bus to Cupertino, don’t freak out: a piece rebutting Pinkstone’s claims of 1984-style overreach purports to clear things up a little.

Writing for iMore, Apple expert Serenity Caldwell says that Apple Music should never automatically delete files off your computer, and that Pinkstone’s issues with the platform likely stem from a fundamental confusion about how Apple Music/music storage operates.

According to Caldwell, once you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, the service will scan your music library and match your tracks with copies in its streaming, iCloud library, so that you can listen to your music on a secondary device like a smartphone or iPad without actually taking up storage space on the device. While songs on your original library will never be removed without your permission, the same doesn’t hold true for the cloud: downloaded songs from the iCloud library will periodically be taken off your device if its storage gets too low.

Where users like Pinkstone likely get tripped up, says Caldwell, is that they mistakenly downloaded iCloud library tracks to their original computer’s library and deleted the originals. If this happens, Apple’s not-quite-perfect matching algorithm could indeed replace and remove songs it doesn’t recognize, and worst of all, your iCloud library only exists as long as you have an active Apple Music subscription. Users also might be confused when deleting files from iTunes, as clicking on “remove download” will delete the original file but keep an iCloud copy:

The main takeaway: Always keep a master copy of your digital music collection, and don’t use Apple Music or iTunes as they’ve become bloated, incomprehensible behemoths that only the prophet Shingy himself could parse the intricacies of. Oh, Rdio, we hardly knew ye.

[h/t iMore]

Tags: Tech, News, Apple, apple music, itunes

0

0

0

0

0

Email this article to a friend