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According to Forbes, Apple Music Could Wreck Your iTunes Library:
At its heart, Apple Music is a simple proposition. For your monthly subscription fee, Apple will offer you access to a library of over 30 million tracks. You can listen, explore, and discover to your heart's content, and you can take that music with you wherever you go. But subscribing to Apple Music and making full use of the streaming service requires a sacrifice.
You have to hand over control of your iTunes music library to Apple and hope that Cupertino's arrogance will preserve your music collection.
[...] The issue that is upsetting many Apple users is that moment when you turn on iCloud Music for the first time and your tracks are synced to the cloud. Apple's methodology on this is not clear, but from reports and feedback from users across the internet, it appears that Apple's view of metadata and what the 'correct' track is, will take precedence over your custom edits.
The Verge's Chris Welch highlights his preference of listening to early tracks from The Beatles in mono format (just as they were recorded) rather than the automatic matching services' preferences for stereo versions. Support forums talk of collections approaching 20,00 songs becoming corrupted and full of duplicate entries, incorrect meta-data overwriting current entries, album art switched out to show the wrong albums, and more stories of personal pain.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Informative) by zafiro17 on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:21PM
I truly fail to understand why the gum-chewing masses have suddenly decided they want something like this. Why pay month after month for music that disappears as soon as you stop paying?
Clearly I'm suddenly in the minority (although potentially not, here on Soylent) for wanting access to my music, no DRM on it, and the right to back it up etc. as I please. I paid for an app that stripped the DRM from music I bought in the early days, and my local network server now has a full repository of music owned by my family, sorted and organized in ways I like (I've got a folder of some obscure stuff I don't want to lose but also don't want on my listening devices, for example). So when my daughter wants some track on her ipod, you know what I do? I give it to her. No, she doesn't purchase and download a copy through her own itunes account. Maybe that's anathema to the business interests these days, but fuck them - I think it's fair use.
As for Apple mucking up your system, they did a hell of a job with iphoto. Iphoto used to be a decent photo organizer until one day they got tired of people poking around the internals, and sealed off the iphoto directory into a monolithic file (tech note: it's still actually a directory and you can get into it, just not using classic file browser tools). That sounds like good stuff until you realize that any little change to your photos now require you to resync or re-backup the entire multi-gigabyte beast now (unless you use Apple's own backup mechanism, which can sync only the minute, internal change). When Microsoft did this kind of stuff we called it bullshit. In desperation, I finally deprecated iphoto and went back to a tree of file folders. On Linux/BSD, digikam works with it perfectly well. And on Mac there's an app called Lyn that does well enough. Point is: Apple arrogance took a perfectly well-written and functional app and changed it in a way that made it unusable to any but Apple's file tools. Consider me pissed off about it.
On that basis, they're not going to get anywhere near my itunes directory. And if it becomes obligatory somehow I am going to give up on itunes. Damn it apple, you still make great hardware, but the great software that used to accompany it is slowly turning into crap. Knock it off - I have fewer and fewer reasons to buy your stuff anymore.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:55PM
Same here, which is why I still prefer buying/ripping CDs.
Both the music and movie industries (especially the latter) are hell bent against making it easy (or even possible legally) for you to own and play the content on whatever device you have, free of DRM, because their business model effectively becomes an honor system. Ironically they seem to be the only ones who haven't figured out that's exactly what they already have.
(Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM
and sealed off the iphoto directory into a monolithic file (tech note: it's still actually a directory and you can get into it, just not using classic file browser tools).
So in other words, it isn't a monolithic file - its just an app bundle - and getting into it in the "classic file browser tools" is a simple matter of ctrl-click or right-click and "show package contents": just enough to stop ignorant users getting in and screwing up the directory structure and metadata, without stopping anybody with a clue from getting at the original jpg files (iPhoto even maintains an .xml copy of the metadata file that 3rd-party utilities can read). Anything running at "Unix" level (e.g. rsync) just sees a directory, so there's absolutely no reason why a backup utility needs to back it up as a monolithic blob.
Likewise with GP's complaint - iTunes is a very long way from perfect, but the way its stores "local" music is totally transparent and it maintains an .xml file (in an easily deducible format) mirroring most of the metadata and playlist info.
Where I do agree with you is in the way you throw all of this away when you move to Apple's 'cloud' option - I gave up on iCloud ages ago because it was so "all or nothing". There's a place for streaming and a place for purchase (usually after you've streamed an album a couple of times and decided its a keeper) and I'd really prefer to keep a firewall between the two models.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:09PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:46PM
Same with Windows... at my work, the managers computer just got 'upgraded' to Windows 7, locked down. It can do nothing that couldn't do better with linux (we are even running linux programs (moved from SCO unix, lol) in an emulated environment!!!): our server is running linux with support, so why not just upgrade to linux with support if you are worried about support.
All of the computers are now running Windows 7, when only the accountant needs it due to software (yes, I know it could be running in an emulator/virtual environment under linux, but don't tell me).
We switched from Outlook to gmail, from Explorer to Chrome/Firefox. Then we upgrade to Widows 7?
I. Just. Don't. Get. It. (but Microsoft did... the $$ anyways).
"Cut your hours and customer support.... so we can hand money off to Microsoftie" just doesn't cut it with me. My 2 pennies.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2015, @11:57AM
Why pay month after month for music that disappears as soon as you stop paying?
I'm not a big music listener, but observing my kids and other people, "most folks" especially top40 types will not listen to or care about anything once its no longer new.
That classic collection of Metallica CDs that I haven't listened to in approaching 20 years is extremely collector-ish behavior, but 99 out of 100 only want to hear the very latest Katy Perry or Taylor Swift song and by the end of the summer when its no longer the very latest, eh, something formulaic and new will be the only thing they listen to.
Looking at the parody that is the Lego "everything is awesome" song, there really is no point in owning something that has zero long term value. Let me dredge the waters for a minute... How much would you pay for a copy of the Bangles Manic Monday from '86? Nothing you say? Wouldn't even want it cluttering up the collection such that owning it would have negative value? Well then streaming it would be the perfect solution.
I guess another way to put it, is broadcast radio suicided by having only one major provider nationally pushing only hyper limited payola genre generally not matching what the listening public wants to hear anyway, aside from being 1/3 commercials, 1/3 DJ babble, and only 1/3 actual music, so streaming took the place of dead broadcast radio. Its like 80s FM, but with modern music and over the internet, kind of.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 06 2015, @04:59PM
I don't see anyone wearing bangles t-shirts walking around town. The kind of shit I listen to, contemporary to the Bangles or predating them by a decade or more, I still see t-shirts of. That implies there is still more of a market for my kind of shit than the Bangles.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2015, @05:12PM
More relevant long term, but in the short term top forty formula filler rules the music industry. In 30 years nobody will be listening to Taylor Swift and most people won't remember who she is without some prompting, but she sold 40 million albums, whatever an "album" means in an itunes economy, and in 30 years it'll be some new hot young woman selling 40 million "albums" or whatever. Also see madonna, katy perry, britney spears, ...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 06 2015, @06:03PM
Fact: if you play a Rick Astley ballad from an LP at 45 RPM (I know I'm speaking a foreign language to some people now), it sounds indistinguishable from a Kylie Minogue bubble-gum-pop song played at normal speed, and if you play a Kylie Minogue single at 33 RPM, and ignore the lyrics, it sounds indistinguishable from Rick Astley. I know this to be a fact because of science - I challenged my g/f at the time to do the experiment, and we both heard it with our own ears. Even after that, she refused to accept that she was just buying shit pooped out by a cynical andouillette machine. We weren't together long. Not long, but still too long.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves